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hello my name is Rick Scheffer I would like to share a bit of history on the second American Gold Rush black gold that is I came to this subject somewhat honestly I believe for over a hundred year period four generations of my family worked in the Pennsylvania oil industry starting with my two great-grandfather's two grandfathers my father and me this presentation is focused primarily on the first decade of the Pennsylvania oil industry 1859 to 1869 but it also includes some of my family's petroleum industry involvement over the subsequent decades so with that said let's begin our journey into the early days of the pennsylvania oil patch the area of Pennsylvania dominated by the first decade of the discovery of oil was located along a creek appropriately called Oil Creek in northwestern Pennsylvania when a stretch of land approximately 27 miles long and ten miles wide this area in the mid 1800s was hilly rural country where industry consisted of farming timbering grist milling and iron ore refining oil creek is located in Venango County approximately 90 miles by the crow flies north of Pittsburgh in about 40 miles south of Erie Pennsylvania the green area shows the oil creek area running between Titusville and oil city which is located along the Allegheny River this was the Black Gold region of the early oil industry at the very corner of the county is a little town called M Linton and this is where I grew up as did my father and grandfathers great grandfathers and even my great great grandfather who came to this area in 1822 from Westmoreland County Pennsylvania within the next 40 years of the discovery of oil the Pennsylvania oilfield extended from the valley of oil pre constrictor Terry's up and down the Allegheny Valley for over 150 miles and covered over 2,000 square miles of land area this map makes it look like he could drill anywhere and tap in this underground ocean of oil but that was far from the case a single thing of oil Rock was limited in size and the only way one determined where the oil rock began and ended was to keep drilling wells if you struck oil you were still an oil rock if not dry hole was the drillers lament we live in a world today there would be incomprehensible without the byproducts of crude oil fortunately everything we use on a daily basis in some form or fashion is dependent upon petroleum crude oil as it is pumped on the ground is a rather non viscous smelly substance but from this raw material comes gaseous fuels liquid fuels lubricants wax sulfur tar asphalt and petrochemical feedstocks and from the feedstocks are made such things as plastics synthetic fibers pharmaceuticals and fertilizer but of course it wasn't always like this before there was petroleum power was generated by waterfalls or steam boilers fired by wood or coal lighting for homes businesses and city streets was by candle power or expensive whale oil but a little over 150 years ago on August 28 1859 all of this change for this was the day the modern petroleum industry was born it all started in Titusville Pennsylvania by a man whose name was Edwin Drake commonly referred to his current Drake this is the story about his discovery and the methods developed to extract large quantities of crude oil pump from beneath the earth as well as the industry that had to invent itself over the next several decades for nothing like this had ever been done before of course petroleum oil had been known for thousands of years and in western Pennsylvania it seeped out of the rocks on the ground and floated on the surface of oil creek because of this it was called rock oil it had a bad smell and a horrible taste Vienna was collected by the Indians and used as a face paint in this medicine for their ailments public attention was first directed to the utilization of petroleum as an illuminator in 18-49 by Samuel W curve Pittsburg Kerr drilled wells for the salt water he distilled in the rock salt the oil was a nuisance byproduct of the salt business but in the mid 1850s Kerr determined that by distilling the crude oil he could make a pretty good lamp oil and so he commenced converting small quantities of this minor by-product in to the illuminator he called kerosene but this oil was just a diversion from his salt manufacturing business in 1857 a man by the name of Bissell was visiting Dartmouth College in New Hampshire while there a professor showed him a bottle of crude petroleum oil now referred to as crude oil which had been collected on oil creek Bissell became interested in the new mineral product procured several barrels and had the materials evaluated by a professor at Yale College the report was very positive in its potential and as a result attracted the attention of capitalists in the New Haven area this led in the purchase of land along a stretch of oil Creek and the incorporation of the Seneca Oil Company of New Haven a here later Edwin Drake a conductor on the New Haven Railroad was sent to investigate a way to extract the mineral commercial quantities after visiting curse salt operation he decided to drill for oil in a similar manner used by the salt well drillers Kerr recommended an experienced driller by the name of Billy Smith and his two sons and the four then returned to Titusville to begin operations they purchased a steam engine and Erie to power the drill operation and went about setting up their drilling rig by the summer of 1859 drilling tools were all ready to be lowered into the pipe and the rink started pounding the ground in search of oil this process was slow advancing only at the rate of 3 feet per day on August 28th as the drill that reached the depth of 69 and a half feet they broke through a rock formation and crude oil started rising slowly up the well the oil was brought to the surface with a hand pitcher pump 220 barrels of oil was collected in a bathtub that day the well consistently yielded around 20 barrels per day for the rest of the year and sold for $20 a barrel yielding the company around $400 a day but more importantly than the 20 barrels per day recovered Drake proved that large quantities of oil could be brought up from the ground and thus started the world's petroleum industry the word of Drake's well spread fast and from the east came men money and business experience who formed stock companies and leased land and parcels of thousands of acres began preparing to put down wells there was little existing mineral technology to draw upon so drilling methods had to be improvised and invented one method of drilling was the manual spring pool commonly used to drill salt wells the device consists of a flexible pole placed over a fulcrum with the large end fastened to the ground drilling tools were connected near to the end of the pole and dropped into the driving pipe stirrups were connected to the pole into which two men each placed a foot and pulled down permitting the tool to drop into the rock below when they loosened their hole the spring of the pole pulled back up with enough force to raise the drilling tool a foot or two now this method appears very primitive but sometimes it proved very effective and profitable for example one well sunk with the spring pool tap the vein of oil which spouted 1,500 barrels a day and earned the owner's 1.7 million dollars over the next several years steam engines were used for power by those who could afford them which greatly eased back burden and speeded up the drilling process the first steam engines brought to the oil country were portable ones that range from four to six horsepower the working elements of the drilling rig consisted of the derrick and the bull wheel which was used to pull tools out of the well and to install the casing pipe the Samson posts acted as a fulcrum for the walking beam that actually hammered the hole in the ground at the end of the rope that was connected to the walking beam was the sharpened iron tool bit and of course the engine with the off-center cam wheel rotated and worked the walking beam up and down drooling reek sprang up along the oil creek like weeds on a deserted lot and within the next several years hundreds of rings were in search of this new mineral resource and as a result wells started to come in in September 1861 the Empire well came in representing the first grape flowing well in the region it started flowing at 3,000 barrels a day unable to secure barrels at any price the owners tried to check the flow of oil but without success they quickly build a dam around the well and let it run into the enclosure but the oil refused to be confined and much of it ran off into oil Creek the hill will be wildered the owners it was just too much of a good thing a few weeks later the Empire was eclipsed by the Sherman well that began flowing in 4,000 barrels a day settling down to around 2,500 barrels a day for months one of the best paying wells came in in May of 1863 oil suddenly bursts forth rising over 100 feet in the air it flowed at the rate of 3500 barrels a day and four days the oil ran into oil Creek and finally it was brought under control the income from this well varied from twelve thousand to forty five thousand dollars per day and altogether the well produced over one and a half million barrels of oil and netted the owners over five million dollars black Gold Fever was in the air but with this outpouring of oil came technical problems to be solved an industry infrastructure to be built at the time the only known use for the oil product was for lighting purposes as a reasonable replacement for expensive whale oil the potential market was global in nature but it had to be developed however first lumber and large quantities was needed for drilling rigs shanties and boom towns as they sprang up in the oil patch supplies of all kinds were needed steam engines drilling bits pipe growth and other equipment for the developing the oil fields and of course wood barrels for storage were critically needed but there were not enough barrels in America to meet the demand whaling barrels molasses barrels and whiskey barrels were quickly added and new ones made specifically for oil storage within a short time cooperage shops cropped up throughout the oil reach struggling unsuccessfully to keep pace with demand and the daily loss of oil was appalling some of the producers dug holes in the ground crib the north Timbers and let the oil run into these enclosures a young Iowa schoolteacher made his fortune by inventing a reddit receptacle built of pine planks tightly cocked with oakum and the result was the first wood oil tank these tanks could hold between two hundred and twelve hundred barrels of oil and before many months he was employing scores of men to meet the demand but once you captured the oil you had to transport it somewhere for it to be refined into kerosene or lamp oil transporting the oil first required filling barrels from bulk storage and hauling it away from the well wagon loads of oil were hauled over dirt roads that were not much better than logging trails the Teamsters equipped with this service seem to fall from the sky his farms for 100 miles around gave up their boys horses and wagons to supply the need there were times when three or even four dollars a barrel were paid for these freelance Teamsters for the hauling of oil away from the will the roads were made almost impassable by the great number of heavily freight and wagons traveling over them for the big wells the constant procession of teams ran back and forth and it was not uncommon for a visitor to the region to meet oil caravans of a hundred or more wagons long indispensable to the business the Teamsters were paid very well and they soon became the tyrants of the region working and brawling as it suited them next the oil needed to be refined into kerosene simple refining operations were built in the oil region near the wells and were not much more complicated than a moonshine still the essential apparatus was a cast iron still the copper worm at inline tank filled with water and a collection barrel the still was filled with crude oil and subjected to a high enough heat to vaporize the oil condense it by cooling and passing it into the collection tank the number of refineries in the oil region increased rapidly by the end of 1860 15 have been established all of them of a small capacity in 1862 a large refinery was built in Titusville and a cost of $250,000 here thousands of barrels of oil could be refined by 1860 561 refineries with capacities varying from 15 to 300 barrels a day dotted the oil region some of the great oil companies of the country grew out of these crude beginnings names like Quaker ste Pennzoil Kendall Wolfson Valvoline Arco Sunoco and even Gulf oil and their Genesis in the pennsylvania oil fields the wells along oil Creek had a transportation damage during high water flat boats filled with barrels of crude oil or kerosene were pulled by teams of horses or mules and floated downstream to oil city and the Allegheny River for a boat trip to refineries cropping up around Pittsburgh a number of warehouses oil yards and steamboat landings soon occupied the riverfront in Oil City both passengers machinery and other supplies were brought up from Pittsburgh drums of oil returned back to Pittsburgh 132 miles downstream in April 1860 the steamer Venango carried the first load of petroleum to Pittsburgh and within two years there were 15 steamboats and tow boats traveling between the oil City and Pittsburgh each boat having a load capacity of around 800 barrels the Allegheny River traffic grew to great proportions over 1,000 tow boats and some 30 steamers were in the fleet each averaging three trips a week accompanied with over 4,000 boatman Labor's barrel makers and tradesmen of all types traveling back upstream to meet the insatiable demand of the oil business oil drillers generally believe that larger veins of oil existed at greater depths than the drakes first well and so wells were dug deeper the number of flowing wells were struck along the creek in the third sand and Adept the 400 to 500 feet eventually wells were drilled thousands of feet into the earth the result was not only successful but quickly proved disastrous to the price of oil by May of 1861 135 producing wells were in operation yielding over 1300 barrels a day and the price fell to under $3 a barrel in the earlier days of petroleum oil veins had a tendency to become clogged with natural paraffin which produced production dramatically in 1865 Colonel EA Roberts came up with an innovation that revolutionized oil recovery this was called the Roberts torpedo he conceived the idea of opening up the veins of oil bearing rock by exploding a shell or torpedo into the bottom of the wealth and an application for a patent was filed the left side of this diagram shows a Roberts torpedo filled with gunpowder at the bottom of an oil will the one to the right shows the torpedo after an iron weight had been dropped to explode the charge the torpedo and being exploded blew out the paraffin and at the same time opened fissures into the solid rock for the oil to flow nitroglycerin was later substituted for gunpowder shooting a successful well resulted in the gusher of water oil and gas flowing out of the hole and up to the drilling rig as pictured to the right here you can see the Nitro man arriving at the well with his wagon and tools next he loads the torpedo with nitroglycerin and then he steps back quite a distance I had and released the iron way detonating the charge and freeing up the trapped oil but torpedoing an oil well was a hazardous business many shooters were killed either in hauling or handling the shot Adam culper of Titusville was one of the best known well shooters in the region he started out one morning in 1903 to deliver a shot to the Amos Klinger farm while driving through East Titusville something set off the nitroglycerin and there was a terrific explosion the wagon was blown to pieces culprit was horribly mangled and killed but his two horses escaped the lie my grandfather on my mother's side of the family was a nitro man who worked the oil fields in the early 1900's in both West Virginia and in Illinois fire was a constant danger in the oil region not only as the wells but also at refineries in cities an
on oil pipelines firefighting equipment was scarce and generally ineffective against the extreme heat of an oil fire wildcatters were entrepreneurs of the day and putting down a well in no way guaranteed an oil strike the best bet was to locate your well in the neighborhood of a producing well when one could be found and then hope however the chance of striking a rich vein of oil was not in the wildcatters favor at the time depending on its location it costs between 3,000 to $8,000 to drill a well in the first 10 years of the business over 5,000 wells were drilled in the upper oil region and over 4,000 were dry holes only 20% of the wells drilled proved productive but those that did quickly produced wealth in only rare cases did individuals incur the total expense of drilling a well the usual way was to finance a well was to form associations of any number of parties from a half a dozen 250 each described in the amount of stock they elected the expense of the venture was assessed pro rata and the profits were divided in the same manner this is a stock certificate for an oil drilling operation formed by my grandfather Meyers several these ventures were started by grandfather Meyers but none proved of commercial value my aunt relayed to me that often critically short family money was invested by her father in the Meyers wells all to little avail housing for oil workers and their families consists of bored shanties built on the leases and they were remained until success made their state permanent where failure caused them to remove to another location the growth of towns and cities in the upper oral region was remarkable with every class of business being established the valley oil Creek from Titusville to oil city began to assume the appearance of an almost continuous town comprised of shanties and oiled earrings in 1859 Titusville was a large village of several hundred people upon the completion of the oil creek railroad in the fall of 1862 Titusville increased in commercial importance within a year the population grew to over 10,000 and came to be widely known as the Queen City of the oil region in that same year Oil City consisted of just a general store a grist mill a hotel in several other dwellings but by 1865 it was a city with a population of over 8,000 and a major river shipment point for oil it would eventually become the center of the Pennsylvania oil industry and host the corporate headquarters for such oil industry leaders as the Quaker State oil company the Pennzoil company note the names Quaker State and Pennzoil Pennsylvania was known as the Quaker State in Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn Pennzoil halfway between Titusville and Oil City emerged a town called petroleum center farmland suddenly transformed into a lively town with 3,000 people a bank two churches a theatre and a half dozen hotels it also included dry goods stores livery stable saloons gambling houses boarding houses in scores of offices for brokers shippers and producers with the influx all sorts of people and an absence of government the San the town soon eclipsed all others in terms of wickedness On January 1865 the Fraser well located along Pinole Creek began flowing at 250 barrels a day a general stampede of oil meant it whole Creek followed people came by the hundreds and thousands as other wells were successfully completed daily production grew to over six thousand barrels per day representing two-thirds of all the oil produced in the oil patch at that time in May the town of pit-hole was laid out and by September the town had a population of over 15,000 comprised of two banks - telegraph offices of daily newspaper a waterworks system two churches of theater over 50 hotels and the third largest post office in Pennsylvania pit-hole was oil Dunn's greatest boomtown and a major oil industry innovation was spawned there the oil pipeline the unsatisfactory conditions of the roads the exorbitant charges of this Teamsters waste and the production of oil faster that could be hauled away from pit-hole influence Samuel Vance cycle an oil buyer to lay a two-inch pipeline from pit hole to Miller's farm along the oil creek railroad five miles away this became the first pipeline transportation system in the world completed in 1865 the pipeline pumped about 80 barrels of oil an hour and an oil revolution began in the business the Teamsters saw its meaning first and turned out in a fury tearing the pipe out of the ground so the oil would be lost armed guards were stationed along the line so the Teamsters burned their oil storage tanks threatened workers and generally terrorized the region on April 1866 to protect the property and Men of the pipelines the governor of the state called in the militia and the day of the teamster was destined to be over it is said that after the Drake well the pipeline was the most important event in the history of the oil region the awe excitement attracted all sorts of people with a variety of skill and temperament John Wilkes Booth performed in Franklin a town just downriver from Oil City and visited other towns and cities in the region in fact he owned a thirteenth interest in the homestead well for which he paid fifteen thousand dollars but he sold out in 1864 and within a short time left the region for Washington DC and a date with the infamy ironically six weeks after the assassination of Lincoln the homestead well struck oil another man of notoriety was Ben Hogan a man of extreme promotional talent he arrived at pit-hole in 1865 and open a palatial sporting house the receipts from which often totaled over a thousand dollars a day Hogan fought the tide of oil development and opened a total of seven free and easy in oil patch communities as new strikes were made he was the most notorious character in the oil region associates Lissie top lane and French gate were well known professionals in his business enterprise the rise of pitbull was Swift and amazing but its decline was even more breathtaking within two years some of the big wells stopped flowing and an increasing number of dry holes were drilled production fell off sharply operators speculators businessmen and others quickly departed and by January 1867 pit-hole was a deserted City the series of disastrous fires razed most of the buildings others were torn down and moved to other new oil towns railroad soon pressed river traffic as the primary means of oil transportation out of the region at the time of the discovery of oil there are only three rail lines running through the northern Pennsylvania and southern new york area by 1867 railroad lines reached all major transport areas within the region and out of two markets south along the Allegheny River to Pittsburgh and east to New York and West to Chicago the oil region now had pipelines and miles of freight service clear to the seaboard at first barrels of oil were loaded on flat cars next came the introduction of the tank car that was devised during the summer of 1865 here two wooden tanks were mounted on a flat car each tank contained 40 to 50 barrels of oil and by the spring of 1866 hundreds of them were in use this type of oil tank car prevailed until the iron tank car first appeared in 1869 the tank was made of boiler steel and reached the full length of the flat car this was the last and best railroad shipping improvement for oil but still a man with a thousand barrel wellness hymns was in a jam he had to sell his oil once for like a storage room or let it run out on the ground and in the early days there was no oil exchange no market Telegraph greetin a post office within reach greek could arrange a sale he had to rely on a buyer to come to him these buyers were the agents of the refineries in different cities or of the exporters of crude in New York these buyers went from well the well on horseback and in each producing well made special bargains each bearing with the quantity pot and the difficulty in getting it hauled away when the railroads came in the trains became the headquarters for both buyers and sellers this made it more easily managed the trains on the creek stopped at almost every oil form these trains became a sort of traveling oil exchange and on them a large percentage of all the bargaining of the business was done the brokers and buyers first organized and established headquarters in oil city in 1869 and Titusville organized an exchange in 1871 however the New York City oil exchange preceded them and was shipping oil and kerosene around the globe by 1866 by 1872 the Pennsylvania oilfield produced nearly six million barrels of oil a year and had raised this product to the fourth place among the exports of the United States with over a hundred and fifty two million gallons going abroad in 1874 the market had grown to virtually every country in the world by the early 1870s capitalists were well entrenched in the oil industry WH Abbott Jay Gould and Henry Fisk owed major railroad lines pipelines and an oil refinery near Jersey City throughout the 1960s john d rockefeller went from buying up refinery facilities at a storage space as well as negotiating highly preferential freight rates for shipping oil to and from his refineries the name of the firm was of course the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and it grew to control over 70% of all the refinery facilities in the United States in 1911 the Supreme Court of the United States found Standard Oil guilty of monopolizing the petroleum industry and the Standard Oil Company was broken up into several competing firms during the first decade of the oil industry Venango County dominated the field and by 1862 produced over three million barrels of oil and by 1870 annual production ran to over 5.4 million barrels the number of producing oil wells in Venango County peaked at just over 4,000 wells in 1880 and total yearly production peaked two years later at 31 million barrels with oil prices at close their all-time low of 80 cents a barrel over the next 20 years the pennsylvania oil region expanded north and to warn and McKean counties and south down the Allegheny Valley through Clarion Butler and Allegheny County's and in 1870 when oil wells began flowing in Clarion County which was just adjacent to Podengo County my great-grandfather joined the oilfield as a mechanic and oilfield worker is early duties encompass repairing machinery and standing power watch at the well site here you can see two individuals one relaxing on a chair in front of this rig and the other sitting on a stand both individuals standing tower watch these individuals stood 12-hour watch periods and responsible for the drilling operations of their wells and if and when they struck oil their job was to marshal the men and equipment to cap the well and bring it in pictured is GM Scheffer and is 1872 tower wats log which he recorded his daily activities the following is representative of his tower wats log entries february 19 1870 to this day i did not work on any kind of the engine being broke down this afternoon went to john connor moons and back to gas city february 20th this day i did not work on any account of the engine being broke down february 21 this afternoon we started up canning well number seven again the drilling today was very good this day we went through the first streak of red rock and about the first sand february 22nd this day i went on tower at one o'clock the drilling today was very hard above the first sand by 1875 the oil boom was in full force in Clarion County and James Sheppard started his first blacksmithing and tool repair shop in a boom town called Pickwick situated along the new Inlet and ship until railroad and located the center of the county's oil industry the town seemed perfect for his operation he called his company the Dutch machine works and here his service the needs of the oil fields for the next seven years pictured here is mr. and mrs. GM Scheffer and their young family and shop workers here is an 1880 advertisement to the Dutch machine works which offered the following services general repairing done on short notice secondhand engines for sale working barrels orders by mail or Terra Telegraph solicited Pickwick Marion County DA 1880 over the next 20 years as oil production diminished in one area or another GM moved his machine shop operation two more times as he followed the prevailing oil strikes in the region rampant strikes were being made in Tools rigs and in all the various essentials of well drilling when tools were lost down a well they found better ways to recover them and my great-grandfather put his ingenuity to work help solve some of these drillers problems in 1876 GM was granted a patent for a device used to fish broken drill bits and sucker rods out of well the device would latch on to and secure the tools so that could be raised out of the well and beery welded like new here is a blurb in a local newspaper regarding this device Daily Herald Edinburgh Clarion County PA Tuesday morning August 7th 1877 GM Scheffer Pickwick is now ready to draw casing with his new patented casing spear o orders promptly filled in all GM Scheffer was awarded five US patents over the course of his business career ranging from drilling tools to railroad equipment to a steam engine improvement that he called the Daisy engine in 1882 the scheffers moved to Edmonton and set up the Scheffer machine shop they're providing the same services to the oil industry here is a picture of the first M Upton shop with GM standing proudly in front by 1890 the oil field around M Linton was in serious decline and the oil business for the Scheffer machine shot dramatically slowed however word spread of an oil strike that came in south of Pittsburgh and a town called McDonald in order to support the family the decision was made and GM and their oldest son Austin my grandfather it was 12 - time would lead home and start up a shop in McDonald PA they called their new company the Daisy machine shop GM Scheffer proprietor they like before they sharpened and straighten drilling the bits and made fishing tools for the oil patch they bashed it as it was called at the time and only returned home to emiltt n' for major holidays pictured here is GM on the right charlie their helper on the left and my grandfather in the center at their operation and MacDonald Pennsylvania in a letter Austin wrote home to his mother in 1892 he said that after a full day of work he went to school I am going to school at night Charlie goes to we pay a dollar a month we have arithmetic writing reading and sometimes we have geography it starts at 7:00 and lets out at 9:00 it's in the public school for two years they worked in McDonald and when the oil field dried up they returned to their home and family in inland gM rewarded my grandfather for his work and Donald with a brand new bicycle the very first bicycle to run the dirt streets of inland around the turn of the century GM tore down the old wood shop and built a new shop made of steel trusses and cement block here you see my grandfather working at building the new machine shop the new machine shop was completed and promoted as the GM Scheffer machine works in garage gas and gasoline engines here my grandfather poses before the new building the picture lower left shows my grandfather and his younger brother sitting on a drill bit ready to be straightened here's inside view of the line shaft powered by a steam engine that ran in the lay drill presses and forging hammer my aunt Eileen told me that at one time the boiler blew up and landed on the house across the street fortunately no one was hurt by the early 1920s the machine shop business was so limited that it couldn't adequately support granddad's growing family so we went to work as a machinist at the Quaker State we find me in Ellenton retiring in 1945 my father george elmer Scheffer graduated from Penn State College as a mechanical engineer in 1936 and worked here at the Quaker State refinery his entire career except for two years when he worked at the Quaker State refinery in st. Mary's West Virginia there he met married my mother while I was in college I worked this refinery cleaning and painting oil tanks for a summer job Quaker State closed the refinery in the mid-1970s and moved its corporate headquarters from
Oil City to Houston Texas Pennsylvania's raw the petroleum industry dominated until 1901 when a Pennsylvania oilman drilled a well in Southwest Texas that gushed forth a wealth of Texas crude oil the well was called Spindletop and the Texas Oklahoma and California oral oil fields became America's new oil patch and Pennsylvania was never quite the same since in 1859 the global oil industry produced just 2,000 barrels of crude oil and it was contained to a 27 mile stretch of land along a stream and mango County Pennsylvania called Boyle Creek in 2007 the United States alone produced 8.4 million barrels of crude every day today the world crude oil production for the top 20 producing countries exceeds 70 million barrels a day a mineral petroleum is now the lifeblood of the global economy but the future supply of oil is somewhat in question throughout 2009 the pennsylvania oil region celebrated its 150th year anniversary communities were asked to host one week of the celebration with presentations and exhibits that September Emel tonneaus did a regional celebration and I was asked to be the primary presenter for the town the oil Museum in Hamilton is called the pumping Jack Museum and they were my hosts for the event the reason that Museum asked me to be the primary presenter was due to an incredible photo an archive collection my aunt hazel accumulated over many years as a resident of the town having an interest in history I inherited her collection I also repatriated to the town copies of all the old town photographs numbering some 600 or more as well as some of the other Aryan memorabilia of my aunt Hazel's my talk at the Museum chronicled my family's journey in 1773 from Germany to America in their migration from Philadelphia to Westmoreland County Pennsylvania and then North 1920 to Tiffin Ango and Clarion counties and finally their involvement what was referred to as the lower oil region Pennsylvania here is a view of in the pumping Jack Museum with wall exhibits depicting the town's involvement in the oil industry it is now housed in the old community schoolhouse where I went to school this schoolhouse the houses the pumping Jack Museum was built totally by the generosity of Emily to resident HJ Crawford who was found her in a major stockholder in the inlet and refining corporation in 1931 nineteen distinct companies including the islands and refining corporation were consolidated and merged into the new Quaker State oil refining Corporation and mr. Crawford at the age of 64 was elected president CEO of the new corporation and served until his death in 1953 today with the discovery of the Marcellus Shale Basin located in parts of New York Pennsylvania and West Virginia in Ohio massive volume of natural gas reserves are now available for recovery through dream deep drilling and a technology called fracking and most experts agree that we currently have more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil in fact the United States recently passed Russia to become the world's largest producer of natural gas black gold oil the second American Gold Rush perhaps natural gas will be Pennsylvania's second gold rush thank you very much for your kind attention to my presentation today you
