A friend of mine told me that Indiana used to have more natural gas than any other state in the US at one time, probably now and well into the future. Supposedly we (I live here) burned it all in giant displays of natural gas flames that would light up the sky like fireworks on the 4th of July as a form of entertainment. He said this is where the term "gas lighting" comes from and that we also shipped the rest of it via pipelines to the east coast, mainly to NY City and all the other major metropolitan areas. He claims we would have been the richest state had we not wasted all our natural resources.
Can anyone legitimize this claim?
Oddly enough, there is indeed a germ of truth to this story.
The Trenton Gas Field stretched across much of east central Indiana and the western bits of Ohio, covering about 2500 sq. miles. It's thought to have contained 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and maybe a billion barrels of oil, and was truly discovered in the 1880s.
For some time, every town in that area had multiple wells for natural gas for cheap heating and streetlighting, and major industry moved into Indiana for access to cheap power, sometimes creating boomtowns as they went... for example, Gas City, Indiana. However, the Trenton Gas Field is almost entirely interconnected; every well, every pipe, every hole drew from the total amount.
Whenever a well was dug, a pipe was run from it. Gas escaping from this pipe was set ablaze to show that the well was still producing. These pipes were called flambeaus, and it was not terribly uncommon for large displays to be made using many flambeaus.
Over the course of 20 years, all this waste added up. These days, people who study these things say that up to 90% of the entire field's supply of gas was burned away needlessly. To make matters worse, the loss of the gas also made extraction of oil very difficult. Prior to this, the pressure from the gas made it relatively easy to pull oil out of the ground... it practically squirted up on its own. There's still some estimated 900,000,000 barrels of oil under Indiana, but even with modern technology its cost-prohibitive to drag it out.
To touch on some of the other things your friend mentioned... the gas was being shipped all across the midwest, to places like Chicago, Detroit, and many others. Running pipelines to New York and the east coast seems like it would be both expensive and daunting, particularly when it was easier and cheaper to light up the midwest.
As far as the term "gas lighting" goes, while I cannot in fact place the precise origin of the term, I can say that it predates the discovery of the Oil Field by over forty years. It was a term used in the theatre biz during the 1850s and earlier, as indeed most large theaters used gas lighting to light their stages. These layouts could be quite complex and were controlled by the precursors of today's computerized lighting boards.
So your friend wasn't entirely wrong at all!
Sources:
History of the Theatre - Oscar Brockett
Indiana Natural Gas Boom - American Oil & Gas Historical Society.org
The Gas Boom in East Central Indiana - James Glass (via Indiana University)
The Great Gas Boom - Greenfield, Indiana's website