Kansas Oil Museum

El Dorado was named in 1857 for the promise of riches, and for half a century the riches went elsewhere. Nearby towns struck gas and boomed. In 1878 John Donley, a barber, drilled 200 feet at a spot chosen by a spiritualist before his money ran out, and wells in 1879 and 1882 brought up only brine. When oil turned up at Augusta, the city fathers tried something new. In June 1914 they hired Erasmus Haworth, the state geologist, to study the ground, and his field work outlined the El Dorado Anticline, an upward fold in the rock where oil could gather.

The first well drilled on it, in August 1915, was dry. The Wichita Natural Gas Company bought the abandoned lease and drilled the Stapleton No. 1, which came in on October 5, 1915. By 1918 the field was producing 29 million barrels a year, almost nine percent of the nation's oil, just as the war and the motorcar both wanted every grade of it. Cities Service, A. L. Derby, Jack Vickers and Bill Skelly made their names here, and in late 1995 the field passed its 300 millionth barrel.

The Butler County Historical Society, organized in 1955, opened the Kansas Oil Museum in 1983. Outside are restored oilfield equipment spanning more than a century, a furnished boom town, a schoolhouse and a cabin; inside are galleries on oil exploration and on the county from the 1850s through the 1940s, and a Legacy Gallery of oil people that includes Haworth.