At the start of the Civil War, Burning Springs (Wirt County) was one of only two oil fields in the world. In 1863, Confederate Gen. William E. Jones burned the field as part of the Jones-Imboden Raid. He claimed that 150,000 barrels of oil were destroyed and that the Little Kanawha River looked like a "sheet of fire." Oil production restarted a year later, and many wells were drilled after the war. However, by the late 1800s, the industry there declined. A park opened at Burning Springs in 2004, and oil is sometimes pumped from the old Rathbone well as a souvenir.