Oil Appears Near Dark Hollow

EARLES

Posted By: Ken Wright (email)
Date: 7/2/2007 at 13:37:02

PETROLEUM FIND NO FAKE
Crude Oil Appears On Farm Of Sam Earles East Of Town
This city is in the early stages of a real genuine oil excitement.
On Friday last, it was discovered that a spring of petroleum existed on the farm of Samuel Earles four miles north east of this place near Dark Hollow, from which a good quantity of petroleum may be dipped up with a pail. The oil appeared since the California earthquake in a sink hole and crevice in the rocks, over which logs and brush had been laid to keep animals from falling in. The place has the appearance of being an old spring.
We have a bottle of the oil at this office taken from the spring by Sonnie Eaton, which we have compared with petroleum from Beaumont in possession of E.A.Fuller of this city, finding them to be apparently the same thing, looking alike and burning alike.
The hole from which the petroleum is taken appears to be full of oil, but it may be that water is present below and the oil is but floating on the surface and that it seeps into the crevice from some near by fountain head.
But one thing is certain the oil is there and doubtless if traced to its source, in quantities sufficient to make it a paying proposition.
Many people have been out to look at the find, and a company is likely to be formed to search for the hidden wealth and it is possible that it may prove a bonanza for this locality.
Maquoketa Record, September 12, 1906.

A man named Johnson from Beaumont, Texas, has secured leases on seven farms out in the neighborhood of the oil find, but he has not gotten a lease on the Earles farm where oil appears and is not likely to commence prospect work until some satisfactory arrangement has been made with him. Although the crude oil is the best to be found anywhere outside of the Pennsylvania field, things have become so tangled and twisted up that there does not seem to be any present prospect of development which means so much to this locality. If the oil should be found in quantities, refineries would at once be established here, and thousands of men employed in the field and factories dependent thereon. This town would grow in a year to a city of many thousand inhabitants and property owners would reap much wealth from the find. That there is a vast field of oil somewhere, is evidenced by the water found in various wells at Delmar, and elsewhere; by the spendid surface prospects on the Mississippi, near the mouth of the Maquoketa River and many of the older inhabitants remember the oil indications on the surface of the pools along the creeks and sloughs hereabouts in early days. A combined intelligent and persistent effort should now be made to locate the source of these indications, and should they prove successful we will all share to some extent in the prosperity that may follow.
Maquoketa Record, October 3, 1906.

Johnson, the oil man, was in the city on Thursday of last week. He came to negotiate, if possible, a lease for the Sam Earles land on which the oil is found. Mr. Earles demanded $1500 as the price of a lease, and Mr. Johnson thought that to be more than he could stand, feeling that a share in the find, if one should be made, ought to be all that Mr. Earles should ask. If Mr. Johnson cannot get a lease of the Earles land the chances are that nothing will be done toward development for some time to come. It might pay Maquoketa people to see that Mr. Earles has his pound of flesh.
Maquoketa Record, January 2, 1907.