The village of Fredonia, N.Y., has
been using natural gas in lighting the streets for thirty years or there
about. On Big Sewickley Creek, in Westmoreland County, Pa., natural gas
was used for evaporating water in the manufacture of salt thirty years
ago, and gas is still issuing at the same place. Natural gas has been in
use in several localities in eastern Ohio for twenty-five years, and the
wells are flowing as vigorously as when first known. It has also been
in use in West Virginia for a quarter of a century, as well as in
the petroleum region of western Pennsylvania, where it has long been
utilized in generating steam for drilling oil wells.
In 1826 the _American Journal of Science_ contained a letter from Dr.
S.P. Hildreth, who, in writing of the products of the Muskingum (Ohio)
Valley, said: "They have sunk two wells, which are now more than four
hundred feet in depth; one of them affords a very strong and pure
salt water, but not in great quantity; the other discharges such vast
quantities of petroleum, or, as it is vulgarly called, 'Seneka oil,' and
besides is so subject to such tremendous explosions of gas, as to force
out all the water and afford nothing but gas for several days, that they
make little or no salt.
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