Jeff Hyatt takes us on a trip down memory lane, telling the story of his company.
The older well driller was Henry “Hawkeye” Ballard, born in 1875, who drilled with those rigs in the same area from the early 1900s to the early 1930s. When Hawkeye passed away, he left the rigs and machine shop to Lester Davis, who married Hawkeye's niece, Berenice Ballard, in 1936. Drilling was slow back in those days with the old core drills managing only 2 feet to sometimes 5 feet a day, which was as much as they could drill in the hard rock of southern New York state. Sometimes it would take three months to a year to drill a single well, depending on the depth. The Davis brothers drilled around 200 wells while they were in business - including one for my great-grandfather, George W. Hyatt - and they got $7 a foot back then! Lester also was a machinist and had his own machine shop with lathes and a welder to make his own tools and rig repairs. Lester, whose greatest heroes were Wilbur and Orville Wright, could fix just about anything, but then, he had a very good teacher, Hawkeye Ballard.