Marietta, Belpre, Beverly: America's oldest continuously producing oil district outside Titusville, with 17,800 wells drilled and almost nothing producing today.
Washington County is where American oil history is, and where Ohio's shale play is not.
The Macksburg field was one of the first oil fields in the United States, producing from the 1860s, and roughly 17,800 wells have been drilled in this county over the century and a half since, the largest historic count of any county we cover anywhere. What produces today is negligible: about 1,100 barrels and 241,900 Mcf in a recent quarter, a rounding error in Ohio terms. The Utica is present but marginal at this depth and maturity and is essentially undeveloped.
We put that first because Washington County gets marketed against Monroe and Belmont and it should not be. If someone is pricing your Marietta area minerals on Utica comparables, ask them which wells they mean.
What is here is a very old, very fragmented conventional estate: 19th century leases still of record, royalty fractions in tiny denominators, and an enormous idle and orphan well population that Ohio's plugging program continues to work through. We buy small conventional interests with no minimum and we pay all closing costs, and we will tell you when an interest is not worth the cost of the paperwork.
The more urgent point is protective. With that much history and that many severances, Washington County has a large population of dormant severed interests exposed to both the Dormant Mineral Act and the Marketable Title Act, which West v. Bode confirmed operate independently. If nothing has been recorded in your family's name in decades, record a claim to preserve. That advice costs us deals and it is still the right advice.
The Macksburg field, one of the first oil fields in the United States, dating to the 1860s, plus Berea, Clinton, and Cow Run sands.
Present but marginal at this depth and maturity, and essentially undeveloped. What little modern gas exists trends dry to lean.
Wherever your tract sits in Washington County, we will research it free and value it with the work shown.
We buy in every Ohio county, including ones without a page here. See the full county index or the Ohio overview.
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