Drake Well Park
Union Township, Erie County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Near Titusville. The Park and Museum are owned by the State. On the site Col. Edwin Drake struck oil Aug. 27, 1859, marking the birth of the petroleum industry. Historical and museum material center.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Drake's well launched the global petroleum industry, reshaping American energy, industry, and everyday life in the century that followed.
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Related people
- · Edwin Drake
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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Joshua M. Merrill (1828-1904)
Corry, PA · est. 2008
After oil was struck near Titusville, the Downer Oil Works rose nearby in 1862, and chemist Joshua M. Merrill made it a laboratory of refining. He devised an illuminating oil safer than kerosene for railroads, steamships, and factories, then pioneered deodorized lubricants that opened world markets in the late 1860s. His work earned recognition at Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exhibition.
Edwin L. Drake
Oil Creek Township, PA · est. 1946
Edwin L. Drake drilled the world's first commercially successful oil well near Titusville in 1859, proving that petroleum could be pumped from underground in quantity and igniting the modern oil industry. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery beneath sculptor Charles Niehaus's bronze figure "The Driller," and the site of his pioneering well is preserved today as a state park a mile and a half south of town. The valley he opened became the cradle of a global energy business.
John A. Mather
Titusville, PA · est. 1964
John A. Mather, born in Bury, England, in 1829, settled in Titusville and from 1860 turned his camera on the world's first great oil boom unfolding around him. In the decades after the 1859 Drake Well strike, he made thousands of photographs of derricks, boomtowns, and oilmen, creating an unmatched visual record of an industry being invented in real time. He lived and worked here until his death in 1915.