1 68 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



the lake shore belt of Chautauqua county and in the interior districts 

 included in Genesee, Monroe, Ontario, Livingston and other counties. 

 The Medina is the most prolific of the New York gas formations 

 and for a number of years has contributed considerably more than 

 one-half of the annual flow for the entire State. 



The development of local gas pools in the area around the east 

 end of Lake Ontario resulted from experimental drilling that was 

 chiefly carried out in the few years preceding and following i8go; 

 this exploration was initiated independently of operations elsewhere 

 in the State, as the conditions are widely different from those in the 

 older fields. Perhaps the incentive for testing the possibilities of 

 gas in the formations below the Medina came from the contem- 

 poraneous discovery of the great gas and oil fields in the Trenton 

 formation of Ohio and Indiana. At any rate, as was brought out 

 by Prof. Edward Orton's investigation, the main yield of gas in 

 the Lake Ontario district comes from the Trenton limestone, the 

 lowest horizon in which any considerable pools have been found up 

 to the present. The particular beds that hold the gas are the 

 extension underground of the Trenton belt which lies along the 

 western margin of the Adirondacks and that in Jeff'erson county 

 reaches from the Adirondacks foothills west to Lake Ontario and 

 the St Lawrence river. They have a southerly dip and where tapped 

 by the wells are covered by the shale formations of the Cincinnati 

 group with an additional thickness of Medina shales in the more 

 westerly localities. The productive pools so far exploited are 

 restricted to Oswego county and the northern part of Onondaga 

 county. 



The Pavilion district represents the most important of the rela- 

 tively recent discoveries of gas in the State. The first holes were 

 drilled in 1906, since which time some sixty wells have been brought 

 in which have maintained a very steady flow. It lies in the south- 

 east corner of Genesee county, having Livingston county on the 

 east and Wyoming county to the south. The gas horizon is in the 

 upper Medina formation, the flow coming mainly from the last 

 20 feet of the sandstone, which here measures about 100 feet thick. 

 The limits of the field seem to be fairly well marked out by the 

 borings; it is one of the few districts in which sufficient data are 

 obtainable to indicate the precise structural features surrounding the 

 accumulations of the gas and for that reason is of much interest. 



Production. The statistics of natural gas production for the years 

 since 1897, covering the more active period, are given below. They 

 are in part taken from Mineral Resources, published by the United 



