Titusville Oil Exchange
Titusville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The industry's first permanent oil exchange was organized in 1871 by producers, refiners, dealers, brokers. Starting in the American Hotel on this spot, it moved to other sites; returned here in a new three-story brick building, 1881. Dissolved 1897; building razed 1956.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Born where the American oil industry itself began, this exchange helped turn raw crude into an organized commodity market, a milestone in the rise of modern petroleum commerce.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Oil Creek
Titusville, PA · est. 1954
Long before drilling rigs, Native people of this region gathered petroleum by skimming it from the surface of Oil Creek, where it naturally seeped into the water. In the years from 1859 to 1865, these same banks became the beating center of the world's first oil rush, crowded with wells, derricks, and refineries.
Ida M. Tarbell
Titusville, PA · est. 1954
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.
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.
Byron D. Benson (1832-1888)
Titusville, PA · est. 2009
In the frantic decades after the Drake Well launched the oil age just up the road, the industry's greatest bottleneck was moving crude from Pennsylvania's fields to the sea. Byron D. Benson answered it in 1878 by founding the Tidewater Pipe Company and laying an ambitious long-distance pipeline that carried oil directly toward coastal refineries, breaking the era's tight grip on rail-based shipment. His larger six-inch line proved that petroleum could be pushed economically across great distances, a template the whole industry would follow.