Oil Derrick Street Signs

Along Main Street in Gas City, Indiana, the street signs on each corner—those flat metal rectangles bearing names and sometimes block numbers—do not sit atop basic, boring poles. Gas City’s street signs are mounted perpendicularly on small replicas of the oil derricks that once drew valuable natural gas out of the ground of East Central Indiana. If you veer off the Cardinal Greenway at the Gas City trailhead and cut through the parking lot to North Water Street, you can spy one of these derrick street signs 200 feet to the right at the southeast corner of Water and State Road 22. Natural gas was first found in East Central Indiana in 1886, and by 1890 an industrial boom was underway in this former agricultural region. In that year, the boom came to a sleepy town named Harrisburg. Monroe and James Seiberling, managers of the Diamond Plate Glass factory in nearby Kokomo, Indiana, transferred the company’s natural gas leases in Harrisburg to the Gas City Land Company organized by John E. Miller of the Pennsylvania Railroad (which ran through Harrisburg). The land company renamed the town Gas City, laid out a grid system for its streets, and set to work attracting plants and factories by promoting the area’s cheap land and fuel. According to historian James A. Glass, it took only two years before Gas City had “five glass plants, a tin plate factory, an iron and steel works, and a strawboard manufacturing plant” that employed over 4,000 workers. By the turn of the 20th century Indiana was producing the most natural gas of any U.S. state, but shortly thereafter the wells ran dry. The oil derrick street signs are one of the few remaining legacies of that boom. Take a ride east down Main Street to see more examples.

• Source: Glass, James A. “The Gas Boom in East Central Indiana.” Indiana Magazine of History 96, no. 4 (December 2000): 313–35.