The first written record of oil in North America is believed to have been made at Seneca Oil Spring in Allegany County in 1627 when a French Jesuit missionary was led to spring by local Seneca people.
The Senecas prized the oil for medicinal proposes; the spring is located in what is now Cuba, NY.
Initially oil and gas was obtained from these natural springs and hydrocarbon seeps in Allegany, Ontario, Cattaraugus and Yates counties. Crude oil from some seeps was used for medicinal purposes and fuel by the Indians and early European settlers.
As early as 1767 Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) were trading oil from the Seneca Oil Spring at Fort Niagara.
In 1821, a shallow well was drilled at another famous seep, the Natural Gas Spring in the bed of the Canadaway Creek in Fredonia, and produced enough gas to light many of the village’s main buildings.
In 1832 farmers digging for coal in the town of Freedom in northeast in Cattaraugus County reported an oil seepage.
In 1833 public attention was raised by the report of an oil spring in Alleghany County by Benjamin Silliman.
His paper discussed the chemical composition of oil, its geological history and advanced the theory that there was probably a very close connection between the petroleum and the coal fields of Pennsylvania.
About the same time New York’s salt industry came into prominence and numerous brine wells were bored in oil producing areas of the state. Considerable quantities of oil came to the surface through these borings.
Most of this was spilled onto the ground as it was generally considered an impediment to the manufacture of salt, but these wells provided the experience to those who would later drill for more deeply hidden oil.
A well drilled in 1857 near the Seneca Oil Spring didn’t produce any significant oil. A year later the first commercial oil well entered operation in Oil Springs, Ontario and in 1859 Colonel Edwin Drake helped launch the American oil industry in Cherrytree Township, Pennsylvania.
Drake’s well was the result of the first corporation formed in the United States to exploit in any way the new business, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, established by two New York lawyers.
They failed to get enough capital and a Connecticut company was formed to take-over the effort. Drake, a former New Haven Railroad conductor, was sent to Pennsylvania on behalf of this company.
The first gusher occurred there in 1861, launching America’s first oil boom.
A well drilled in Rushford, NY in 1860 produces little oil yet substantial natural gas, but in 1865 “Job Moses No. 1” located in Limestone, in the town of Carrollton, in Cattaraugus County, became the New York State’s first successful oil well, producing at seven barrels a day.
That same year Jonathan Watson drilled a well in Ontario County about five miles east of Canandaigua Lake and began producing about five barrels of oil a day.
The earliest oil wells in modern times were drilled percussively, by repeatedly raising and dropping a bit on the bottom of a cable into the borehole. In the 20th century, cable tools were largely replaced with rotary drilling, which could drill boreholes to much greater depths in less time.
From 1859 to 1876 all of the country’s oil came from Pennsylvania and New York. In the early 1870s, New York’s refineries were producing 9,790 barrels a day.
In the 1870s the industry in New York was led by Charles Pratt & Company, formed in 1867 by Charles Pratt and Henry H. Rogers in Brooklyn. It became part of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1874.
In the early days of marketing refined oil in the United States the odor was a difficult thing to overcome. The first such establishment in the United States was located at 184 Water Street in the City of New York, until it was found to be objectionable and forced to move.
More than 75,000 wells have now been drilled in New York; about 14,000 of these are still active, and new drilling continues.
New York’s Oil Boom
Drilling at Rock City southwest of Olean, in Cattaraugus County, NY, in 1877 is said to be New York’s first major oil field. From the Civil War until the Great Depression, fields around Olean produced a considerable amount of oil. Enough to send down an early oil pipeline that ran from Olean to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New Jersey in Bayonne.
The “Triangle No. 1” near Allentown (in the northwest corner of Alma township in Allegany County) drilled in 1879 produced about eight barrels a day, but created the nearby boom town of Petrolia in Scio.
In 1881, on the advice of a geologist, a group of investors drilled a well on the Reading farm in Richburg, NY. The well produced 70 barrels on its first day, sparking the Oil Boom of 1881.
Within days, hundreds of people moved into the valley and within ten months 4,500 to 5,000 people in Bolivar and 7,000 in Richburg. The two villages had gambling dens, bordellos, three dozen saloons and a dozen billiard halls.
Production that first year reached over six million barrels in Allegany County and about a million in Cattaraugus County and production was steady into the 1920s.
In 1884, a special Census Bureau report reported the following:
“A line drawn from [Canandaigua Lake] west to Lake Erie and another south to the Pennsylvania line would include all of the territory in the state of New York over which oil or gas has been obtained by boring and along the shores of Erie from the state line to Buffalo at almost any point natural gas may be obtained from artesian borings. Fredonia in Chautauqua county a few miles south of Dunkirk has been lighted by natural gas for more than forty years.”
The New York State Oil Producers Association in Bolivar (established on July 2, 1918 and the oldest association of it’s kind in the United States) has nearly 200 members with interests in New York State’s oil and gas industry.
The organization was created at a time when “water flooding” which used hydrostatic pressure to force more oil from the rock below, was becoming an important source for “secondary recovery” of oil from old wells.
Water flooding (a precursor to hydraulic fracking) increased production, peaking in the 1940s with over four million barrels a year in Allegany County and nearly two million in Cattaraugus.
In the 1970s, when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) increased oil prices, oil producers again looked to New York State with new drilling and production technologies.
When oil prices collapsed in 1986, New York’s oil production went back into decline.
Oil Production Today
More than 75,000 wells have been drilled in New York; about 14,000 of these are still active, and new drilling continues. An interactive map, DECinfo Locator, provides access to well locations and links to well-specific information.
New York State still produces a small amount of crude oil, with recent annual production around 200,000 to 228,000 barrels at wells concentrated in the western part of the state. In 2023 there were active wells, from most to least, in Allegany, Cattaraugus, Steuben, Erie, Chautauqua, Oswego, Ontario, Tompkins, Wyoming and Oneida Counties.
Unplugged wells remain a problem in these areas. Allegany County now has more abandoned and unplugged wells than active wells, according to City & State New York. “Left open and unchecked, the Environmental Defense Fund said unplugged wells can cause air pollution, contaminate groundwater and release greenhouse gases.”
Those interested in the early history of oil production in New York State should visit the Pioneer Oil Museum of Western New York, also in Bolivar. Also this anonymous DEC Draft GEIS Document’s “History of Oil, Gas & Solution Salt Production in New York State.”
Read more about New York ‘s oil industry.
Illustrations, from above: Seneca Oil Spring, photographed by Anton Schwarzmueller, July 19, 2015; Samuel Kier’s salt water patent medicine advertisements featuring wooden brine well derricks inspired industrialist George Bissell to experiments with using them for “rock oil” — from which kerosene is distilled; O.P. Taylor’s Triangle #1 oil well near Petrolia, NY, taken on June 12, 1879 – the first successful oil well in Allegany County; and New York State Oil Wells, 2022 DEC Data.
