My mother was 12 when the family moved to Muskegon in 1926---just in time to get in on the mini oil boom that started in 1927 and lasted long enough to delay the arrival of the 1929 depression here for one year.

Grandpa Reed heated the house on Russell Road with a huge potbellied wood stove. When the oil well, which was behind the house almost back to the railroad tracks, came in, he buried a pipe between the pump head and the house and connected it to the top of the stove. He had a valve on the pipe and adjusted the heat by controlling how much crude oil dripped on the logs. My mother said he seldom let the fire burn hot enough to heat the house comfortably for women. Whenever he left, Grandma turned the oil up a drop or two and threw another log in the fire.

Gideon Truesdell wasn't looking for oil when he started drilling in 1869; he was looking for salt. Salt exported from Saginaw was producing half a million dollars a year. Alpena also had salt wells; so why not Muskegon? Drillers punched wells (one 2,627 feet deep) at various locations in Muskegon County between 1869 and 1886 before they gave up. There just wasn't enough brine flow to make it worth the investment and what they found was often contaminated with petroleum. Oil! But nobody really cared much about that in 1886.

In 1922, Stanley Daniloff noticed oil seepage on the swampy land near his home. Even then it took him five years to raise enough interest to amass the funds needed to organize the Muskegon Oil Corporation and start drilling. They hit a gusher at 1,675 feet on the Charles Reeths farm Muskegon Township on December 27, 1927.

Merry Christmas! The oil boom was on, but local people didn't get excited until the speculators came to town and started buying leases. Things really heated up when the riggers and operators arrived. Lease prices jumped from $1 an acre to as high as $2,500 an acre in a few cases. There were 70 oil rigs operating here in late 1928, most with a crew of four men, many of whom were paid $10 a day, as were truck drivers. There were pipes to be laid and storage facilities to be built. Roughly, 1,000 well-paid men were employed during the peak of the boom. The Occidental Hotel added capacity to accommodate 100 or so of the executives, scouts, and leasers working the territory. Many more rented at boarding houses and private homes. The whole community shared in the boom.

The whole community also shared in the crash that began in February 1929 when Standard Oil dropped the price of crude oil from $1.25 to 50 cents per barrel. The refineries and tank farms remained. Muskegon capitalized on that and maintained a healthy gasoline storage and distribution site, at one time one of the largest in the nation.

Only a few wells were producing enough to continue operating. Although the oil flowed from his well for a little longer, my grandfather was one of many Muskegon residents whose period of greatest prosperity was over.

George D. Parrish

Access: The Key to Muskegon County Small Business

August 1996