The American Spectator

Feature

Oil City Is Well Again

By Shawn Macomber from the December 2008-January 2009 issue

THE GRANDLY IMPOSING Venango Museum of Art, Science and Industry in downtown Oil City, Pennsylvania, was abuzz with preparations for its production of Oil on the Brain, a play designed--much like the museum itself--to hype the area's historical claim to fame as the birthplace of the oil industry. One hundred fifty years ago the world's first commercial oil well was drilled not 15 miles north of here in Titusville, igniting an economic and cultural boom destined to reverberate the world over. When it first came on line the well produced more oil than the world had hitherto seen in any one place: 20 barrels a day.

"Before I enlisted, that crazy Connecticut Yankee named Col. Edwin Drake started it all off in August of 1859 by hiring that salt well driller from Tarentum--Uncle Billy Smith," the character Patrick Boyle, a returning Union soldier circa 1865, muses to the tune of a flute rendition of "When Johnny Comes Marchin' Home" during the play's opening monologue. "He convinced Uncle Billy to follow him to Titusville and try and drill for oil. Everybody in these parts thought he was plum crazy. But nobody's laughing at him now. Everybody's trying to get in on the action and the money! You know what they say? Oil, oil in the air and money, money everywhere!"

It isn't difficult to see why Oil City ("a special blend of people," according to its official website) and the region at large prefer to hearken back to days of glory and consequence. Or, for that matter, why, despite such unabashed civic pride, the permanent exhibit at the Venango Museum is entitled "Black Gold or Black Magic?" Asked how visitors typically answered the query, the museum's executive director, Betsy Kellner, admitted they were "split about down the middle." Doubtless this is at least partially because the museum places displays breathlessly detailing "The Price of Dependence" (oil spills, embargos, war, rationing), American overconsumption, and environmental devastation (assemblage of potential modes of alternative, oil-free transportation: cross-country skis, snowshoes, and a Native American canoe) alongside those exalting the fascinating local heritage and global oil-fueled material progress. (a 20-minute spoof of the film Clueless entitled Fuel-less, in which a spoiled high school girl loses all oil-based products--no make-up or aspirin, car won't start, closet full of burlap sacks--until she takes the time to appreciate "fractional distillation" (!) and, regains her oil-filled life.)

Still, there is clearly more at work here than the sway of a museum exhibit or even the general unpopularity of the oil business in this increasingly populist moment. Setting aside the requisite supply-and-demand fueled lulls and dried-up fields that transmogrified thriving metropolises into ghost towns virtually overnight, the oil industry propelled and sustained the good life in these hardscrabble hills from the day Col. Drake first struck oil (August 27, 1859) until the mid-1970s, when Pennzoil relocated its headquarters to Texas, land of the gushers. Wolf's Head and U.S. Steel soon followed, leaving Quaker State in its glass digs downtown as the last shining hope until a "transformational" CEO decided 60 years was long enough to be in one place and left for the Lone Star State in 1995.

The New York Times thought that last a seminal enough event to warrant a story headlined "Inside Oil City, Hope Runs Dry," which somehow failed to raise spirits around town. The population plummeted. Blight spread like gray, untended weeds composed of crumbling concrete. A few of the hulking, rusting tanks of a once-bustling Pennzoil refinery (originally called Germania until a certain chilling of our Deutschland relations during the 1940s made the name untenable) stand idle today, like mocking ghosts in an era when President George W. Bush bemoans our lack of refineries as a national security issue. What occurred here, in sum, was something akin to the popular, exuberant 1865 C. Archer song, "Pa Has Struck Ile"--only in tragic reverse:

I once was unknown by the happy and gay,
And the friends that I sought did all turn away
Our dwelling was plain and simple our fare
And nothing inviting of course could be there.
But now what a change! Our house is so grand,
Not one is so fine throughout the whole land,
And we can now live in the very best style,
And it's simply because my pa has struck ile.

An interesting thing happened on the way to $4-a-gallon gasoline and $140-a-barrel oil, though: Local independent oil producers began to make money again in a tight market. The media showed up. Americans suddenly obsessed with domestic oil production started making pilgrimages to the area in larger numbers. Words like renaissance and revival slowly moved from airy abstractness into firmer reality. It was as if the speech James Earl Jones gave at the end of Field of Dreams had been adapted for a sequel, Oil Field of Dreams: "The one constant all the years has been [oil]. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again but [oil] has marked the time. This [oil]field…is part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and could be again. People will most definitely come."

Perhaps sensing that the illumination/vindication of its past could hold the key to its future prominence, the region has largely embraced this Jonesian spirit. The Franklin High School Black Night Band, for example, has cut a CD, Music of the Oil Boom, which includes "American Petroleum Polka" (1864), "Crazy on Oil" (1865), and "Petroleum Court Dance" (1865). The Oil Creek & Titusville Railroad offers a two-and-a-half-hour narrated tour, occasional interactive murder mystery productions, and the chance to "mail a postcard from the only operating Railway Post Office car in the country." An Oil City chain hotel renamed itself The Arlington after a long since demolished establishment where oil barons used to meet and negotiate.

The Oil Region Alliance, a business and tourism development group housed in the National Transit Building, former home to both John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company and Ralph Nader's Institute for Civic Renewal -- and a veritable beehive of savvy PR, has been busy. It has erected historical markers, exported traveling photo exhibits and museum kits, advertised the 60 miles of scenic bike paths through lush wilderness once leveled by ill-fated boomtowns and no-luck wells, refurbished "muckraker" Ida Tarbell's house, and organized a multitude of cultural events for the yearlong Oil 150 ("Celebrating the Story--Progress From Petroleum"). Recently the organization built a huge reproduction of a derrick (the iconic wooden towers over oil wells) at the entrance of Titusville--lit by solar power!

Making the most of whatever circumstances you find yourself in is, of course, a profoundly American approach to a problem, and the Oil Region Alliance is fairly adept at turning any negative into a positive. "The lack of economic development up until now froze a lot of the area in time," Marilyn Black, the Alliance's vice president of heritage development, related proudly. "Not much was torn down to make way for the new, so we have basically every form of Victorian architecture, which is great."

OIL-AS-MAGICAL-SALVE has precedent in Pennsylvania. Samuel Kier, creator of the process whereby crude oil could be refined into kerosene, took his cue from Seneca Indians and originally tried to sell the thick substance contaminating his salt wells as a cure-all in 50-cent bottles, after a slick fire deterred him from continuing to dump it in a canal. Among the ailments he claimed a swig of oil could cure were rheumatism, gout, asthma, "obstinate eruptions of the skin," diarrhea, cholera, deafness, and "all that class of disease in which ALTERNATIVE OR PURIFYING MEDICINES are indicated." Alas, the product never took off for what should be obvious reasons, hint: stick to antibiotics for your cholera--but Kier's refining precipitated the search for large quantities of crude oil that would in the not-too-distant future result in a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune writing on September 13, 1859, "The excitement attendant on the discovery of this vast source of oil was fully equal to what I ever saw in California when a large lump of gold was accidentally turned out."

Oil City mayor Sonja Hawkins--a whip-smart, determined transplant to the area from Alaska--rejects this oft-used Gold Rush analogy. She sees the region's oil heritage much more than simply something to lure tourists or even new prospectors. "This was the Silicon Valley of its day," Hawkins explained. "We're a town born of creative risk-takers who instinctively knew forward-looking innovators could prosper and distinguish themselves here. That is our heritage as much as what was under the ground here. We have to tap back into that underlying culture to lift us back up."

Indeed, Oil City continues to have the energy of a city that evolved with a giddy haphazardness around an unexpected boom. A program to bring artists and traditional craftsmen to town with promises of cheap studio space and low cost of living has been popular, the accompanying cafes and niche stores moving into storefronts long gathering dust. "People are starting to buy into the idea that there could be a next step for the community," Hawkins said. "For a long time it was really hard to get people to move beyond the woe is me storyline. It felt like a funeral shroud was hanging over the whole town sometimes. Oil can be part of the wave we ride to the future, but it can't be the whole wave. And what happens here does matter. If we don't fight to revive our tiny communities we'll collectively lose a lot more than Oil City. We'll lose an essential part of the American character."

It's worth noting that Col. Drake died ill and broke, a beaten man, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1880. A respected journalist of the day, John McLaurin, wrote of savagely of Drake, "Had he possessed a particle of the prophetic instinct, had he grasped the magnitude of the issues at stake, had he appreciated the importance of petroleum as a commercial product, had he been able to see an inch beyond his nose, he would have gone forth that morning and become Master of the Oil country. The world was all before him and he did not move a peg! He pumped the well serenely, told funny stories and secured not one foot of ground."

Yet 22 years after his passing Col. Drake was reinterred, along with his wife, in Titusville's Woodlawn Cemetery. They lie at the foot of a massive statue straight out of Greek-myth central casting, a figure hammering into a stone flanked by several great stone tablets which, in addition to bestowing upon Drake the honorific "founder of the petroleum industry, friend of man," relate the following: "Called by circumstance to the solution of a mining problem, he triumphantly vindicated American skill and near this spot laid the foundation of an industry that has enriched the state, benefited mankind, stimulated the mechanical arts, enlarged the pharmacopeia and has attained worldwide proportions."

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