Discovery Oil Well - Marathon Oil Company

The company named on the plaque carries a name younger than the company itself. Marathon began at Lima, Ohio, in 1887 as the Ohio Oil Company, was part of Standard Oil until the 1911 breakup, and in 1930 bought the Transcontinental Oil Company along with its Marathon brand of filling stations. It adopted Marathon Oil Company as its corporate name in 1962. Gurley, the village the plaque measures from, dates only from 1913, when the Burlington reached it, and was named for Fred R. Gurley, a Burlington superintendent.

What the plaque says

Discovery Oil Well- Marathon Oil Company On August 9, 1949, the first successful oil well in western Nebraska came in for 225 barrels of oil per day at a total depth of 4,429 feet. Marathon Oil Co. completed the discovery well, Mary Egging No.1, located four miles east and two miles north of this marker, and five miles southeast of the town of Gurley. The oil discovery ended 60 years of unsuccessful searching in western Nebraska. The first reported interest for oil occurred in 1889, near Crawford, in the northwest corner of the Panhandle. The first recorded drilling operation took place in 1903 near Chadron, also in the northern part of the Panhandle. In 1917, the first exploratory well drilled in the southwest Panhandle, near Harrisburg, failed. Oil searchers sunk many other dry test wells in western Nebraska until success came in 1949. Wells in the Nebraska Panhandle through 1966 had produced more than 216 million barrels of oil. Nebraska's first successful oil well was completed in 1939 in the southeastern corner of the state. Gurley Centennial Committee, 1967 Historical Land Mark Council

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Sidney — 8.1 mi
  Three surviving buildings of the post that guarded the Union Pacific at Sidney from 1867 to 1894, where a young army surgeon named Walter Reed found a ward full of ugly cases.
• Courthouse and Jail Rocks — 24 mi
  Two clay and sandstone buttes south of Bridgeport that emigrants called a castle, a capitol, a church and coffins before the courthouse and jail names stuck, with a path to their base.

More markers nearby

• Fort Sidney — 8.0 mi
• Sidney-Black Hills Trail — 8.1 mi
• Sioux Army Depot — 8.9 mi
• Nebraska's Earliest Documented Burial — 8.9 mi