ABSTRACT
Just south of the attractive little town of Titusville, in northwestern Pennsylvania,
a state park extends for some 12 miles on either side of a clear stream much
frequented by fly fishers and, in high summer, by canoeists also. Traveling the cycle
and hiking trails of this beautiful and thickly wooded valley, which narrows and
steepens as the stream gets closer to its outfall in the Allegheny River, one could see
this as a landscape hardly touched by human hand. But the names in the valley tell
another story: the river is Oil Creek; it meets the Allegheny River at Oil City; and
the passenger halts on the railway line that hugs the riverbank are Petroleum
Center and Drake Well. For this is the birthplace of the U.S. oil industry and the
site of the first oil boom-indeed, of the first one or two, if we take into account
the busts caused by price collapses at intervals during the industry’s first decades,
the 1860s and 1870s.
