Maiden Rock, Wisconsin.

Population 146.

Give or take.

The main drag is the only drag in this sleepy town.

Three rail tracks snuggle in between State 35 and the Mississippi River. A wood driver shot from downtown Maiden Rock is where Wisconsin's little piece of the oil industry is centered.

The Wisconsin Industrial Sand Company.

Tim Stauffer is the plant manager of the state's only underground mine where a process with a fancy name...

"Hydraulic fracturing," Stauffer says

..."is turning these little pieces into big business."

"We're selling all we can make," he said. "Six million pounds a day."

You heard that right. The sand at Maiden Rock is the envy of oil drillers.

"Texas, Oklahoma, out West, it goes all over the U.S. They want as much as they can get. We're very dependent on them for our livelihood."

Here's why this sand, known as Jordan sand, is so crucial. The makeup of each particle, when buried two or three miles into the Earth, loosens up the seam where the oil is sitting, essentially, causing the oil to shoot back towards the surface.

"We're a little better than a mile in right now," Stauffer said during the start of the tour in the 60 degree mine. "Extremely warm in the winter and nice and cool in the summer.

"We can drive, walk through here and stand up. We drive most of the time and it's dry because we're above the water table."

In this labyrinth of limestone, the process of turning the sand is an around-the-clock pursuit. Almost.

"The mine runs five days a week," he added, "but the actual process takes 12 to 16 hours a day."

Raw sand is collected and then transferred into this machine, which acts as a high-volume filter.

"These are the screens the sand goes through," Stauffer said, holding up a filter. "Anything larger than this gets wasted."

Then the washing...to clean off the clays.

A mile down the pipeline, the sand is dried out. When you send out six million pounds a day, you don't have much room for water in your product.

And, throughout the course of the day, the finished, in-demand Jordan sand piles into about two dozen rail cars, just steps from the majestic Mississippi.

Tim is thinking about adding staff because his workers are pulling 12-hour shifts to keep up.

"The price of oil goes up and so does our demand."

Even with this boom, Maiden Rock is still quiet. The trains only come through once or twice a day by December.

But when they do, with all that sand heading out, Maiden Rock, population 146, enjoys its boom town status a little more.