Findlay was once thought to sit atop an inexhaustible supply of natural gas, with such optimism that people believed Toledo would one day be a suburb of Findlay, but by 1900 most of the gas had run out. Without free gas, many factories left town, and Findlay faced the real danger of becoming a ghost town. As the gas declined, however, oil prospecting expanded, helped maintain land values, and essentially saved Findlay from disappearing. Oil had been discovered there almost by chance as early as 1859, when Daniel Drake noticed a gaseous odor from an abandoned water well, used an iron bar to move debris, and realized he had found oil. The first real oil well in Hancock County was on the Mathias Brickyard property on West Main Cross Street, and in 1885 the well was shot with 100 quarts of nitroglycerine, after which oil flowed at 300 barrels per day. The average time it takes oil and gas to form is sixty million years, and neither resource is inexhaustible or easily replenished.