Reminiscent of the California Gold Rush, thousands of people once flocked to Wood County when oil was discovered in the late 1880s.

“The oil they discovered around here wasn’t very good oil,” said Michael McMaster, education programs coordinator at the Wood County Historical Center. “It had a lot of sulfur in it.”

But there was a lot of it.

One-third of crude oil produced in the United States came from Ohio, especially Northwest Ohio, according to the Black Swamp Memories Web site. In September 1896, 5,500 oil wells ran in Wood County, making it the lead county in oil production.

“People who owned land where oil was discovered made lots of money,” said Matthew Bloom, a doctoral student in the history department.

Several buildings were built on oil money, including the courthouse and houses found west of Main Street.

The population also sky rocketed. Findlay’s population jumped from 4, 633 to 14,000 in three years, according to an online Archive Chronicle.

The glass industry moved in from New England to set up shop in Toledo, using the oil as a fuel for glass manufacturing, Bloom said. Edward Libbey was the glass manufacturer, and he started the Toledo Museum of Art with the profits from his business.

Bowling Green also saw its own telephone operation soon after the turn of the century, called the Oil Belt Telephone Co., the Web site said.

“The Marathon Oil company had its beginnings at that time,” Bloom said. “J.D. Rockefeller looked at Northwest Ohio as a place for oil.”

But as good as it was for the economy, it was bad for the environment.

“There were lakes of oil – not ponds, but lakes – sitting on the surface before they could contain it,” McMaster said. Birds would land on them, thinking it was water.

Oil blanketed the towns, regularly causing fires. Workers would use nitroglycerin to blow the oil out of the ground, often blowing up parts of the town in the process.

About 12 miles south, in Cygnet, Ohio – one of the major oil cities at the time – houses would catch on fire and factories would explode. Many people were killed, and a few were buried in cemeteries sprinkled through southern Wood County and into Indiana, where oil was most plentiful.

According to the Black Swamp Memories Web site, a particularly bad fire swept through Cygnet in September 1897. A well was drilled and oil spilled, but the boiler fire that powered the machine was not put out in time. A nearby wagon containing nitroglycerin exploded, killing six people and demolishing the buildings in town square.

“It was a treacherous business back in the day,” McMaster said, but only until the 1920s, when the oil supply dried up and nearly everything vanished.

They sucked all the oil out so fast that it just couldn’t last, Bloom said. The technology used to extract oil wasn’t as advanced as it is today.

Eventually, “it would take them a long time to fill up a glass jar,” he said.

According to the Archive Chronicle, the supply of gas and oil far exceeded the demand and “nobody practiced conservation.”

“Lights and stoves were left burning 24 hours a day,” the chronicle said. “Gradually, the supply of gas began to decrease.”

At that time, bigger and better oil fields found farther west caused people to lose interest in Ohio.

“By the 1920s, oil industry moved west into Oklahoma and Texas into bigger oil fields out there,” McMaster said.

Areas that once boasted thousands of people soon became ghost towns.

At one time, the biggest towns, like Cygnet, had about two hotels, five bars, a prostitution house, factories, and were quite large, McMaster said.

“There’s not even two slabs of concrete sitting side by side anymore.”

Many of the towns went out in the 1920s when the oil was depleted, and some of them have been sitting for 100 years, struggling to keep together the few buildings that still exist.

Though around 200 oil wells still operating in Wood County, the industry is nothing like it was in the 1880s.

Today, a lot of people have forgotten about the oil boom, McMaster said. “People who lived here all their lives are surprised to hear there was oil here.”