SMETHPORT — The McKean County Historical Society’s Old Jail Museum and the Penn Brad Oil Museum have cooperated in creating the exhibit, “Early Oil Industry in McKean County,” that will be open daily at the McKean County Fair, Aug. 13-18.
“We partnered with the Old Jail Museum on this project,” said Sam Slocum, manager of the Penn Brad Oil Museum. “Representatives of the Old Jail Museum visited our facility and chose the items that could be included in the exhibit that is now displayed at the fair. Included in the display are oil field engines that were used to run rigs, pumps and powerhouses.”
Slocum said Mike Fuoco researched and compiled a list of the 19 McKean County companies that at one time manufactured their own oil field engines, and this information is part of the display at the fair. In addition, Ron Moyer had built several of the working models of oil field equipment and assisted Bart Barton, a volunteer at the Old Jail Museum, in cleaning and restoring oil field equipment that was in storage so it could be ready for presentation at the fair.
A turning point in the economic history of the United States came in 1859 on Aug. 27 with the first producing oil well that began to flow at the rate of 20 barrels per day. Edwin Drake had drilled the well at a depth of 69 feet near Titusville. So far as known, this was the first time that oil was tapped at its source using a drill.
An oil rush recalling the California gold rush began almost immediately. Boomtowns were common sights and within three years after Drake’s drilling, 128,000,000 gallons had been produced.
The production and marketing of Pennsylvania oil spread from Tioga County west to Crawford and south to the West Virginia border. By 1891, Warren, Venango and McKean counties had demonstrated leadership in production.
“While oil had been found in McKean County since 1861, wells had only been drilled to the approximate depth of the Titusville and Oil Creek discoveries, a depth too shallow to find it in commercial quantities,” wrote Terry Hess, former McKean County planner, in his “McKean County: Where the Gold is Green.”
Hess continued, “The initial significant find came in 1871 in the Tuna Valley on the Foster farm, two miles northeast of Bradford. The well struck oil at 1,110 feet and produced ten barrels per day. The strike caused excitement, but activity did not accelerate greatly since production was small compared to the Venango strikes.”
However, things were about to change when, late in 1874, the first large producing well — 70 barrels per day — was struck in the soon-to-be famous Bradford third sand on the Buchanon farm northeast of Bradford.
Twenty years of indescribable excitement followed the discovery of oil. “The valley swarmed with prospectors,” Rufus Stone chronicles in his “McKean: The Governor’s County.” “The streets were ground into mire by heavily laden teams. The strife to secure leases of promising territory was keen and many farmers thinking to take advantage of the competition made haste to sell royalty interests.”
Bradford’s oil was characterized by its unusual paraffin base, making it the world’s highest quality. Despite the better-known Titusville and Oil Creek oil, the McKean County fields were to become the world’s first great oil region.
By 1880, 4,000 producing wells were in the Bradford oil field with an output of 50,000 barrels per day. That number had increased to 11,200 wells by the end of 1881.
From a report from the American Refining Group, it is stated: “The year was 1881 – the peak year for the Bradford Oil Field, which produced 22,945,069 barrels out of a total of 27,611,000 in the United States. This represented 83 percent of the country’s entire output and 77 percent of all the oil produced in the world that year. This made Bradford ‘The High Grade Oil Metropolis of the World.'”
Bradford’s oil refinery was built in 1881.
Part of the society’s exhibit will acquaint the public with the jargon of those early oil field workers, and some of these terms remain in use today. Terms like “mud logger,” “roughneck,” “toolpusher,” “jug hustler,” “weevil,” “motorman,” “landman,” “bugman,” and “badge of honor,” were commonly expressions in those early days.
One of the displays shows the use of nitroglycerine, which was far superior to gunpowder in smashing rocks and cleaning the paraffin from the wells. So volatile was nitroglycerin though, that it was transported by wagons; railroads considered it too dangerous to carry.
Two speakers from the Penn Brad Oil Museum will be at the fair exhibit Thursday. They are Sherry Schultze, former curator and a current board member, and Susan Gould, board member and an expert on Joab Moses, who drilled Bradford’s first oil well.
