Speechley Gas Pool Well
Pinegrove Township, Venango County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Here on April 15, 1885, at a depth of 1, 963 feet, Samuel Speechley completed a natural gas well that was sufficient, for a time, to supply all of Oil City & nearby communities. At the pool of this well was discovered a deep gas bearing sand-stone belt--named the "Speechley Sand" in his honor--extending through much of Pennsylvania into West Virginia. This well continued in operation under successive owners into the early 1990's.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
On April 15, 1885, Samuel Speechley completed a natural gas well here at a depth of 1,963 feet, briefly powerful enough to supply Oil City and its neighboring towns. Drillers discovered at its base a deep gas-bearing sandstone that was named the 'Speechley Sand' in his honor and later traced across much of Pennsylvania into West Virginia. Remarkably, the well kept producing under a succession of owners into the early 1990s.
Why it matters
This well helped map one of the region's great gas-bearing formations at the height of Pennsylvania's oil-and-gas boom, part of the energy frontier that fueled American industry.
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Related people
- · Samuel Speechley
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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Founded near Oil City in 1878, the Oil Well Supply Company rose to become one of the leading makers of oil-field machinery and supplies, its equipment reaching drillers across the globe. At its height in the early 1900s the firm employed some 2,000 workers, and in 1930 it was absorbed as a subsidiary of the giant U.S. Steel. Its story traces the consolidation of scrappy oil-region enterprises into the era's great industrial combinations.
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Charles Lockhart rose to become Pittsburgh's largest crude oil refiner in the 1860s, a period when the new petroleum industry was transforming western Pennsylvania. In 1874 his firm, Lockhart, Frew & Co., folded its seven refineries into John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and Lockhart took a seat on the board of a combine that controlled the overwhelming share of American oil refining, transport, and marketing. One of his early offices once stood on this spot.
Jacob J. Vandergrift
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When Jacob Vandergrift steamed into Oil City in 1861, Pennsylvania's oil boom was barely two years old and crude still moved the way freight always had — in barrels, by river and rail. Vandergrift saw a better way. Beginning in 1868 his firm laid pipe directly from the wells, and by 1877 he had consolidated much of the scattered pipeline business into his United Pipe Lines. In 1881 that network was folded into Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire, cementing the pipeline as the artery of modern petroleum.
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