Oct. 25--HUGHESVILLE, Pa. -- W. Neil Barto's 180-acre Angus breeding farm reflects a man struggling with burdens. A barn has collapsed into a heap of lumber and hay. Tomatoes rot by the driveway. Rusted junk and empty bottles clutter the porch. Weeds flourish.

Barto's wife, Louise, came to the door in a wheelchair. She was disabled 23 years ago in an automobile crash, and Barto quit his county job to care for her. Barto's health is not so good, either. He lost a finger to a log splitter, got a knee replacement a few years ago, and had a kidney transplant in 1995 that freed him from dialysis.

"The wife and I, we've been without for quite a long time," Barto said last week as he stood by a pen of watchful, mud-caked heifers.

Barto's luck may have turned. In April, two wells drilled on his farm began producing natural gas, and the royalties started arriving in the summer. He and his neighbors became the latest Pennsylvanians to strike gold in a mile-deep layer of black rock called the Marcellus Shale.

The full scale of the Marcellus gas boom is still coming into focus, but Barto likes what he has seen so far.

In July, four days before Barto's 67th birthday, he received the first check from Chief Oil & Gas L.L.C., the Dallas company that last year drilled the wells on this hardscrabble farm, 21 miles east of Williamsport.

Barto's monthly royalty checks now come in at about $7,000. It's just the beginning. He and 14 neighbors get royalty checks from the sale of the gas, but the wells capture only a fraction of the gas trapped in the rock. Chief plans to drill many more wells on Barto's land and surrounding properties.

Barto is trying to keep his newfound bounty in perspective. With the compensation he got when Chief drilled on his land, he splurged on a $42,000 McCormick tractor -- the first new tractor of his life -- and he built a new metal barn.

"All I want to do is keep my cows and take care of them," he said. "That's good enough for me."

As each new well comes into production, gas drillers are reporting robust discoveries. They're scrambling to lock up the most promising properties in northern Pennsylvania, where there has been little gas development. Gas leases that could be bought for $25 an acre four years ago, and $2,500 last year, are approaching $6,000 an acre.

"You should have come up and bought yourself a hunting camp about 10 years ago," said Bill Wilson, a retired airline pilot who organized the Wyoming County Landowners Group. Last month the group, representing more than 600 property owners with 39,000 acres, signed leases with Chesapeake Energy Corp. for a dizzying $5,750 an acre. The deal will inject $225 million by year's end into a rural county west of Scranton with a population of 28,000.

"There's a lot of smiles up here now," said Wilson, who stands to earn more than $1 million in bonus money to lease his 200-acre farm, regardless of whether any gas is ever developed.

The bonanza is attracting idle drilling rigs from other states.

While oil and gas drilling nationwide has fallen by half since the stock market crashed a year ago, the number of rigs has doubled in Pennsylvania. There are 59 active rotary rigs in Pennsylvania, the most outside the traditional energy giants of Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, according to Baker Hughes Inc., an oil and gas field services company.

In the first nine months of this year, 1,340 Marcellus permits were issued and 385 wells drilled -- more than double the number from 2008.