William Cooper Stiles
Compiled by
Richard Wilt
William is the 3rd cousin 4 times removed of Richard Wilt.

William Cooper Stiles Jr. came to Wood County, WV on 1857 to investigate the potential of the oil field near White Oak on the eastern border of what is now Wood County. He returned in 1864 to form the Volcanic Oil and Coal Company. Stiles purchased 2000 acres, began drilling, and laid out the town that by 1870 was called Volcano. In its heyday Volcano had nearly 4000 permanent residents. Stiles died in his Volcano home on December 17, 1896

William Cooper Stiles, Jr
Birth: Jul. 27, 1839
Philadelphia
Philadelphia County
Pennsylvania, USA
Death: Dec. 17, 1896 Family links:
Parents:
Henry A. Stiles (1794 - 1863)
Elizabeth Gaul Stiles (1802 - 1859)
Spouse:
Ella M. Magill Stiles (1839 - 1878)
Children:
Charlotte McKaraher Stiles (1864 - 1879)
Albert Magill Stiles (1870 - 1938)
Samuel Brown Stiles (1873 - 1953)

William Cooper Stiles, Jr, born in Philadelphia on July 27, 1839, was one of the earliest operators in the West Virginia and Ohio oil fields. Mr Stiles traveled to the White Oak region of WV in 1864 where he purchased several thousand acres and began drilling.
After an ominous start, Mr. Stiles made a major strike and later revolutionized the oil industry through the introduction of the endless cable pumping system--an application conceived from the cable system powering street cars in Philadelphia.
Mr. Stiles built the volcanic Oil And Coal Company into a major force in the local oil industry. In 1866 at the cost of Laurel Fork and Sand Hill Railroad, a standard gauge rail system for transporting oil to refineries in Parkersburg.
For his major contributions to Volcano, Mr. Stiles was known as the "Father of Volcano." He also served as a county commissioner from 1881 to 1885.W. C. Stiles, Jr. died at his beloved Thornhill on December 17, 1896.
Excavation sought for W.Va.'s oil past

THE CHARLESTON GAZETTE, W.VA.
| RICK STEELHAMMER |
Sun, Nov 21, 2021 at 1:32 AM

Nov. 21--PARKERSBURG, W.Va. -- After producing only dry holes when drilling for oil in Ohio in 1863, Philadelphia entrepreneur William Cooper Stiles Jr. decided to move south and roll the dice again on a tract along White Oak Run in Wood County in the newly formed state of West Virginia.
His prospects looked good.
Oil was already being produced in the Burning Springs area a few miles to the southeast, and was pooling to the surface in places like Oil Spring Run along the Ritchie County line, just over the ridge and about one mile south of Stiles' 1,000-plus acre tract.

Stiles brought in a major strike on his property that, for a few decades at least, transformed the pastoral landscape.

Today, stone walls and stairs and rusting oil derricks are all that's left of this piece of West Virginia history, which is now incorporated into Mountwood Park.

Friends of the park are hoping that an archaeological dig -- possibly commencing next year -- will unlock some of the secrets of the townspeople's lives.

Drilling was intense in the area between 1865 and 1870, as Stiles developed his Volcanic Oil Co. oil field, so named because "oil tended to run out of the ground quickly from the shallow wells in the field," according to Wood County historian Mike Naylor. "Many of the wells were less than 100 feet deep."

Oil was initially hauled from the fields in wooden barrels carried in wagons. But the Volcano Oil Field became so productive that Stiles sank $160,000 into building the Laurel Fork and Sand Hill Railroad, which opened in 1869, to transport crude oil to refineries in Parkersburg. Within 10 years, the railroad became obsolete when the state's first pipeline was built connecting the oil field to Parkersburg.

Since the hilly topography of the area didn't lend itself to building and tending hundreds of pump engines to extract oil from the wells, Stiles invented a looped cable and pulley system that, when strung along the hillsides, allowed a single engine to pump up to 40 wells at a time. The last segment of Stiles' "Endless Cable" network continued pumping oil until 1974.
The boomtown of Volcano took shape during this period, with Stiles, who came to be known as the "Father of Volcano," spending $60,000 to build a mansion shaped like a Maltese cross on a hilltop overlooking the hastily built community. The three-floor mansion had 25 rooms and was surrounded by flower gardens, a wine cellar, a tennis court, stables, a barn and a groundskeeper's residence.

Sometime during the 1870s, the town's population peaked at 2,300 and included an opera house, post office, bowling alley, two newspapers, several hotels and restaurants, numerous retail shops and hundreds of wood-frame homes.

But on Aug. 4, 1879, a fire broke out in the basement of a Volcano dry goods store. Whipped by high winds, the fire quickly spread through the compact wooden community, destroying all but a handful of structures.

There were rumors of arson, and Stiles hired a private detective firm to investigate that possibility, Naylor said. But no proof could be found, and the fire's cause was never determined.

By that time, the oilfield, which produced an estimated 2.5 million barrels of crude, was beginning to decline and the town was not substantially rebuilt. Stiles' mansion, known as Thornhill, was one of the few buildings in Volcano that escaped the fire. Stiles died at Thornhill in 1896, and the mansion and its auxiliary structures soon went into a slow, steady decline, hastened by area residents scavenging for building materials during the Great Depression years.

Today, only two of the original homes in Volcano are still standing, and all that remains of Thornhill are foundation stones, sections of rock walls, and a quarter-mile stone staircase descending from the mansion to the former town site. The remains of Thornhill and its outbuildings, along with an assortment of crumbling oil derricks and rusting drilling machinery, lie within the boundaries of Mountwood Park, a 2,600-acre recreational complex and forest reserve managed by Wood County. The mansion grounds can be reached by a two-mile hike along a park hiking and biking trail, or by a quarter-mile hike up a dirt road from an unmarked parking lot along State Secondary Route 28, a short distance from a roadside historical marker at the town site of Volcano.

"It's a little hard to get to, but once you're here, it's a pretty cool place," said Mary Beth Held, Mountwood's marketing and events director, as she showed a pair of visitors the remnants of Stiles' mansion.

During the past year, she said, park employees and the Friends of Mountwood, a volunteer group of park users, cleared brush and installed interpretive signs at the Thornhill ruins.

"Until the brush was cleared, we didn't know the stairway from the mansion down into Volcano was here," said Held.

Thanks to the brush clearing and the signage, wagon rides to the mansion site offered during the park's annual Volcano Days celebration in September were so popular that some prospective riders were turned away.

A small museum in the basement of the park's administration building contains a number of artifacts from, and photos of, Volcano and Thornhill.

Earlier this month, the Friends of Mountwood's history committee applied for a grant from the state Division of Culture and History to pay for an archaeological excavation next year on the former mansion grounds.

"The first phase would involve the mansion site and caretaker's home," Naylor said. "We hope the artifacts found there will tell us more about how these people lived."

Eventually, Naylor said he would like to see some of the commercial buildings and homes in Volcano excavated, too.

"It would be good to have a walking and driving tour of Volcano and the Stiles Mansion," he said. "If you do a good job of marketing this spot, I think the public will be interested in going there. We won't rival Blennerhassett Island, but I think we have a future.">

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