Vandalia, St. Elmo, Brownstown: we buy minerals and royalties throughout Fayette County, home of the Louden field, more than 400 million barrels and counting.
Fayette County is Louden, and Louden is one of the great fields of the Midwest: Carter Oil's rotary rigs hit it in 1937, the boom remade St. Elmo and Altamont, and the field has made more than 400 million barrels. Nobody is drilling it anymore. What is left is a waterflood with thousands of unit participations, most of them owned by the grandchildren of people in St. Elmo, Brownstown and Altamont who leased before the war.
What produces here. The Illinois Petroleum Resources Board puts Fayette County at 293,821 barrels for calendar 2025, fifth in the state, down from 372,427 in 2024, a 21 percent drop that was the second largest in Illinois. The oil is Louden first, with pay in the Chester sands and Cypress above the Benoist, Ste. Genevieve, Carper and Devonian, plus St. James, Patoka and Patoka West, Iola Consolidated, Wilberton, St. Paul and Laclede; part of Louden is also a gas storage field. The ISGS database carries about 2,460 unplugged oil producer records and 775 active injection wells in the county, with Exxon and Carter Oil still on the historical entries and Petco Petroleum Corporation of Hinsdale, which runs much of the Louden waterflood, next on the list; W. L. Belden Trust, Jack Petroleum, Extex and CDG Operations are the other names in the county records. New drilling has essentially stopped: the IDNR weekly permit logs show one oil well permit in 2025, CDG Operations' Jeremiah Swarm 30 to the Spechts Ferry at 4,500 feet in December, alongside injection and disposal permits for Jack Petroleum and the Belden Trust, and no permits of any kind in 2026 through late October.
Whatever you own here, producing royalties, non-producing acreage, or an inherited fraction split among family, we will identify it from whatever paperwork you have, value it off the actual wells and activity, and show you the reasoning with the offer. Free, no obligation, and no pressure: if keeping it is the right answer, we will say so. Inherited it? Start with inherited mineral rights in Illinois.
Discovered by Carter Oil in 1937 in eastern Fayette and western Effingham counties, more than 400 million barrels to date, a Chester sand and Cypress waterflood that Exxon sold in the 1990s and that still carries the county.
St. James, Patoka and Patoka West, Iola Consolidated, Wilberton, St. Paul, Laclede and Herrick South, with pay in the Cypress, Benoist, Ste. Genevieve, Carper and Devonian.
Wherever your tract sits in Fayette County, we will research it free and value it with the work shown.
We buy in every Illinois county, including ones without a page here. See the full county index or the Illinois overview.
Whether you need a probate, the affidavit and transfer on death routes, the dormant mineral rules, and where unpaid royalties go: inherited mineral rights in Illinois, what heirs should do.
What Illinois mineral rights are worth, information only, with this month's activity. Unclaimed Illinois royalties: where the money goes and how an heir claims it.
Everything a Illinois owner needs in one place: who owns what under state law, how royalties must be paid and by when, what a buyer can and cannot deduct, the tax treatment of a sale, and the deadlines that quietly cost people their minerals. Free, and no sign-up.
Read the Illinois guideThe things owners here most often wish they had read first. All free, none of it gated.
Free, no obligation, and no pressure. We reply within one business day, usually faster.
Prefer the phone? Call or text 918-984-1645 and you will get Stephen, the owner, not a call center. If we miss you, we text back the same day.
In a hurry? Text a photo of a royalty check stub to 918-984-1645 and our preliminary offer puts a written number in front of you within about two business days. It holds for 7 while you decide.