THE LOST HISTORY OF OHIO ‘ S GRAND
RESERVOIR OIL BOOM
Judith L. Sneed, P.O. Box 323, Mooringsport, LA 71060
In 1 984, citizens of Caddo Parish Louisiana proudly placed
their new historical marker identifying the location of the
“world ‘ s first over water oil well ” . The referenced well was
the Ferry Lake # 1 , completed in 1 9 1 1 . Sources cited in
making this claim included :
Franks, Kenny A. and Lambert, Paul F. Early Louisiana and
Arkansas Oil: A Photographic History, 1901 – 1946.
College Station, Texas : Texas A & M University Press,
1982; and Shreveport Times , September 19, 1960.
commercial production to this day, Caddo Lake oil was not
the first. Somewhere, lost in the archives, is the story of the
oil boom in the Grand Reservoir located between Celina and
St. Marys, Ohio. An article in the Celina Ohio Daily
Standard of June 3, 1995 tells of the production from the
17,000 acre artificial lake that began in 1891. This
allegation is substantiated by the 1903 volume of the
Geological Survey of Ohio : “By 1890 the productive
territory had been pushed to the eastern border of the Grand
reservoir, and a year later wells were being drilled in that
body of water.” By 1908 production had waned and many
of the wells had already been abandoned, but in between,
200 – 300 wells were drilled in the lake . It is claimed that
“hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil” were produced.
How did we lose this bit of history? Perhaps it was because
the oil companies and operators were small businesses from
the local area, and because the venture lasted only a short
time. Possibly it was kept from the public eye because the
experiment was viewed as a failure by local s . Also, oil was
just a brief side-bar in the history of this man-made reservoir
that was the “largest man-made lake in the world” at its
completion in 1 84 5 . It had been constructed originally to
provide water for the Miami – Erie Canal.