Two weeks ago I went back to the Titusville/Oil City area in Western Pennsylvania. This was my first visit to the area since a few years ago when I was doing some video shoots for my Petroleum Pop Princess projects.
Titusville is the site of the first commercial oil well, and the area where one of the first oil booms occurred. In the late 1800s, Sir William Drake drilled for oil, and as the books say, “ the valley was never the same. “ Oil rigs popped up everywhere.
Oil City, which is nearby had many citizens who had come from Germany, and knew how to make wooden barrels. This led to Oil City becoming the place where barrels for the oil got made, and the area became a huge producer of oil.
Both Titusville and Oil City have museums dedicated to oil history and the history of the region. Oil is still drilled in the area – in a few wells that are in the area.
Whenever I see Oil Creek, I always think back to stories that I read that said that native Americans in the area found a gooey black substance at the edges 47 mile waterway. The black substance would be soaked up with pieces of cloth, put onto sticks and used as a mobile light source.
At the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, there is a historical reconstruction of the Drake Well, with moving and working parts. This rig is a wooden hut structure, with a mechanism that gets oil out from the ground. It does so while making a loud banging sound that goes off every 15 seconds.
When we were hiking in the area – we could hear the well from miles away. It is really loud – and though I had heard it last time I was in the area, I had forgotten how loud it is. I could only imagine how much noise pollution there would be with many wells working.
At the gift shop, I picked up some more souvenir samples of petroleum from the area. It is not from the Drake well, but from a working well that is nearby. If you participate in my Petroleum in Me and On Me performance next month at the Infringement Festival in Buffalo, NY – you might just win one.
How was the hike? It was great. We saw lots of ferns, frogs, and a raccoon. Also four other hikers.
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