Fredonia: Where the Natural Gas Industry Was Born

The small village of Fredonia, in Chautauqua County along the Lake Erie shore, is where the American natural gas industry began. Not in Texas, not in Pennsylvania, but here, in the spring of eighteen twenty-five, when a gunsmith named William Aaron Hart dug a twenty-seven-foot well along the banks of Canadaway Creek.

Hart was not a geologist. He was a machinist by trade who had noticed that gas was already seeping naturally from the ground near the creek. He fashioned his own tools and hand-dug the well himself. He covered it with a crude wooden shed and built a gasometer, a vessel to capture and hold the gas. Then he ran a pipeline made of hollowed logs, sealed with tar and rags, to nearby businesses. By August of eighteen twenty-five, two stores, two shops, and a grist mill were lit by natural gas. It was the first commercial natural gas distribution system in the world.

The timing produced one of history's more charming coincidences. That same summer, the Marquis de Lafayette was making his celebrated farewell tour of the United States. When his coach arrived in Fredonia at two in the morning on June fourth, the townspeople had illuminated the Taylor House inn entirely with natural gas to greet him. Lafayette reportedly expressed astonishment at the brilliant light blazing in the middle of the night from what he expected to be a frontier village.

The Fredonia Gas Light and Water Works Company was incorporated on April fourteenth, eighteen fifty-seven, as the country's first natural gas company. Hart's original well, barely wider than a barrel, launched an industry that today supplies about a third of all energy consumed in the United States. A historical marker near Canadaway Creek marks the site.