 Booth invested some of his growing wealth in various enterprises during the early 1860s, including land speculation in Boston's Back Bay section.He also started a business partnership with John A. Ellsler, manager of the Cleveland Academy of Music, and with Thomas Mears to develop oil wells in northwestern Pennsylvania, where an oil boom had started in August 1859, following Edwin Drake's discovery of oil there, initially calling their venture Dramatic Oil but later renaming it Fuller Farm Oil.The partners invested in a site along the Allegheny River at Franklin, Pennsylvania in late 1863 for drilling.