Ida M. Tarbell
Titusville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Noted oil historian, biographer of Lincoln, journalist, lived in this house about six years. She was graduated from the Titusville High School in 1875.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
This Titusville house was an early home of Ida M. Tarbell, who grew up in the heart of the booming oil region and graduated from the local high school in 1875. She went on to become one of America's most influential journalists and historians, remembered for her biography of Abraham Lincoln and her landmark investigation of the oil industry that had shaped her hometown.
Why it matters
Tarbell helped define modern investigative journalism, and her work exposing corporate power made her a towering figure of the Progressive Era.
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Related people
- · Ida M. Tarbell
- · Abraham Lincoln
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ida M. Tarbell
Amity Township, PA · est. 1950
Ida M. Tarbell was born in 1857 in a log home at Hatch Hollow, in the oil-boom country of northwestern Pennsylvania. She grew up to become one of the great muckraking journalists of the Progressive Era, and her painstaking "History of the Standard Oil Company" exposed John D. Rockefeller's ruthless business methods and helped fuel the antitrust movement. She also wrote a widely read biography of Abraham Lincoln before her death in 1944.
Charlotte Elizabeth Battles (1864-1952)
Girard, PA · est. 2021
Charlotte Elizabeth Battles broke through the narrow expectations set for women of her generation: she earned a college degree and, after her father's death in 1904, became president of the R.S. Battles Bank in Girard. She drew national notice in 1933 when she refused to shutter the bank during President Roosevelt's Bank Holiday, and she served her community as a philanthropist and as the first woman trustee of Edinboro State Normal School. This building was the bank's home until it merged in 1946.
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.
Titusville Oil Exchange
Titusville, PA · est. 1999
As Pennsylvania's oil boom matured, producers, refiners, dealers, and brokers organized the industry's first permanent oil exchange in Titusville in 1871, beginning in the American Hotel on this spot. The exchange gave the young petroleum trade a formal marketplace, moving among sites before returning to a new three-story brick building here in 1881. It was dissolved in 1897, and the building was torn down in 1956.