Oil Well Supply Company
Oil City, Venango County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Founded nearby in 1878, it was a leading manufacturer of oil well machinery and supplies, serving the oil industry across the globe. By the early 1900s, employment peaked at 2,000. In 1930 it became a subsidiary of U.S. Steel.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Founded near Oil City in 1878, the Oil Well Supply Company rose to become one of the leading makers of oil-field machinery and supplies, its equipment reaching drillers across the globe. At its height in the early 1900s the firm employed some 2,000 workers, and in 1930 it was absorbed as a subsidiary of the giant U.S. Steel. Its story traces the consolidation of scrappy oil-region enterprises into the era's great industrial combinations.
Why it matters
The company outfitted the world's oil industry from the Pennsylvania fields where drilling was born, and its absorption into U.S. Steel captures the Gilded Age march toward corporate consolidation.
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Nearby & related markers
Jacob J. Vandergrift
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When Jacob Vandergrift steamed into Oil City in 1861, Pennsylvania's oil boom was barely two years old and crude still moved the way freight always had — in barrels, by river and rail. Vandergrift saw a better way. Beginning in 1868 his firm laid pipe directly from the wells, and by 1877 he had consolidated much of the scattered pipeline business into his United Pipe Lines. In 1881 that network was folded into Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire, cementing the pipeline as the artery of modern petroleum.
Patrick C. Boyle (1846-1920)
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In the decades after the 1859 Drake Well strike, northwestern Pennsylvania's Oil Region became the crucible of the world's first petroleum boom, and Oil City sat at its heart. Patrick C. Boyle rose from the rough-and-tumble world of the oil scout to build trade papers—The Derrick and The Oil and Gas Journal—that told drillers, refiners, and investors what was happening across the fields. His publications gave a chaotic new industry a shared language and a national nervous system of prices and news.
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