– 2018 Business Inductee –
Lucky Seven Oil Company
Fairport, Kansas
By the early 1920s hard times had come to Russell County, Kansas. Rough economic conditions, brought on by the depression following World War I and combined with falling cattle and wheat prices, made the idea of investing in any new financial scheme to be rejected by most sensible folk. A few gamblers, though, could still be found willing take a chance if the right field of opportunity came along. And one of those fields of opportunity lay in oil.
Up to that time, no oil had been discovered in Kansas west of El Dorado. In Russell County, as in many areas in western Kansas, there was considerable activity in leasing oil and gas as early as 1917. But no well was ever drilled to prove that anyone’s wild hunch was right. Then with one roll of the dice in 1923 Russell County’s history – and the history of Western Kansas – changed forever.
A group of local men, calling themselves the Lucky Seven Oil Company, decided to speculate on their dream that oil lay beneath the prairie. If they were right, they would all be very rich. If they lost, they would lose everything they owned. The original seven men were:
+ George Frederick Dawson, Russell, Kansas pharmacist and a director in the Russell State Bank
+ Charles Edwin Hall, a Russell real estate investor and insurance broker
+ Joe and Frank Liggett, Butler County, Kansas oil operators and ranchers
+ Jesse Earl Missimer, Russell State Bank board member
+ Alvin Earle Seeley, Russell County rancher and oil operator
+ Charles Wilmer Shaffer, former president and board chairman of the Home State Bank in Russell and the bank’s
cashier when the Lucky Seven Oil Company was formed
Their dream came about when rancher Ed Oswald approached banker Jesse Missimer with a proposal. Acknowledged a hard worker by all, the economic times had caused Oswald to borrow $100,000 from his bank, and his inability to repay the loan made the loss of his ranch certain. About to lose everything, Ed appealed to Missimer to lease his land for oil drilling.
Geologist V. H. McNutt’s discovery of the Fairport-Natoma anticline supported the hopeful idea that underneath the farm, located two miles south of the community of Fairport in northwestern Russell County, lay the same geologic formation that had produced oil in Oklahoma. This idea led credence to Oswald’s offer.
Missimer discussed the matter with Alvin Seeley, who approached his friend Joe Liggett, and the trio decided that if they were to drill they would need $40,000 to do so. And that meant finding more partners.
Within a few weeks Shaffer, Hall, Frank Liggett, and Dawson joined the trio to form the Lucky Seven Oil Company. Dawson died before a drilling contract was signed, and his widow sold his share in the company to the Stearns and Streeter Oil Company of Wichita.
It was considered to be such an unbelievable longshot that when the Lucky Seven leased farmland on the Oswald ranch for the location of the first wildcat test, oilmen everywhere reacted with disbelief and even outright laughter at their folly.
In 1923 the Valerius Oil and Gas Company, contracted by the Lucky Seven, began drilling operations. They “spudded in” a well in May 1923. A pipeline was laid to connect the well with tank cars ten miles away on the Union Pacific Railroad at Paradise, Kansas. The snickers continued until on Thanksgiving Day, 1923, when the cable tool bit rammed into an oil deposit at a depth of around 3,000 feet. It “swabbed” oil and gave birth to Russell County’s first oil-producing well, the Carrie Oswald No. 1. The output of the well was at first about 175 barrels of oil a day, then rose to 240 barrels, and with pumping maintained a steady yield for nearly six months at about 200 barrels a day.
When the Carrie Oswald No. 1 became the first oil-producing well in the western half of the state, the nearest oil refinery was over 120 miles away to the east in Marion County, Kansas. Six wells were immediately sunk on the farmland, then referred to as the Oswald Oil Field; as the area developed this would later be renamed the Fairport Oil Field.
News of the Carrie Oswald No. 1 caused oil speculation to run rampant as oilmen from all over the United States poured into the region, and the Gorham Oil Field to the south was opened in 1925. In all 150 wells were sunk on lands that the Lucky Seven had leased in the area. They were the ones laughing now, on their way to becoming very wealthy men.
Then on May 15, 1924, a flow of gas, reported to be. 7,000,000 cubic feet daily, was struck in the Stearns-Streeter Company’s Ed Oswald No. 1 well, proving that natural gas could be produced in Western Kansas as well. The two wells marked the beginning of both the oil and natural gas industries in western Kansas. The longshot gamble by the men of the Lucky Seven Oil Company paved the way for the biggest single economic change in the history of Kansas and won them everlasting immortality in the oil industry in general. Just thirty years later Western Kansas oilfields were producing five-sixths of the oil in the entire state, a complete reversal from just a generation before. As of 2011, 85 years after the drilling of the first well, the Fairport Oil Field had produced over 58 million barrels of petroleum and continues to be productive.
A monument commemorating the great events of 1923 can be visited a few miles south of Fairport at the Carrie Oswald No. 1 well site. The Oil Patch Museum in Russell tells the story of the Lucky Seven and drilling of the Carrie Oswald No. 1. The legend of the Lucky Seven continues with their selection to the First Class of the Russell County Kansas Hall of Fame.
SOURCES:
Palco News, December 5, 1923
Emporia Gazette, June 2, 1924 and March 26, 1927
Hutchinson News, May 7, 1950
Salina Journal, September 6, 1952
Russell Daily News, June 1, 2001
The History and Geology of the Fairport Oil Field in Russell and Ellis Counties, Kansas, by Ernie Morrison, Petroleum History Institute, 2011
www.kgs.ku.edu/Publications/Bulletins/10/02_intro.html, Significance of the Investigation in Russell County, by Raymond C. Moore
www.lakefrances.net/dyrekayre.asp
Photographs of Carrie Oswald No. 1 and Carrie Oswald No. 1 Monument courtesy of Charlotte Pierson David.
