The Early Days of Oil Dreams in Central Oregon
By Steve Lent, Museum Historian
In the summer of 1908, Central Oregon was abuzz with a different kind of gold rush — this time, for black gold.
On the west slope of Grizzly Mountain, where golden wheat once waved in the breeze, a team from the newly formed Madras Oil and Gas Company began drilling what they believed would be the region’s first successful oil well. Local newspapers fed the buzz, reporting enthusiastically that petroleum had indeed been pulled from the well, and that samples of “good commercial oil” were even on display in nearby Madras.
Coal and water were also reportedly struck, adding to the optimism. “The company, while knowing all the time that oil was there,” the Prineville Review wrote in August 1908, “is highly gratified of being in a position to also convince the public of this fact.”
With the Harriman railroad line under construction — set to compete with the James J. Hill line in reaching Central Oregon — there was real hope that the railroads would become eager customers for a local oil source. Several Prineville-area entrepreneurs jumped on board as investors, betting that the Madras company was onto something big.
But despite the fanfare and high hopes, the well never quite delivered. The oil find was real — just not in quantities worth commercial extraction. After a few more months of effort, the operation was quietly shut down and the well capped. The site became known as “Oil Well Flat,” a name that now serves more as a footnote than a legacy.
Oregon’s Elusive Oil Boom
Grizzly Mountain wasn’t the only place in Central and Eastern Oregon where oil fever flared, however briefly. Nearly two decades later, in 1927, the Clarno Basin Oil Company stirred excitement in Wheeler County, sinking a well on the Hilton Ranch near the mouth of Pine Creek. Shares sold for $10 apiece and investors were promised that “One Good Speculation is Worth a Lifetime of Saving!” The company spent an estimated $300,000 and drilled to a depth of 4,800 feet. Onlookers came in droves on Sundays to watch and hope. What they got was natural gas — and another dry hole.
The 1960s and '70s saw yet more attempts to extract oil from Oregon’s stubborn geology. A well on the Morrow Ranch was repeatedly drilled and redrilled by multiple companies, including Central Oils and later Robert F. Harrison and Associates. It never made it past 3,300 feet and was officially abandoned in 1971. The state of Oregon recorded it as well number 36-031-00003 — a bureaucratic name for yet another unrealized dream.
Despite scattered efforts across the decades, Oregon remains one of the few states never to produce commercial quantities of oil. Still, for a moment in time on Grizzly Mountain, and again in Clarno and Morrow, hope sprang eternal — and the lure of oil briefly stirred the ambitions of pioneers looking to stake a new kind of claim.