Cleveland morning leader. [volume] (Cleveland [Ohio]) 1854-1865, 1861-03-04
OIL News.


Mr.. William Dentors,, has been lecturing on
Geology in Detroit, and has taken occasion to
visit the famous oil wells of Canada, Of which
he says:
They are situated from twenty-eight to
thirty miles southeast of Port Sarnia, in q
fiat, swsmpy and denkely wooded country.
The stiff soil is Underlaid with a very uni
form deposit Of tenacious, drift clay, the
thickness of which varies from fifty to one
hundred feet. In it are occasionally found
boulders of primitive rock, and masses of
limestone, evidently torn from the underly-
ing formation and transported but q short
distance from the place of their original de-
posit. In the drift clay, or at the base Of it,
most Of the oil hitherto found has been dis
covered at depths varying from thirty to sew
enty feet.
At Kelly & Adams wells / found them
pun ping by hand four to five barrels day
from each well, Of dark oil, having the cou-
sistency of Orleans Molasses; but have no
doubt that, with proper appliances of pumps
and steam engines, forty or fifty barrels
could be easily produced
Eight or ten miles south of these at Under
hills well, where five or six thousand gal
Ions flowed over and run down Black River
when it was first opened, We found man
"greasy as tallow ketch," drawing up oil
with common wooden pump at the rate Of
twenty barrels per day.
At Williams wells, two miles from there,
asphaltum covers the ground for two or three
acres, in some places uIore than two feet in
thickness. The gas disengaged from the oil
seems to have produced an eruption, and ele-
waited this part Of the country above the gen
eral level, and the oil overa0Wing, its more
this bed of asphaltum IS the result.
It is q common idea, even with Biologists,
that this oil has been produced from beds Of
coal; but this oil field is Of itself sufieiens to
show the incorrectness of this notion. The
limestone found in this region, under the
drift clay, recognize as a member of tho
Hamilton Group ofthe Devonian Formation,
and as such is geologieally many thousand
feet below the lowest member ofthe carboni-
ferrous formation, helow which workable coal
beds are never found.
The truth is, that this oil. found so abun-
dainty in Canada, Mecca, Ohio, Titusville.
Pa, and many other localities, is not coal
oil, but coral oil. Stored away in cells, form
ing in the aggregate immense reefs, as itwas
collected from the impure waters of the early
oceans by minute coral polyps, it has been
driven by heat and pressure into reservoirs
and crevices, where mans ingenuity is dis
covering it day by day. have in my pos
session many specimens of this fossil coral,
with the oil plainly visible in the cells.
In Canada the oil fever is raging. Land is
changing hands rapidly, and selling from
eight hundred to one thousand dollars per
acre, according to its supposed propinquity
to the oleaginous deposit. On the Michigan
side of the river have no doubt that oil will
yet be discovered in large quantities, though
at a greater depth. Mr. White, Of Port Hur-
on, who accompanied me on my Canadian
trip, took me to one spot about three miles
west of Port Huron, where gas is passing off
continually in quantities sufficient to light a
large city, good evidence Of oil beneath, from
which the gas is disengaged.