From the article: Some of the farms boasted a single oil derrick, pumping out a few barrels a day. “Not enough to live on,” Webster observed, “but a good extra income.”
I don't know about you... but I could probably live on a few barrels a day. A barrel is $60 bucks today. Around 5 barrels a day, everyday, is a 100k annual income.
These farmers would not own the well. They would typically be leasing the mineral rights to a company who takes the risk to drill, maintain the well and sell the result, if any. Standard rates for the mineral rights owners would be around 3/16 of net proceeds. And oftentimes the mineral rights are severely fractionated among family members as ownership gets passed down and split up from generation to generation.
Are surprisingly low for a well-engineered setup. You can run many pump jacks off a single-cylinder engine (a dozen or more in some arrangements). If you have two jacks that counterbalance each other, your only loss is friction. You can even run the engine on the natural gas that comes out too (which would normally just be flared off).
I don't know about you... but I could probably live on a few barrels a day. A barrel is $60 bucks today. Around 5 barrels a day, everyday, is a 100k annual income.