The story begins with a different commodity. In the early 1800s, settlers drilled the springs at Burning Springs for brine, which they evaporated in iron kettles to produce salt - one of the few processed goods that justified the labor of an Appalachian frontier economy. The salt operations sometimes produced an inconvenient byproduct: a heavy oil that contaminated the brine and had to be skimmed off. By 1836, the operators discovered the oil was worth something on its own - sold as illuminating oil and as a medicinal liniment - and the salt wells began producing 50 to 100 barrels per year of crude as a deliberate sideline. This was 23 years before Edwin Drake drilled the famous Pennsylvania well that is conventionally credited with starting the American oil industry.

William P. Rathbone purchased land at Burning Springs around 1840 and, over the following decade, drilled a new well that produced more oil than salt. By 1859, that well was producing seven 40-gallon barrels of crude per day. Father and son - William P. Rathbone and John C. Rathbone, known as Cass - subdivided their property into 70 one-acre plots and sold them to other drillers. The boom followed within months. By 1861, the population had jumped to ten thousand. The river became a working petroleum highway. The Rathbones, who had owned a quiet salt-producing farm in 1859, were among the wealthiest families in western Virginia by 1862.

The Civil War complicates the Rathbone story. Cass Rathbone helped recruit the 11th West Virginia Infantry and took command. On September 2, 1862, he surrendered approximately 200 of his men to Confederate raiders at Spencer in Roane County. The surrender was suspicious. Some observers believed it was a kind of protection payment - the price of keeping the Burning Springs oil field intact. Confederate forces paroled the Union soldiers immediately, which was unusual. Cass Rathbone was sent to Pennsylvania, and in January 1863, President Lincoln dismissed him from the Union army. Whatever protection arrangement may have existed did not last. Four months after Rathbone's dismissal, the Confederates burned the oil field anyway.

The Jones-Imboden Raid was a Confederate cavalry operation aimed partly at preventing West Virginia's imminent statehood - which would take effect on June 20, 1863, six weeks after the raid. William E. Jones's brigade reached Burning Springs on May 9. The destruction was thorough. Every working well was set afire. The 120,000 gallons of crude awaiting shipment were ignited. The flammable oil spread onto the Little Kanawha and floated downstream, setting the river and its forested banks on fire for miles. The boomtown that had been more than a mile long was consumed. Pillar of smoke visible for forty miles. River running black with burning crude. The financial damage ran into the millions in 1863 dollars.

The Rathbones and their neighbors rebuilt as best they could. Several family members died during the war years. The patriarch William P. Rathbone died in 1865. The remaining family sold their interest for $400,000 and moved west - a fortune in 19th-century money, but a fraction of what the field would have been worth had the war not intervened. Other drillers replaced them and sank hundreds of wells over the following decades. By the 20th century, the center of West Virginia oil production had shifted elsewhere, but small operations continued. Some oil is still produced at Burning Springs today. The historic Ruble Church, listed on the National Register in 1982, marks the community's surviving 19th-century architecture. A park and museum opened in 2002. The town is once again what it was in 1830: a few buildings on a quiet river, with one of the more extraordinary historical footnotes in American industrial history.