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Why Was It
Important To Find Oil?
There were two reasons
Colonel Drake and his backers from New Haven Connecticut decided
to drill for oil.
- A shortage of whale
oil
- Oil that seeped naturally
from the earth could not be held in a dam.
 By
the 1850's, New England seafarers had hunted whales nearly to
extinction. Because people used whale oil as a high quality lubricant
and as an illuminating oil, it was scarce and expensive. Reports
of an oil spring near a Pennsylvania creek, where the oil literally
leaked out of the rocks, therefore sparked the interest of the
New Haven entrepreneurs. They reasoned that if they could recover
enough rock oil from the Oil Creek site, they could sell it as
an inexpensive substitute for the shale oil. They formed the
Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company of Connecticut in 1855 and began
thinkng of ways to extract the oil.
Since the oil seeped
onto the ground near the creek, it had to be contained, First,
the bankers hired workers to dig trenches and direct the oil
into holding ponds. To make the ponds, the laborers simply dug
out the soil and piled it around the edges of the pond. Unfortunately,
everytime they built such a wall, rainwater and groundwater washed
it out and the oil ran off into the creek.
To solve the problem,
James Townsend, president of the newly formed oil company, proposed
drilling for the oil, rather than merely trying to contain what
seeped to the surface. Others in the area had been drilling for
salt water, or brine, for many years. Townsend hired Drake, declared
him an honorary colonel, sent him to Oil Creek to supervise the
drilling for oil. Drake, in turn hired Uncle Billy Smith, an
experienced saltwater driller.
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