The conventional history of American petroleum begins on August 27, 1859, when Edwin Drake's well struck oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania. The Burning Springs Complex complicates that history. Indigenous people had known about the seeps in this part of West Virginia for centuries - the springs got their name because gases bubbling up through the water could be lit and would burn on the surface. As early as the 1810s, settlers were collecting the oil that pooled around the seeps and selling it as a patent medicine and a lamp fuel. By the 1830s, some local landowners had drilled shallow brine wells that happened to produce oil as a side product. Recent scholarship, including the 2013 PBS documentary Burning Springs, makes a strong case that small-scale commercial oil production at Burning Springs predated Drake's well by years - though Drake produced the world's first dedicated, intentional oil well, which is a meaningful distinction.

Drake's success in Pennsylvania triggered a rush. Within two years, speculators and drillers were swarming the Little Kanawha. By 1862, Burning Springs had become what newspapers of the era called the second great oil field of the world. The Rathbone Wells and the Karns Wells - the two principal complexes that survive as the historic district today - were producing crude that was floated downstream in barrels and barges to refineries in Ohio. The boomtown that grew up around the wells had hotels, banks, and the standard cast of prospectors, swindlers, and prostitutes that boomtowns produced in 19th-century America. Land that had been worth a few dollars an acre in 1859 was changing hands for thousands by 1862.

The Union Army was buying significant quantities of Burning Springs oil for use in its operations - particularly for the lamps and lubricants required in the increasingly mechanized warfare of the 1860s. The Confederate command saw an opportunity. William E. Jones, nicknamed Grumble for his temperament, led a brigade of cavalry on a long raid through western Virginia in the spring of 1863. On May 9, his men descended on Burning Springs. The destruction was thorough. Wooden derricks went up in tar-fueled flame. Storage tanks ignited and burned for days. Barges loaded with crude were set adrift in flames down the Little Kanawha. Contemporary accounts described a column of black smoke visible for forty miles. The financial damage was substantial - estimates ranged from $1 million to $3 million in 1863 dollars.

The field was rebuilt almost immediately. Oil demand kept rising through the Civil War and accelerated after it, and Burning Springs continued to produce - though never again at the dominant scale it had achieved before Jones rode in. By the 1870s the center of West Virginia oil production was shifting to other fields. By the 1900s Burning Springs was a quiet rural area again. The boomtown faded back into the landscape. A small community remained. The oil business moved on. What survives today is the Burning Springs Complex, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971: one contributing building and three contributing sites that mark where the early derricks stood. It is one of the few archaeological landscapes in the United States that documents the very beginning of the petroleum industry.

The Drake Well in Pennsylvania remains the standard origin point of the American oil industry in textbook accounts. The Burning Springs Complex sits as a useful corrective - a reminder that the history of any technology is rarely as clean as the founding-myth version makes it sound. Petroleum was already being extracted commercially in multiple places before Drake. The story of the modern oil industry begins, in some sense, with the seeps in the Little Kanawha as much as with the well in Titusville. And the story of how thoroughly oil would become entangled with American military power begins on May 9, 1863, when a Confederate brigadier discovered that you can win a small tactical victory by burning a substance that, in less than a century, would become the most strategic commodity on Earth.