This week’s edition piles one unlikely story on top of another that places an area outside of Tidioute at the center of one of the nation’s largest industries.

Let’s start with Ernest Miller’s Place Names in Warren County.

That details Grandin as “a projected village in Limestone township, just across the Allegheny River from Tidioute.”

It was named after the Grandin family who were “large landowners, bankers, oil producers on a very large scale in the west, and general entrepreneurs.”

Miller explained the “town was laid out and mapped in 1873 with Grandin Avenue as the wide main thoroughfare and a Fairmont Park included. A handsom3 map of the streets was published in Philadelphia the same year but the village never came into existence!”

Perhaps the most well-known contribution of the Grandin family, though, places them at the core of the birth of the oil industry in 1859.

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society tells the story of the Grandin Well – the first oil well to come up dry, the first to be shot with an explosive charge and the first one in which tools got, well, stuck.

Most people in this area know that Edwin Drake struck the first oil well outside of Titusville.

“Two days after “Drake’s Folly” at Titusville surprised everybody by producing barrels of oil from a depth of 69.5 feet, the news arrived at a general store in Tidioute, 20 miles away,” according to an article by the Society. “With each barrel of oil was said to be selling for 75 cents and John Grandin, the owner’s son and an aspiring entrepreneur, saw an opportunity. With growing demand for a cheap fuel for lamps, Pittsburgh refineries wanted oil, instead of coal, for making kerosene. Grandin knew of petroleum seeps on Gordon Run of the nearby Campbell Farm and rode south of town to buy the land. He bought 30 acres surrounding the oil spring at $10 per acre.”

He immediately got to work, hiring a blacksmith to start building the tools necessary to drill the well. They erected a 20-foot derrick and started drilling within days.

“Drilling with the axle as a chisel worked well enlarging the borehole – until it became stuck at 134 feet, “where it never saw daylight again!” as described in a contemporary account. All attempts to retrieve the axle drill bit failed. A drilling tool was lost down-hole for the first time,” the Society article states. “This significant “first” in the history of stuck tools remains buried as a footnote in petroleum history.”

They attempted to blast the well into production but that turned out to not be successful.

“With the failure of Grandin’s well, the industry had its first of dry hole,” the Society article noted. “Many more followed.”