302 The American Geologist. May, isoi 
OIL AND GAS RESOURCES OF WEST VIRGINIA. 
By I. C. White, Morgan town. West Va, 
[Address delivered at the World's Fair banquet] Charleston, W. V.] 
The desire to search out new and hidden things is universal. It 
weds alike the astronomer to his telescope, the chemist to his cru- 
cible, the philosopher to thought. Led by this enchantment, men 
explore the depths of the sea, delve into mountains, and seek to 
penetrate the earth itself to unveil its hidden n^steries. This all 
prevailing impulse is the mainspring of human progress. It led 
Col. Drake to drill the historic oil well in the valley of Oil creek 
below Titusville, which gave to civilization a new illuminant and 
to the business world a new industry. 
The credit of originating the industries dependent upon oil and 
natural gas is usually awarded to Pennsylvania. This is not 
really true. West Virginia, and not Pennsylvania is the true 
birth place of both. Right here in this beautiful valley of the 
Kanawha, was natural gas first utilized for manufacturing pur- 
poses, 30 years before such use in Pennsylvania, while from the 
other Kanawha at Burning Springs, oil was shipped in barrels and 
a regular traffic in it built up many years before Pennsylvania's 
first well was drilled. In fact it was right here in the county 
of Kanawha (which generally leads the procession in business as 
well as in politics) that drilling tools and the method of casing 
wells were both invented, without which the oil and gas industry 
would have been impossible. All honor to the memory of Col. 
Drake for first conceiving and executing the plan of drilling into 
the earth to obtain oil. But in this connection let us not fqrget 
the names of the Ruffner brothers, whose busy brains invented 
casings; nor "Bill}'" Morris, who constructed the first pair of 
"jars," for without both of these discoveries, deep drilling would 
have been impracticable. 
The question is frequently asked, why it is that, if West Vir- 
ginia read}' contains so much oil, it was not discovered and devel- 
oped along with that of her sister state. The answer is at hand. 
The first wells to find oil in our state were on the Little Kanawha, 
where a great arch in the rocks throws the oil sands much nearer 
to the surface than elsewhere in the state, and hence it happened 
that although wells were drilled in nearly every count}' west from 
the Alleghenies, none of them, until recent years penetrated the 
earth far enough to reach the oil bearing rock. 
