Black gold another Pa. first

On a warm morning near Titusville, Pa., William Smith woke up and looked at a hole dug into… On a warm morning near Titusville, Pa., William Smith woke up and looked at a hole dug into the rolling farmland. A black liquid was oozing up to the surface, floating above the dirt. It is unlikely Smith knew what that small puddle of liquid would become.

Thirst for oil has bored holes in the earth and shook the foundations of governments. Battles over petroleum have claimed millions of lives, from the Mexican revolution to the Gulf War. Gasoline keeps the transportation and machinery of the world running, and almost everyone in the world uses an oil-based product nearly every day.

Today, most of the world’s oil comes from the Middle East, though the race for “black gold” did not start there, but in the woods of Northwestern Pennsylvania.

Native Americans harvested oil from natural seeps in the ground for medicinal purposes more than 500 years ago. Early settlers used raw oil as lamp fuel and, after striking oil accidentally, refined it into kerosene for sale.

The idea of drilling and taking oil from the earth came in the early 1850s, when the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company was created to distill oil into its components and sell it commercially. Edwin Drake was hired to find enough oil to do so. He began surveying the area around Titusville, Pa., in 1857, and after two years, the company’s financial support began to waver.

On August 28, 1859, oil began to float at the top of a 70-foot-deep hole drilled by Drake and his crew in a field near Titusville. It was not a dramatic spurt of black liquid, and the well produced less than 20 barrels a day.

But the operation — which the locals called “Drake’s Folly” — soon produced more oil than Europe had produced in the previous 200 years.

So began a worldwide race to quench the world’s new thirst for oil.

Within a decade, the quiet valley around “Oil Creek” was dotted with oil derricks and roared with the sounds of industry. Wells were built too close together during a frantic attempt to get rich quick, and fires often tore down entire fields. Drake’s well burned to the ground by the end of 1859, but many more followed it.

Barges towed oil by the hundreds of barrels down Oil Creek to the Allegheny River for it to be refined in Pittsburgh. Railroads and oil tanker cars were developed in the area beginning in 1865, carting the “black gold” all over the northeastern United States. Standard Oil Company was created in Pittsburgh in 1868, and was soon incorporated in Ohio, the first corporate giant that required antitrust legislation to break it down.

For the rest of the century, Pennsylvania produced half of the world’s oil. It was not until oil was discovered in East Texas and a similar boom swept the West that a rival to Pennsylvania was created.

But the presence of oil took its toll on the state and continues to do so. Drake died rich, but thousands more died penniless after attempting everything from prayer to diving rods to find oil and failing.

Greed caused sabotage and even murder in the “boom towns” of northwestern Pennsylvania. The largest inland oil spill in history dumped enough diesel oil into the Monongahela River to contaminate the drinking water of one million people in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia in January 1988.

Nations have been torn apart by oil, yet remain dependent on it. All the industries of the world rely on the same liquid that William Smith saw early one morning in 1859 as the sun rose over Pennsylvania’s quiet farm country.