It’s right there on Fredonia’s village seal: a lamp with five small flames and the words “First gas well”---a shorthand way of laying claim to the proud distinction of being the first place anywhere in the world to be lighted by natural gas.
That first well was drilled by a gunsmith named William A. Hart. One day in 1824 or ’25, he saw some boys playing in Canadaway Creek, next to his shop. They were using a flint to light sticks on fire, then threw them into the creek. It caused the water to flare—a burning creek! The phenomenon was hardly unknown to the indigenous people of the region or to the settlers of Southwestern New York, home to several “eternal flames”. But this time, something clicked in Hart’s head.
Soon, he was drilling into the rocks where natural gas was seeping out, using shovels and a hand drill. His first two attempts produced nothing… but the third time was the charm. According to the village newspaper, The Fredonia Censor, a “hole was drilled 27 feet into a slaty rock”, and Hart used bamboo piping to funnel the seeping gas into a crude gasometer, or storage tank. From there, by September 1825, the gas was piped through hollowed-out logs sealed with tar and rags to five nearby customers: three shops, an inn, and a mill, each of which paid an annual fee of $1.50 per light for the service, or about $41 in today’s money. Each gas lamp was claimed to yield the light of two good candles.
Gas lighting had been around for more than 30 years, but in those cases, the gas used was a byproduct of coal extraction; indeed, by 1820, London, Paris, and Baltimore were illuminated this way. But the little town of Fredonia was the first to harness the much cleaner natural gas, direct from the ground. By late 1825, the village was lit up by 100 streetlamps---a sight so remarkable that a few years after the Marquis de Lafayette visited the town en route to Buffalo during his 1825 tour commemorating the 50th anniversary of the American Revolution, people misremembered it. They said that Lafayette was impressed by illuminated Fredonia… even though his visit preceded the installation of streetlamps by at least four months.
Such was the fame of gaslit Fredonia that on June 5, 1841, the famed Scottish geologist Charles Lyell visited to see the wonder, observing: “Sailed in a steamboat to Fredonia, a town of 1200 inhabitants, with neat white houses, and six churches. The streets are lighted up with natural gas, which bubbles up out of the ground, and is received into a gasometer, which I visited.”
Hart operated his natural gas business for the next few years before selling it to another Fredonian. In 1856, Hart’s relative by marriage, Preston Barmore, bought a well nearby well and, the following year, formed the Fredonia Gas Light Company---America’s first natural gas firm. Later in 1857, Barmore dropped a charge down a borehole to blow up shale in an effort to release more gas. It succeeded, the first instance of fracking ever recorded---another landmark of innovation for the natural gas industry in Fredonia.
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Cast (in order of appearance):
William A. Hart: Robert Creighton
Boy: RJ Creighton
Narrator: Susan Banks
Sound editing: Micheal Peters
Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Webpage written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer
Maxwell Walters, Aurora Merwin and Catherine Oag-Miller, Darwin R. Barker Historical Museum, Fredonia
Councilmember Mitch Nowakowski and the Buffalo Common Council for their generous support