The Volcano oil field was discovered in 1860, the year after Drake's well in Pennsylvania kicked off the American oil rush. The field spanned both Wood and Ritchie counties. According to the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, drilling was very active between 1865 and 1870, producing crude from what local geologists called the Salt sand at a depth of about 360 feet - shallow by any modern standard, easy to reach with the equipment of the era. The first major strike came on March 6, 1865, on Buffalo Run in Ritchie County. The first Wood County well followed in May. A September 1865 strike produced high-quality crude suitable for lubricating - the most valuable grade of oil at the time - and the field was selling barrels for $30 each at peak. In 1860s dollars.

The yellow-dog lantern was a piece of practical 19th-century oil-field equipment - a simple sheet-iron lamp with a wick burning crude oil, painted yellow or fitted with a yellow glass, and hung from the pumping equipment to provide enough light for night-shift workers to see what they were doing. The name came from the yellow paint, the small size, and the dog-like way they followed the pulley systems through the hillside. In a town built on a steep slope with hundreds of producing wells, the network of pulleys was extensive, and the lanterns were everywhere. Photographs from the period - the ones that survive - show a hillside punctuated with dozens of lights even at three in the morning. From the river road below, the effect was the visual joke that gave the town its name.

By 1879, oil production at Volcano was declining. Wells that had produced 100 barrels a day in 1866 were producing 5 or 10. The boomtown population was thinning. The economic margins were tightening. There had been, according to a contemporary New York Times account, two prior attempts to set the town on fire. Both had been caught in time. The town had hired watchmen to patrol overnight. On August 4, 1879, the watchmen retired for the night, and the third fire was discovered just after they left. It spread quickly through the wooden buildings and the oil-soaked ground. Storage tanks burst. The fire reached the streams of crude that ran in shallow ditches along the streets. By morning, the town was gone.

The Pinkerton Detective Agency, the private investigative firm that had become the standard recourse for crimes that local authorities could not handle, took the case. After their investigation, a town resident named Jim Frey was arrested and charged with setting the fire. The trial ended in acquittal due to lack of evidence. Whether Frey actually did it remains unknown. The motive that contemporary investigators speculated about was insurance - a common arsonist's motive in the late 19th century, when fire insurance had become widely available and buildings burned more readily than they survived. No one was ever convicted. The fire stood as the official cause of the town's death, though the oil field's economic decline would have killed it within a few more years anyway.

The town was never rebuilt. The post office closed. The wells were gradually capped or abandoned. The pulleys rusted. The yellow dogs went dark. The site, south of US-50 at the junction of Wood County Routes 5 and 28, is now mostly woods with a few foundation stones visible if you know where to look. But starting in 1893 - fourteen years after the fire - former Volcano residents began holding an annual memorial dinner in remembrance of the town they had lost. The dinner has continued, in various forms, for more than 130 years. Volcano Days, an antique-engine and oil-field-equipment show, now takes place at Mountwood Park near the site. The visitors are mostly descendants of former Volcano families. The engines they bring are the kind that pumped the wells. The yellow-dog lanterns, in glass cases, are part of the display.