Pennsylvania oil rush

Before petroleum was used as a fuel, oil had many uses. In Pennsylvania, the Native American tribes had been using oil from seeps for several centuries. Early European explorers discovered evidence of troughs dug alongside the creek where Native American tribes had collected oil for use as ointment, insect repellant, skin coloring and in religious ceremonies. These oil seeps, which are areas where oil spontaneously escapes the earth in gas or liquid form, were common across northern Pennsylvania. As the frontier expanded into Western Pennsylvania during the 18th century, the region became known for the oil beneath its surface, and maps of the era displayed the label “Petroleum.” With few uses for crude oil, the label served primarily to deter farmers who found the black soil inhospitable to their crops. Later, other uses became known. Crude oil began to be used as an alternative to whale oil for lamps, and inventors and scientists began to test oil for other uses, including energy. In the 1850s, Kier began to drill for crude oil rather than separating it from salt water. After extracting the oil from drilling, Kier joined up with John T. Kirkpatrick to build the first refinery. Kier and Kirkpatrick distilled oil that could be used for lighting. For years after, Kier improved the crude oil refining process to produce the clean and efficient lighting oil. He called his oil “carbon oil.” To accompany his refined oil, Kier invented an oil-burning lamp that burned his oil with little bad odor or smoke. This could have been profitable to Kier, but he never patented his lamp. In 1857, Bissell and Townsend hired Edwin Drake to travel to Titusville and drill for crude oil. Drake was an unemployed railroad conductor whose sole qualification for this job seems to have been a free railroad pass that allowed travel to Titusville. Many of his drilling sites only yielded trace amounts of oil. He and his assistant, blacksmith Billy Smith, endured fires, financial setbacks, and the ridicule of the local inhabitants. When the Seneca Oil Company gave up and decided to withdraw its funding, Drake obtained a personal line of credit to continue digging. On August 27, 1859, Drake struck oil at below ground, just before his funds ran out. This marked the beginning of drastic change for the people of Western Pennsylvania. He died a poor pensioner in 1880. ==Oil rush==

Soon the area had many wells drilled by Seneca Oil Company and others. The oil boom in Pennsylvania paralleled in many ways the gold rush in California ten years earlier. It is reported that in the first year (1859), these wells produced . Annual domestic output of crude swelled from in 1859, the year of Drake's discovery, to in 1869 and in 1873. The ongoing industrial development of Europe spurred this rapid expansion. European, and especially British, factories began importing large quantities of cheap American oil during the 1860s. By 1866, US petroleum exports far surpassed petroleum distributed to domestic markets and the value of these exports nearly doubled from $16 million in 1865 to $30 million in 1869. Petroleum jumped from the sixth most valuable US export to the second most valuable during this period. At the peak of the oil boom, Pennsylvania wells were producing one third of the world's oil. The railroad brought more people into the Oil Creek valley and provided a safer alternative to the freshets for transporting barrels of crude. The oil was carried from the wells to the railroad in horse-drawn wagons. In 1865, Laurence Myers of Philadelphia made an improvement on a patent from 1851 that was invented to transport coal at that time. The patent on July 18, 1865, was an improvement made for a freight car that would transport petroleum and crude oil. He named it the Rotary Oil Car. It was the first appearance of an oil tank on wheels. Three books mention his invention. Pipelines were laid from the oil fields directly to the rail line, ending horse-drawn transport. The Farmers Railroad extended the rail line 20 km south from Petroleum Center, Pennsylvania, to Oil City. In February 1871, the Union City & Titusville Railroad (UC&T), which was built to compete with the Oil Creek Railroad, was completed. The UC&T became part of the larger Philadelphia and Erie Railroad in July 1871. Consolidation and end of the boom The rush to Pennsylvania created violent swings in the petroleum market for the first decade of the oil boom. In 1861, the proliferation of wells across the Oil Creek valley pushed the price of oil down from $10 per barrel to 10 cents per barrel. In response, producers in the region formed the Oil Creek Association to restrict output and maintain a minimum price of $4 per barrel. Despite efforts such as this to control the petroleum market, the volatile boom-bust cycle continued into the early 1870s. By 1871, refining capacity had grown to over 12 million barrels per year, more than twice the amount of oil that was actually processed in that year. The first oil exchange in the U.S. was established in Titusville in January 1872 in response to rumors that a conspiratorial ring of crude oil traders in New York City had cornered the market. As the decade progressed, larger producers such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil began to consolidate their holdings over the wells and refineries in the region, and the oil rush began to settle down. Pennsylvania oil production peaked in 1891, when the state produced 31 million barrels of oil, 58% 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 U.S., 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 10% 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, and the discovery of oil in Texas, California and Wyoming shifted the nation's attention elsewhere. Pennsylvania continued to be a significant producer of petroleum for much of the 20th century. ==See also==