Matson Insurance is partnering with Jefferson County History Center to offer exploreJeffersonpa.com readers a look into Jefferson County’s past. Today, the history of natural gas prospecting, along with Brookville’s historic industries Deemer Furniture Company, Twyford Motor Car Company, and the Brookville Glass and Tile Factory are featured.
(Pictured above: Frank C. “Cliff” Deemer spent a lifetime prospecting for natural gas in western Pennsylvania and selling it to the United Natural Gas Company, without ever signing a contract.)
‘CLIFF” DEEMER’S ORISKANY BUG
Following Drake’s 1859 discovery but nearly two decades before the birth of Frank Clifton Deemer, the riverboat Venango transported fifty barrels of oil to Pittsburgh—and started the oil boom in northwestern Pennsylvania. Eventually, the Standard Oil man visited Jefferson County searching for more black gold. During this search for oil, natural gas was discovered, and by 1887 the Jefferson Heat and Light Company was piping it from Knox Township to heat Brookville homes.
When only seven, his father had encouraged him to understand the world of business by giving him an interest in a gas well at Iowa Station. By the age of twenty young “Cliff” had drilled and sold interests in a successful well along the Clarion River. He’d also invested in the stock market as a young teen only to be wiped out in the panic of 1893 leaving him $7500 in debt. His problem at the turn of the century—how to liquidate that debt?
Throwback Thursday is brought to you by Matson Insurance in Brookville.
When his father organized the Deemer Furniture Company in 1901, “Cliff” recognized the company as a potential buyer of natural gas, along with the new Twyford Motor Car Company, and the Brookville Glass and Tile Factory, three young industries located in the southeast of Brookville. Later he boasted he’d started his business on a two-cent stamp when he mailed a letter to Katherine Bell Lewis in Buffalo and asked if he could market the gas from her well in Knox Township.
By 1910, when commenting on the birth of his first son, the local editor described Deemer as “the proud father, who can face the coming of a duster gas well or one good for 5,000,000 without shifting an eyelash…”
In 1924, he planned to drill 3,200 feet down near Big Run. Not getting production, he continued drilling, to 4,000 feet, then to 5,280—a mile. He claimed it was then that the “Oriskany Bug” hit him. Oriskany sandstone is a geological feature common to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, and it is where oil and natural gas are found. When the well was abandoned in 1932, Deemer had worn out 60 drilling lines, three steam boilers, three steam engines, three bull wheel shafts, two band wheel shafts, and numerous crews, and the well was 8,227 feet deep, the deepest cable tool hole in the world then.
Frank Clifton “Cliff” Deemer continued to set records in natural gas prospecting. When United Natural Gas Company officials acknowledged their more than 50-year business association in 1957, they presented him with a certificate that read, “For a period exceeding fifty years he has sold natural gas to the company in volumes exceeding those of any other independent producer in Pennsylvania. It is a unique but exemplary fact that through these many years of business association no written contract existed between the two. His word is his bond.”
Copyright@Jefferson County Historical Society, Inc.
Submitted by the Jefferson County History Center.
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