First Commercial Use of Natural Gas in Louisiana

The discovery was an accident of the ice trade. In 1870 workers boring a water well for the Shreveport Ice Factory hit a pocket of gas. The Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association tells it with a night watchman striking a match near the well; the plant piped the gas inside to light the building, the first recorded commercial use in the state. Nobody was looking for gas. The first marker here, raised in 1976, was destroyed in a vehicle collision, and the state put up this replacement in 2022.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Street Museum — 0.3 mi
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 0.3 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.
• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — 0.7 mi
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 3.3 mi
  A circular Art Deco museum of 1939 on the Shreveport fairgrounds, with a 1,000-year-old Caddo log boat, rotunda murals and dioramas of early Caddo Parish.

More markers nearby

• Confederate Navy Yard — steps away
• First City Market — 0.3 mi
• Cane & Bennett's Trading Post — 0.4 mi
• Shreve Memorial Library — 0.4 mi