Qualla: Burning Springs, West Virginia

Burning Springs, West Virginia: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. On the evening of May 9, 1863, people in Parkersburg watched the eastern sky go orange. The glow was forty-two miles away, on the Little Kanawha River, where every barrel and well and pumphouse in a town called Burning Springs was on fire. Crude oil floated downstream and burned as it floated, so for hours the river itself was a sheet of flame. Confederate cavalry watched from the bluffs. General William E. Jones, who had given the order, reported to Robert E. Lee that it was a 'scene of magnificence that might well carry joy to every patriotic heart.' Nothing quite like it had ever happened in a war before. Nothing exactly like it ever needed to happen again.

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burning Springs, West Virginia: Before Pennsylvania, Before the Boom

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Native hunters had known about the seeps at Burning Springs Run for generations - bubbles of gas that you could touch with a torch and watch ignite on the water. White settlers used the oily film as liniment, sold in bottles as 'Seneca Oil' for arthritis and toothache. In 1840, a...

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burning Springs, West Virginia: Ten Thousand People in a Hollow

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. What followed is the shape every boomtown takes, just compressed and intensified. The Rathbones sold off seventy one-acre parcels to anyone with cash and a drilling rig. By the spring of 1861 the river bottom was a forest of derricks - eighty to a hundred steam-powered wells pump...

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burning Springs, West Virginia: Industrial War, First Edition

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. The Confederacy noticed. By 1863, Burning Springs was producing as much oil as any field on earth, and most of that oil was lighting Union lamps and lubricating Union machinery. In late April, Brigadier Generals William E. Jones and John D. Imboden launched a long sweeping raid a...

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burning Springs, West Virginia: What Boom Leaves Behind

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. The wells were rebuilt in time, and oil continued to come out of Burning Springs for decades. But the field was always smaller than people had hoped, and the bigger Pennsylvania discoveries pulled capital and attention east. The population drained off year by year. By 1900 Burnin...

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burning Springs, West Virginia: Why It Still Matters

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Burning Springs is the kind of place every modern oil province has at its root - the small, frantic, half-forgotten rush that proved the geology before the big money showed up. It is also a sobering footnote in the long history of war. Every pipeline strike since, every refinery ...

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0