78 KANSAS' ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, 



ECONOMIC GEOLOGY OF lOLA AND VICINITY. 



By Q. P. Grimslby, Washburn College, Topeka. 

 Read before the Academy, at lola, December 31, 1901. 



"VrO city in Kansas can display a greater variety of mineral interests 

 -'^^ than lola. It is then very fitting that the first annual meeting 

 of the Kansas scientists in the new century should be held in this 

 center of industrial activity. Here may be seen one of the most com- 

 plete cement plants west of the Mississippi, the largest number of 

 zinc-smelting retorts in the United States, yielding one-half the total 

 production of spelter in this country, the largest natural-gas engines 

 constructed, probably the only sulphuric-acid works in the world 

 where natural gas is used in reduction, and some of the model brick 

 plants of the state. Here a quiet village of 1500 has changed in six 

 years to a city of 8000, with a monthly pay-roll of $100,000, the result 

 of natural gas and the energy and hustle of competent and fore- 

 sighted business men. Recently lola has constructed an eighty- 

 thousand-dollar water-works and electric-light plant. An electric 

 railroad is now in operation, with cars running from the Neosho river, 

 through lola, to Gas City, Lanyonville, and La Harpe, representing an 

 investment of $150,000. 



Outside of the mineral industries to be described, there are a num- 

 ber of important manufacturing plants at lola, including the ice 

 plant of the lola Ice and Cold Storage Company, with a daily capacity 

 of fifty tons, an iron foundry, a planing-mill, a creamery with a ca- 

 pacity of 1000 pounds a day, flour- and feed-mills, and a sawmill. 

 These mills and factories alone would give lola high rank as a manu- 

 facturing city, but they are overshadowed by the larger mineral indus- 

 trial work. 



Natural Gas. — The motive power for these various lines of manu- 

 facture is natural gas. Thirty years ago the lola gas-sand was first 

 pierced by the drill, in the old well, known to this day as the Acres 

 mineral well, a sure cure for the ills of man. Its real value, how- 

 ever, was not recognized until the Ohio and Indiana gas was devel- 

 oped, in 1886 ; then the lola Gas and Coal Companj^ was organized 

 and several wells were drilled, with poor success. 



In 1889 Pryor and Paulin took charge of the work and drilled six 

 additional wells, with about the same success ; but near the end of 1893 

 a great flow of gas was struck, yielding three million cubic feet per day. 

 In 1896 the company was changed, and became the Allen County Gas 

 Company, and later, consolidated with the Cooperative Company, 



