A well drilled at Reid’s Gap around 1891 had sat plugged and abandoned for a decade - the original prospectors reportedly left the country after typhoid struck their crew - when R.R. Zell, president of the Southern Industrial Company, reopened it in 1901. Zell’s test found oil mixed with water at around 180 feet, and samples he sent for analysis compared favorably to producing wells in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. He and partner John L. Burns marketed the find hard in the Birmingham and Montgomery papers.
The plan to prove it out was dramatic: shoot the well with 100 quarts of nitroglycerine at a depth of 1,920 feet, made by the Sterling Dynamite Company of Chattanooga and hauled in by wagon from a magazine near MacAdory - considered too dangerous to move by rail. Whether that shot ever happened isn’t recorded. In 1902, Zell and Burns incorporated the venture as the Reid’s Gap Oil, Gas, and Mining Company, but no surviving record shows the well ever producing oil or gas commercially.
By 1904 the company had pivoted to coal, buying 2,000 acres of mineral land in Marion County through the Industrial Finance and Trust Company of Birmingham, with state geologist Dr. Eugene Smith analyzing the coal seams; it picked up an interest in Clay County land soon after. The Reid’s Gap oil scheme itself quietly ended.