Crawford County
Meadville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Formed March 12, 1800 from Allegheny County. Meadville, in 1788, was the first permanent settlement in northwest Pennsylvania. In 1842 the nation's first direct primary was held here. Cradle of the oil and zipper industries. Named for Col. William Crawford.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Formed from Allegheny County in 1800 and named for Colonel William Crawford, Crawford County grew up around Meadville, which in 1788 became the first permanent settlement in northwestern Pennsylvania. The county proved a seedbed of American firsts: the nation's first direct primary election was held here in 1842, and it became a cradle of both the oil industry and the modern zipper. Meadville anchored settlement in a corner of the state that was still wild frontier when the town was founded.
Why it matters
Crawford County's blend of frontier settlement, democratic innovation, and industrial invention — from the earliest oil enterprises to the everyday zipper — shows the restless American genius for pushing into new country and remaking daily life.
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Related people
- · William Crawford
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Meadville
Meadville, PA
In 1788, David Mead and a small band of settlers pushed west from Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley to plant a settlement on French Creek, in country only recently opened to American pioneers. The town they founded grew quickly enough to become the seat of Crawford County by 1800, and it went on to leave two very different marks on the nation: in 1842 it staged what is remembered as the first direct primary election in the United States, and decades later it became a cradle of the 'hookless fastener' — the humble zipper — turning a frontier outpost into an unlikely engine of American invention.
Oil-Producing Salt Well
Beaver Township, PA · est. 1985
In 1815, drillers here bored into the earth hunting brine to boil down into salt, a precious commodity on the frontier. When the well was deepened in 1819, they struck oil instead—an unwelcome contaminant that soon forced the salt works to close. Decades before the world thought to prize it, petroleum surfaced here as a nuisance, some forty years ahead of Drake's famous 1859 well near Titusville.
Drake Well Park
Union Township, PA · est. 1946
On a wooded flat near Titusville in 1859, Edwin Drake gambled on a radical idea: drilling for oil the way one drilled for water or salt. When his well struck oil that August, it proved petroleum could be produced in quantity, and a scramble of derricks and boomtowns soon filled the Oil Creek valley. The state now preserves the site with a park and museum on the ground where the modern oil age began.
Venango County
Franklin, PA · est. 1981
Formed in 1800 and named with an Indian term for French Creek, Venango County would give the world an industry. In 1859 at nearby Drake Well, the first commercially drilled oil well struck petroleum, igniting an energy revolution that transformed daily life across the globe. Franklin and Oil City grew into cities on the fortunes that flowed from the ground.