Oil Before Drake — The Salt Well of 1819
Pennsylvania
Forty years before Edwin Drake's famous well near Titusville made headlines, Pennsylvania drillers had already struck oil by accident right here. In eighteen fifteen, Samuel Magaw and William Clark bored into the earth looking for brine, the frontier source of salt. When Daniel Shryock deepened the well to three hundred feet in eighteen nineteen, oil came up instead.
It was an unwanted nuisance. The salt works closed by eighteen twenty-one, unable to separate the petroleum from the brine profitably. Nobody knew yet what to do with the black liquid.
It would take another four decades, new technology, and a former railroad conductor named Drake before the world figured out that western Pennsylvania's underground oil was worth a fortune rather than a headache.
