Oil: The Luck of Roaring Oneida

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The fryers in Noah Blevins' hen house woke up one morning recently to find a 10-ft. flame roaring up out of the barnyard. It was a "burn-off." Like a dozen or so other small farmers around Oneida, Tenn. (pop. 3,500), Blevins had just struck oil. Before long, the chicken coops took second place to storage tanks as the dominant topography on the Blevins farm. The biggest oil boom in the state's history has brought prosperity to rural Scott County on the Cumberland Plateau of eastern Tennessee.

Affluence has its price, of course. "The odor is terrible," complains Mrs. Jean Puckett, who has wells and burn-offs to either side of her one-acre lot. "It's just like leaving on a gas stove without lighting it." Lon Whaley, who has two of the natural gas burn-offs lighting up his front yard like the county fairgrounds, has difficulty getting to sleep at night. And Noah Blevins worries about the landscape: "It 'bout made me sick to see them drillin' and tearin' up what I spent all my life buildin'."

Near-Millionaires. Even so, few farmers held out very long after word got around in August that 30 years of sporadic drilling in Scott County had finally paid off. Oil rights that had gone begging for years at 500 an acre have now been sublet for as much as $2,000, plus 50% royalties. Today there is hardly a single unleased acre left in Scott and three neighboring counties. Though no resident has yet become a millionaire, some are getting pretty close. Blevins, for example, expects to gross nearly $200,000 a year in royalties—close to his total earnings for all of his 55 years. Lon Whaley expects to do even better.

Scott County can surely use the prosperity. One-third of its 16,000 people are on welfare. Some still live in log cabins heated by wood stoves. When new safety laws went into effect last May, scores of men at nearby coal mines were permanently laid off. Unfortunately for the locals, workers on the 25 new oil wells are mostly skilled outsiders brought in by independent drillers. (The big oil companies have not yet come to Scott County.) At least one driller, however, is starting to train Cumberland men for the jobs.

In the scramble for subleases, drilling rights and tips on new finds, Oneida has become the newest boomtown headquarters of the oil industry. Cadillacs and Lincolns with out-of-state license plates cruise the streets. D.B. Biglane, rotund in his checked suit, swoops in almost weekly from Natchez, Miss., in his rented DC-3. Like most visiting oilmen, he wheels and deals at Tobe's Motel and Restaurant. Owner Tobe Philips, who now drives a Cadillac himself, has nearly doubled his prices and started a 16-room addition. Across town, the B & Z Motel is putting up visitors in trailers on a vacant lot.

Without Pumps. The town's half dozen lawyers, most of them named Sexton and vaguely related to one another, refuse to take non-oil cases any more. Even oilmen queue up to see them. "When someone comes in and wants title or lease work done," says one lawyer, "I tell 'em to put $300 on the table before we even start talking."