The following story is from the following link, which has a host of other interesting stories about the history of the oil industry.   I thought this story was interesting to highlight because of it's local connection.

Merry Christmas everyone!

http://aoghs.org/2011/12/

December 10, 1844 – Legendary “Coal Oil Johnny” is Adopted

“Coal Oil Johnny” of Venango County, Pennsylvania.

Culbertson and Sarah McClintock adopt infant Johnny Steele – who will one day be known as “Coal Oil Johnny” – and his sister, Permelia, and bring them home to their farm on the banks of Oil Creek in Venango County, Pennsylvania.

The oil boom prompted by Edwin Drake’s oil discovery – America’s first commercial oil well – 15 years later makes the widow McClintock a fortune in royalties. She leaves the money to her only surviving child, Johnny, when she dies in a kitchen fire in 1864. At age 20, he inherits $24,500 and his mother’s 200-acre farm with 20 producing wells yielding $2,800 a day in royalties.

Coal Oil Johnny Steele will earn his name in 1865 after such a legendary year of extravagance that years later the New York Times will report: “In his day, Steele was the greatest spender the world had ever known…he threw away $3,000,000 in less than a year.”

The rise and fall of Coal Oil Johnny, who dies in modest circumstances in 1920 at age 76, will linger in petroleum history – giving rise to stereotypes J..R. Ewing, or the Beverly Hillbillies, or even John D. Rockefeller.

“For generations after the peak of his career, he was still so famous that any major oil strike, particularly like the epoch-marking one at Spindletop in Texas in 1901, brought his tales back to people’s lips,” notes an October 18, 2010, article, “The Legend of Coal Oil Johnny, America’s Great Forgotten Parable,” in the Atlantic magazine.

“Coal Oil Johnny was a legend and like all legends, he became a stand-in for a constellation of people, things, ideas, feelings and morals — in this case, about oil wealth and how it works,” notes the article. “He was the first great cautionary tale of the oil age — and his name would resound in popular culture for more than half a century after he made and lost his fortune in the 1860s.”

John Washington Steele’s Venango County home has been restored by Pennsylvania’s Oil Region Alliance.