A North Dakota town now has an oil well aimed under it, believed to be a first for the state in years.

Wichita, Kan.-based Slawson Exploration Co. began drilling Thursday about two miles beneath Parshall, a town of about 1,000 people in northwestern North Dakota.

"There is definitely a feeling of excitement around here," said Loren Hoffman, a local farmer and the city auditor.

Slawson spudded one horizontal well last year on the outskirts of Parshall, said Todd Slawson, one of the company's owners. Dozens of other wells are near the city.

Horizontal wells typically go down two miles vertically, and then travel horizontally for another two miles.

The new well is just outside the city limits and just west of the town's high school and a mobile home park.

"It's basically in a farmer's field, but it is still very visible in the community," Hoffman said. "But I haven't heard any complaints about it yet."

Oil companies eyed North Dakota towns in the 1950s, with wells in or near city limits in a handful of communities, officials said. In 1996, a company announced it had found oil under the football field at Dickinson State University. But Parshall is the first community in the state's modern-day oil boom to draw interest in exploring under it.

In Parshall, Slawson said most of the new well is under the city's sewer treatment plant on the outskirts of town. He said a well that will aim directly under the city's downtown is planned for early next year.

The company should know in about a month if it's a good producer, he said.

Hoffman said he is one of about 400 people who own mineral rights beneath the city. Businesses, churches, nursing homes, tribes and the city itself also have leased mineral rights.

"With the price of oil down, I don't think anybody is going to be a millionaire, but they'll be able to participate and maybe get a check every month," Hoffman said.

Any extra income will help Parshall, where about a quarter of the residents live below the poverty line, according to the 2000 Census. The town is on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and American Indians make up about half its population.

Besides having the distinction of hitting 60-below zero, the coldest temperature ever recorded in the state, Parshall also is considered ground-zero of the oil-rich Bakken shale formation, which the U.S. Geological Survey estimates holds 4.3 billion barrels of oil that can be recovered using current technology. The agency said the Bakken, much of which lies two miles under the surface in western North Dakota, was the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed.

Slawson said he knows of no other wells in the country that are sucking oil from beneath a city.

"There aren't too many cities to go under," Slawson said, "and if you do, they're so small that you probably wouldn't know if you did."