The Ancient Oil Mines of Alsace.

The Ancient Oil Mines of Alsace.

“The oldest practical petroleum producers in the world are the Le Bel family of Alsace,” said ex-Senator Lewis Emery, Jr., the fighting anti-Standard oil producer to a reporter, “Strange as it may seem, they began to produce petroleum more than 130 years before Colonel Drake sank his pioneer well in Pennsylvania, and yet the history of oil production is dated from Drake’s successful venture near Titusville. No one in this country ever heard of the ancient Alsatian oil field until 1880. In that year I was making a tour of investigation among the Russian and other alleged foreign oil countries and learned of the existence of the Le Bel territory. I was surprised to find that it was only fifty miles from Strasburg, and that a railroad ran within three miles of it to a place called Sultz-unter'm-Wald. I took a trip to the district, and met the owner, M. Jacques Le Bel, an ancestor of whose, as he told me, had discovered the oil in 1735, found that it made an excellent lubricator, and purchased for a song 91,000 metres square of the land in the region, and went to mining the oil. M. Le Bel also told me that I was the first foreigner who had ever visited the field.

“I found it a most curious oil region, and when I told Le Bel that I was an oil operator myself from the greatest oil country in the world, he was surprised, for he knew nothing about any other oil country besides his own primitive field, which had been owned and worked by the descendants of its discoverer for 130 years. After satisfying him of the truth of my statements—except the one as to the manner in which oil wells were put down and operated in America, which he could not bring himself to believe—he consented to show me the way he put down and operated his wells, at the same time assuring me that I was the first outsider who had ever been permitted to examine the works. After seeing the way they produced oi] in Alsace, I was not surprised that M. Le Bel was incredulous about the Pennsylvania methods.