The Pennsylvania oil rush was a boom in petroleum production, which occurred in northwestern Pennsylvania from 1859 to the early 1870s. It was the first oil boom in the United States. The discovery soon fueled refineries that were producing a new and highly coveted consumer product: kerosene.
The oil rush began in Titusville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania, in the Oil Creek Valley when Colonel Edwin L. Drake struck rock oil there. Titusville and other towns on the shores of Oil Creek expanded rapidly as oil wells and refineries shot up across the region into Erie County. Oil quickly became one of the most valuable commodities in the United States and railroads expanded into western Pennsylvania to ship petroleum to the rest of the country.
By the mid-1870s, the oil industry was well established, and the rush to drill wells and control production was over. Pennsylvania oil production peaked in 1891, and was later surpassed by western states such as Texas and California, but some oil industry remains in Pennsylvania. In fact, western Pennsylvania produced half of the world’s oil until the East Texas oil boom in 1901.
During the rush a great many test wells for oil were bored in Erie County, nearly every area of the county had from three to half-a-dozen exploratory drilling. With scarcely an exception, a small yield of oil resulted, but not enough to encourage the belief that it would be found in profitable quantities to extract. The most promising well though was along Mill Creek, in the City of Erie. The Althof well in Erie produced oil enough for many years to warrant the expense of pumping. The oil that was gotten in the county was of the heavy kind used for lubricating purposes. The Althof Oil Company, after operating for two years, having struck oil at a depth of 700 feet, was producing about 6 barrels per day, which was considered profitable then.
In 1860, Pennsylvania's first gas field was discovered in Erie County at shallow depths along Lake Erie. The gas and oil wells of Erie vary in depth from 450 to 1,200 feet. Natural gas was found almost everywhere by boring. The wells put down for oil invariably yielded gas in a heavy volume, and in Erie it was used in a number of instances for light and fuel. Over the course of time, as the use of gas for street lighting diminished, the wells lost their value.
Erie City Iron Works, which became well known in the manufacturing world for the quality and capacity of its engines and boilers, made the engine, which drilled the first oil well near Titusville for Colonel Drake ; also, the iron works erected the iron work and the stills for the first oil refinery in Erie county, which was established at Corry.
In 1861, the two railroads then known as the Sunbury and Erie, and the Atlantic and Great Western, crossed each other's rights of way in a swamp that laid at the corner of Erie county, and had established a little frame ticket office at the junction point, of a triangular form, and was known as the Atlantic and Erie Junction. Little by little other shanties were constructed in the vicinity, until a small huddle of them was formed at the crossing. In October, 1861, the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad Company purchased a small piece of land from Hiram Corry, the owner of the tract about the junction, and General Manager Hill was pleased to name the station for Mr. Corry. The little buildings increased in number, spreading out along Main Street, and better ones came to be built, until Samuel Downer, a wealthy Boston oil operator and refiner, desired a location for a refinery near the oil fields and which had the advantages of good transportation, believing he would thus have a big advantage in the business. His agent, Mr. W. H. L. Smith looked over the field, and selected the junction for the site, purchasing fifty acres of Hiram Corry's lands for a mere trifle, and secured Mr. Eugene Wright, of Boston, to lay out the tract in lots. This occurred in the summer and fall of 1861. The Downer Oil Company built a frame office building, a post office with Mr. C. S. Harris in charge came to town, and a small refinery was put in operation, known as the Frenchman's. The following year came the erection of the Downer and Kent Oil Works, the Boston Hotel, the Gilson House, and several factories. Residences of a better architecture, together with the ever-needful stores, were built. In 1862, another railroad was built to Titusville and into the oil country, forming the gateway from the oil fields to the outside world, and Corry grew quickly into a city.
Meanwhile, early oil producers, in neighboring Warren County, had considerable trouble moving their crude to market. Producers had to rely on hundreds of teamsters to transport their filled barrels to the nearest railroad shipping points. The only railroad within thirty miles of the first wells was then known as the Sunbury and Erie and the western line ran only from Warren to Erie County. On May 15, 1861, the newly built Atlantic & Great Western Railroad met the Philadelphia and Erie line at Corry, and this point soon became the intersection of the two great oil-carrying trunk lines. In Warren County proper, oil from the wells went by team to Garland and Pittsfield, both in Warren County, onto the nearby Philadelphia and Erie Railroad line. Lesser quantities of county-produced crude oil out of Warren went to Corry after May 15, 1861.
In 1862, Oil refineries began operating in Union City, creating a major spike in property values. Prior to Drake's discovery of oil at Titusville, the residents at Union City had been in the habit of gathering the oil from the surface of the water from French Creek; later, several wells were sunk there.
Like many people, a young Frank Cleveland took advantage of the rush to oil wealth, which by the 1870s was a stable business, and opened a refinery in Erie. His oil venture lasted only a few years, but an ambitious Cleveland looking for more opportunities would soon to be the impetus to Erie’s most well-known manufacturers of engines and boilers.
The rapid increase in demand for useful oil products, in the early case, kerosene, led to more wells and a greater need for transportation of the products to markets. Early transport by teamster wagon rapidly led to the need for the development of pipelines. 1865 finally saw the development of the oil pipeline gaining a solid footing in the Pennsylvania oil region. Before then, of all the attempts to construct pipelines, only 3 succeeded, one of the very first, that was successful, was an 1861 line from a depot to a refinery in Erie.
Many Erie citizens at the time bitterly recalled the narrow margin by which Erie missed being the great oil refining center of the United States, when the Standard Oil Company was seeking to locate large refineries on the lake coast. Heman Janes was one of the hard workers who sought to bring this large plant to Erie, and had his efforts been properly supported, without opposition, the City of Erie would have been the big oil refining center, instead of Cleveland.
Pennsylvania oil production peaked in 1891, when the state produced 31 million barrels of oil, 58 percent of the nation's oil that year. But 1892 was the last year that Pennsylvania wells provided a majority of the oil produced in the United States, and in 1895, Ohio surpassed Pennsylvania as an oil producer. By 1907, the decline of the Pennsylvania fields and the great discoveries made in Texas, California, and Oklahoma, left Pennsylvania with less than ten percent of the nation's oil production.
By 1901, the Pennsylvania oil boom was over. The formation of the Standard Oil Trust in 1882 effectively established a monopoly over the industry in Pennsylvania. The state continued to be a significant producer of petroleum for much of the 20th century, but Erie and Crawford counties had been permanently eclipsed.
From 1893 to 1906, Ida Tarbell, from Erie, worked for the publisher S.S. McClure as a feature writer and editor of McClure's Magazine. It was during this time that she published her History of the Standard Oil Company, a muckraking account which brought her to the forefront of her profession. Marianne Moore, who was educated at Bryn Mawr College and taught at the United States Indian School in Carlisle, was a famous poet and the winner of many international awards.
Though the oil boom went bust and the oil industry bypassed Erie County, the infusion of capital made off of the boom provided the county with an opportunity to grow its emerging manufacturing business.
