ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 16, 1996 TAG: 9608160043
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: MERRIMAC
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
Come and listen to a story about Price Mountain folk
Who got excited and imaginations stoked.
But a big tall well built by California dudes
Never did produce the bubbling crude.
Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. It's only a flimsy piece of paper, no more substantial that the deal it struck turned out to be.
Curtis Linkous kept it anyway. It belonged to his mother-in-law, Roxie Kipps, who was among hundreds of Montgomery County landowners who caught oil fever back in the late 1940s.
"I used to tell my wife, 'Here I married you and thought we were going to have a big oil well,'" Linkous says today.
Now all that's left of this episode is one capped-off, very deep hole in the ground atop Price Mountain.
When a national oil exploration firm, The California Co., began obtaining leases in 1947 to drill in a wide area surrounding Price Mountain, local people eagerly signed up.
Eventually the firm got the rights to drill beneath more than 50,000 acres in Montgomery, Giles and Craig counties.
In February 1949, work began at the only well ever to come from all the speculation. A crowd of spectators endured a chill wind to watch the drill rig-raising, and a reporter for The Roanoke Times heralded the event as "a new and exciting chapter in the economic history of Southwest Virginia."
Nine months later and nearly two miles deeper below Price Mountain, the venture abruptly ended. The California Co. packed up and left the site without explanation, leaving only whimsical memories among the would-be Jed Clampetts.
"Everybody thought money was going to flow," says longtime Merrimac resident Fred Lawson. "But it never did amount to anything."
No one has ever searched for oil around here since.
Wildcat exploration seemed like a good idea after World War II, in an era when petroleum began to rule the market and displace coal as a primary industrial energy source. Symbolically, The California Co. focused on some played-out coal fields when its agents began to circulate locally around Price Mountain.
After yielding coal for about 200 years, the mines there were nearly all closed. And people were receptive to new ways of making some revenue - particularly one as potentially lucrative as striking oil.
Between 1947 and '49, more than 400 parcels of land in western Montgomery County communities such as Belmont, Vicker, Crab Creek, Prices Fork and Midway were leased to The California Co. for oil and gas exploration.
Hundreds of people inked 10-year leases. Among them were substantial landowners such as the Heth and Wall families and then-Roanoke Times publisher Junius P. Fishburn. Many ex-coal miners and their families also leased their small plots.
"Everybody signed it. It wasn't anything to lose," says Alex Linkous Jr., who agreed to let The California Co. look for oil beneath his two acres off Merrimac Road.
Like most others, for his permission Linkous got a mere $1 per acre. Some of the larger landowners got as little as 10 cents per acre for the exploration rights.
In return, The California Co. promised each landowner a standard one-eighth royalties share should oil be struck.
Excitement peaked when the heavy equipment began to arrive by the trainload in early 1949. Bulldozers scraped a new road to the summit of Price Mountain, followed by big trucks bearing the derrick.
All the commotion left little room for secrecy. When installed, the portable derrick rose about 140 feet above the mountain, widely visible across the county. And the three huge diesel power generators hummed constantly.
Locals frequented the site of the operation, chatting with the exotic "roughnecks" from Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana who manned the derrick in round-the-clock shifts. People who met them recall the workers as being friendly but tight with information about the drilling.
Progress was slowed by hard subsurface layers of rock that chewed up even the hardest diamond-studded drill bits. "Drilling for Oil is Intricate, Costly Operation; Price's Mountain Project Proves How Tough It Is," read a September 1949 Roanoke Times headline.
With little official information about the project, gossip deepened as the well sunk thousands of feet below Price Mountain. A rumor that the well had struck a gusher sent one newspaper reporter on a hurried but futile night trip up the mountain road.
Workers gave up at the end of November when the nine-inch diameter well reached 9,336 feet, or nearly 1.75 miles down. According to reports, they sang, "I'll Be Home For Christmas" as they dismantled the machinery and left.
"The only report that could be confirmed was that the people of Montgomery County know no more about the 'oil well' being drilled in their own back yards than they did nine months ago - except that there's supposed to be a hole almost two miles deep up there," groused the weekly Montgomery Messenger newspaper.
In April 1950 all the exploratory leases were canceled by The California Co. - which later became part of oil industry giant Chevron.
Some Price Mountain residents still believe the well was mysteriously closed down after it struck oil. Others tossed away their lease documents years ago.
"We might of gained something. But we haven't so far," says Alex Linkous with a chuckle.
All that remains is the access lane up Price Mountain, now a backwoods residential drive past Curtis Linkous' house, which bears the name, "Oilwell Road."
LENGTH: Long : 110 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: GENE DALTON/Staff. Curtis Linkous (right) of Oilwellby CNBRoad shows the oil lease he still has from The California Oil Co.
color. 2. The Saturday, Feb. 26, 1949, copy of The Roanoke Times
printed a picture of the new Price Mountain oil derrick raised the
day before, an event the newspaper said might represent "a new,
exciting adventure" in Montgomery County.