This project was financed in part by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Bureau of Recreation and Conservation, and the National Park Service.

Additional funding provided by the Dr.

and Mrs.

Arthur William Phillips Charitable Trust, the Edith Justus Charitable Trust.

The Elizabeth S. Black Charitable Trust.

The Philo and Sarah Blaisdell Foundation.

Petroleum History Institute, and Edward Jones Investments.

There's a drop of oil in our life every day.

The oil story is a marathon.

It all started here.

Gold.

I guess it is gold.

They call it black gold.

I think people don't make a connection with the oil industry in Pennsylvania because it happened such a long time ago.

The oil industry really does touch every part of our life today.

Some have referred to the 20th century as the century of mobility, in the 19th century as the century of light.

Both were fueled by oil.

On August 27th, 1859, Edwin Drake struck oil outside Titusville, Pennsylvania.

His 25 barrel strike marked the beginning of an industry in the valley that changed the world.

This beautiful, peaceful valley was once alive with activity.

These wooden towers, oil derricks lined these hills.

Hundreds, maybe even thousands.

Nobody ever bothered to count.

It looked like a forest of manmade trees.

The sounds were deafening.

The wells creaked as they pumped oil out of the earth 24 hours a day.

6 days a week.

They were pumped every day except Sunday.

These were welcome sights and sounds.

It meant the valley was thriving.

It was here in northwestern Pennsylvania.

The oil industry was born.

See, this one back here is pumping the pure stuff.

Pure crude oil is always green.

We call it green mountain blue.

And it's here that oil men like Bill Huber still work the fields today.

This is wax based, crude.

It used to be sort of sought by everybody.

Everybody wanted Pennsylvania crude.

This is crude oil.

Many people are surprised to see how liquid it is.

I think they base their consumptions.

One on the mistaken belief that the industry began in Texas, where the oil is more tar based or asphalt, and it is thicker, but ours has gasoline and paraffin in it, so it's much more fluid.

Pennsylvania still produces the best petroleum in the country.

They call it sweet crude because it has a low sulfur content.

It can be refined into things like gasoline and paraffin, and it makes the best motor oil in the country.

But 150 years ago, it wasn't about the gas that runs our cars.

It was about something different.

It was about light.

Light was what those folks at that time valued very highly.

Wanted to push back the night.

In the 1800s, pushing back the night wasn't easy.

People use candles and oils made from animal fat.

Coal camphene, even whales to light their homes and businesses.

Lard oil was a beneficial lighting ingredient simply because most everybody had access to pig fat, which is what lard oil is.

Barbara Zolli is the director of the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

The museum was built on the site of Edwin Drake's famous well.

Burning fluids were extremely dangerous.

They were made from camphene and turpentine and alcohol, and they had a tendency at low temperatures to explode.

Many people were killed by lamp explosions and fires, but one oil was safe and originally available in large quantities.

Society in the United States in the 1850s was dependent on whale oil, had been from about the 1700s here.

It was a good light.

It was steady and safe and at initially very inexpensive.

There were hundreds of ships sailing out of ports all over the world, doing nothing but killing every whale in sight, taking the light of life out of the whale so that we could have the light in our room when it went over $2 a gallon for sperm oil and was headed north.

The parallel for $5 a gallon, people got very concerned about how they would light their factories, their lives, any of their activities.

So they began looking for an alternative fuel oil for lamps.

Though the search for a new illuminate was fueled by need, it was found by chance, a Pittsburgh entrepreneur by the name of Samuel Kier had his hand in many businesses.

Not only was Kira a successful canal boat operator, he also owned salt wells and to rent them, Pennsylvania, a small town just north of Pittsburgh.

When his men drilled for salt, there was often a smelly byproduct dredged up from the depths of the earth.

This byproduct a greasy, greenish substance Kier recognized as similar to a pricy medicine his wife took to improve her health Kier looked at the stuff in the bottle, and then he looked at the stuff that they were dumping in the river from his salt wells, and he said, they look the same.

And that's how Kier got into the medicinal oil business.

He began bottling the greenish stuff and selling it under his own label, claiming it could cure everything from asthma to blindness.

For a while it was a big seller.

So we got here, selling his here's rock oil, snake oil, medicine, and he's looking for some other use for all this oil that's being recovered from the salt wells here was smart.

He had heard about a man in Nova Scotia named Abraham Gesner, as well as a Scotsman, James Young.

They both had been taking things like coal and shale and distilling them into illuminating oils.

So Kier thought, why not try distilling the liquid coming out of his own wells to see if it could be refined to produce light?

His claim to fame really, is that he used that same distillation process to get kerosene from crude oil.

Much more efficient and cheaper.

When you refine oil by distillation, you take a great big, huge kettle.

And that's what Keir did.

Just a five gallon kettle initially put a fire underneath it, and the first thing to vaporize is benzene, then naphtha, and then you end up with kerosene.

Keir was the first to establish a commercial market for petroleum.

Prior to that, it was considered a nuisance around the salt wells.

It was considered dangerous.

It would catch on fire the farmer's wives, who were fortunate enough to be around salt wells, they would burn it in its very crude form in their houses.

But the smoke was awful.

The smell was awful.

It was just considered, all in all, a pretty awful thing from the center of the earth.

The devil's maybe from the devil.

For thousands of years, people have found uses for oil.

It's even mentioned in the Bible.

Noah uses it to waterproof his ark, and Job talks about the rock that poured out streams of oil.

Oil has been found as a component of bricks and mortar in buildings such as in the Hanging walls of Babylon.

It was used for embalming fluid.

It was used to waterproof boats and canoes.

The Chinese were drilling wells 600 BC, and they were down 1000ft.

They used the natural gas to boil the salt water to get the salt.

Even had bamboo pipelines moving this stuff all around the district.

This is a gift from the mother.

Gift coming from the earth.

The first people to use petroleum in northwestern Pennsylvania were native Americans.

The gift Leon Briggs is a member of the Seneca Nation.

He was telling his friend Dan Weaver, an educator at Drake Well Museum, how his ancestors used the oil.

They used it for their skin.

They used it for their hair.

They would mix the oil with some of the the traditional rocks and stuff around to use as paint.

How exactly would you use the same to to get the oil out of the sea?

When we were coming down through, you know, we can get underneath.

And then they actually turn and just keep gathering more.

The settlers that came to America use the same methods as the Native Americans to collect the oil.

They were digging the pits.

The oil would seep in.

They'd soak it up in blankets, woolen blankets, and then wring it out over a barrel.

And that was the way they were getting their oil, because it did have a commercial market.

The crude methods of gathering and refining petroleum limited Kier.

He only distilled about a thousand barrels a year.

That's just a drop in the bucket compared to today.

Modern refineries can distill 300,000 barrels of crude each day.

But Kier was definitely on to something.

It wasn't long before other people realized you could burn this oil to, Could you have gotten this from one of the pallet lists?

Sue Bates is passionate about oil history.

She's the curator at the Drake Well Museum and devotedly maintains the largest collection of oil artifacts in the world, one of a kind.

In the 1850s, refining kerosene from coal was big business on the East Coast.

Doctor Frances Brewer, who came to Titusville for a sawmill business with Jonathan Watson, found petroleum on the property, took it back to his college.

Dartmouth College, had it analyzed by a chemist.

The chemist pronounced that it was a hydrocarbon from which kerosene could be distilled, while the petroleum samples were being analyzed in the lab, a Dartmouth alum, George Bissell, just happened to be visiting his former school.

An ambitious young man from New Hampshire, Bissell saw the samples and realized they might have real commercial value.

So he decided to act.

George Bissell and his partner, Jonathan Eveleth, bought this land up in northern Venango County, right there at the line just below south of Titusville, because it had promise to produce oil.

They set up the company in New York state called the Pennsylvania Oil Company.

East coast investors wanted a piece of that action and invested in the Pennsylvania Oil Company.

Soon after, the company leased the land in Titusville to the Seneca Oil Company to Bore for oil.

Now all they needed was for someone to go there.

Who did they send?

And this tall, very personable chap by the name of Edwin Drake, who, by the way, also just happened to have a free railroad pass because he'd been a conductor on the railroad.

Professor William Brice knows Edwin Drake's story well.

He is working on Drake's biography and has read through all of Drake's writings and notes.

Now, here he's writing a letter about he didn't have money to pay expenses on the road to keep them.

Professor Brice will tell you that Drake didn't have an easy life.

His first wife died in childbirth, and Drake suffered from ill health for most of his life.

And he wasn't much of a businessman either.

So when Drake came to Titusville, he was banking on his life changing.

You can see his signature at the end.

He reminds me somewhat of the tragic figures of classical literature, because in many ways, Drake couldn't catch a break.

In other ways, he was right on top of it in his pursuit for oil.

Drake was right on top of it, trying to find ways to get the crude out of the ground.

There are conflicting details in terms of who actually came up with the idea of drilling the well for the oil.

One story is that it was Drake's idea entirely, but others think it was George Bissell.

He might have been inspired to drill by the picture on Kier's medicine oil bottle that shows a derrick, or by seeing the salt derricks while traveling the Pennsylvania main line Canal.

Regardless of who had the idea, it was Drake who actually drilled.

He had been told by a friend about the salt works in Tarentum, near Pittsburgh, along the Allegheny.

And so he went there, where he came in contact with Kier and other drillers of the area.

One of the name of Billy Smith came up here.

He was actually a blacksmith, but he knew how to to drill.

Drill?

Well, they really began in earnest to drill the well in that summer of 1859.

Uncle Billy Smith, Drake's driller, he came to us from to rent him.

But when it was actually time to load his family up and move up here, his wife said, no way, I'm not going to that frontier wilderness.

Drake worked for over a year before finally striking oil.

At one point, his backers stopped sending him money to finance the project and Drake had to turn to the locals for help.

Though folks around Titusville like Drake personally, he was so unsuccessful that in time he became the attraction.

It was well known all through the town, no question of that, that they were drilling for oil Never heard this I mean, you drill for salt water, you drill for water for, domestic water, but nobody drills for oil.

I mean, that that just seeps out of the ground.

It was, known as Drake's Folly.

Everybody stop laughing.

When on the morning of August 27th, 1859, at the depth of 69.5ft, Drake and Uncle Billy struck oil.

Drake was geologically lucky because his drill found a very shallow stringer of sandstone, and it happened to be oil bearing.

So at 69ft he found oil.

If he'd been a little farther away, he would have missed that little layer completely, and he would have had to drill a lot deeper than he did.

I think Drake was more than lucky.

There were circumstances that led him to make the decisions he did here.

I would credit him for the ability to observe and analyze.

When he came to this site.

He chose the most productive of the oil pits and drilled in that one.

We recognize other places produced oil about the same time, so we won't get into the arguing about where was the very first.

Well, successfully drill for oil was probably in Russia or someplace like that, believe it or not.

But the Drake Well was what started the development, the full development of the great Pennsylvania oil field.

Something about that.

Well, that captured the imagination in ways that all of these other wells had not done.

Once that well, Drake's Wells started pumping.

The oil boom was on.

They got on their horses, and they took off on Oil Creek and down into Franklin and up Cherry Run, which is these are tributaries.

The area, and leased everything they could get their hands on.

There was a rush, initially very similar to a gold rush, where, this commodity was so valuable and attracted people from all over to find more of it.

Four wells were produced in the Oil Creek valley by the end of the year, and by 1860s, more flocked in, and throughout the 1870s the industry grew at breakneck speed, and this huge rush of humanity developing boomtowns with general merchandise stores, oyster houses, boarding houses galore, plus your simple farmhouse that becomes a boarding house and all the associated industries with it foundries, machine shops, merchant selling rope, lumbermen, teamsters, everybody converging on this empty land just like the gold rush in California.

Really was one of the essential cogs of industrial development in America.

Drake's Well was pumping about 25 barrels a day.

A lot in those days, but almost nothing compared to today's standards.

But just one year later, as the drillers went deeper and deeper, they hit what we now know as the Venango Third Sand.

And what happened was an amazing phenomenon along Oil Creek.

There was so much pressure behind the crude in the ground that the gas and the water pressure in the ground blew it all out.

And as it came out, this was this was unprecedented.

These guys had no idea what to do with the crude.

And the biggest was the Phillips.

Well, it came in October 1861.

It's somewhere around 4000 barrels a day.

And that held the record for production of the natural gas that blew the crude out of many of those early wells also found a market.

Many of the same men who invested in the oil wells began to harvest this invisible fuel that came out of the ground.

They used it to power the engines, pumping the crude to light their lamps, and even for cooking and heating.

You can see the brake, that metal brake still.

That's right in the handles.

Cathy Flaherty and her husband, Tom, are both oil geologists.

Cathy loves the oil story so much she even writes poems about it, and Tom helps her find her inspiration for fun.

They like to explore abandoned wells and old derricks, often found in the strangest places, like this suburban backyard in western Pennsylvania and the well, like the one behind me, was drilled to about 2200ft.

It hit oil in the fourth sand at about 2000ft and then, gas in the sand about 80ft deeper.

Experts have to search for it constantly in all the most likely and unlikely places.

But this cartoon from the 1950s shows what it takes to find oil spot.

They drill a hole in the ground called an oil well, for almost all oil lies calm beneath the surface of the earth.

These wells go down thousands of feet and cost a lot of money to drill, but that's no guarantee that they're going to find oil.

But how did it get there in the first place?

Western Pennsylvania has all of the ingredients, like a recipe for oil.

We have the source rocks, which are the muddy, oozy, stinky, smelly, decayed critters that are embedded in the sedimentary rocks that eventually decompose and form oil.

We have the reservoir rocks, which are the porous sandstones or limestones that hold the oil once it's formed.

And they had plenty of time and they were buried plenty deep enough to form oil in western Pennsylvania.

The oil story is not just about the crude in the ground.

It's about the ingenuity and innovation it took to get the industry moving.

Everything in this business started from scratch, from the types of tools needed to drill to the containers for storing this smelly liquid.

The people that were living here were pretty much innovators.

I mean, they had built a lot of their farm tools and they had built, you know, their timbering tools, and they knew how to do things.

And the people that came in were enterprising too.

Think of the blacksmiths.

They'd been hammering out tools or pots and pans.

All of a sudden they were making the drilling rigs.

They were making the bits.

It was sharpening them all the time.

The oil industry is not strictly a technology story.

Behind every invention, there's a person, the person who solved the problem, the person who designed and patented the solution, the person who poured their life's blood into making this industry go.

Look at Drake.

Drake invented the drive pipe, which we still use today to help prevent groundwater from seeping into the well.

They had a problem.

He found the solution.

Money, people, and oil flowed freely from the valley, and every time an oil strike was found, more people rushed in by the thousands.

Towns would spring up overnight, built in the shadows of the derricks.

Today, many are ghost towns.

The most famous boomtown: Pithole.

In January 1865, the well in the Thomas Holden farm along the Pithole Creek started gushing.

Down in Pennsylvania, there is plenty oil, they say petroleum, petroleum.

We must all have some right now I am standing at the intersection that the world would see in 1865.

This is the intersection of First Street and Homeland Street.

Fred Slider knows every blade of grass in Pithole.

He's dressed like this because he is the honorary mayor of a city that has no population, no buildings, nothing.

As a volunteer tour guide at Pithole, Fred is happy to share his city's storied past.

Pithole City would be the largest boomtown in northwest Pennsylvania, though it would not be the only one Pithole came into being with three wells that came in within ten days of each other.

Now, these were high production, what we call flowing wells.

They weren't the gushers of the deep wells in Texas, but for us they were as close as we get.

We're talking 2000 barrels a day, 2000 barrels at a one well, they put petrol over the top and they misguided a lot of people to invest money in this endeavor that was going to turn out to what you see it today.

The city grew from a farm to 15,000 people in nine months, and it had the third largest post office by volume in the state, second only to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Because of that rapid growth and that transient population, they were fooled into believing petrol was on a river of oil.

And it wasn't.

Entire buildings went up in one day.

So many people rushing to Pithole at once created extreme conditions.

Water and food were scarce and had to be hauled in from Titusville, so that city was only 12 miles away.

It wasn't an easy wagon ride over rocky, rutted roads.

Water at $0.10 a glass costs more than whiskey.

The town was overrun with teamsters pulling tens of thousands of barrels of oil each day for shipping to nearby refineries.

Horses, mules, and oxen live side by side with pit holes.

Residents, the population being so close together, the mud for caribou, the flies would have been bad.

First came the men, soon followed by women and families.

Money was made not only from the wells but from the establishments that serve the industry.

Barrel makers, carpenters, bankers, innkeepers, Pithole thrived, at least for a while.

By the end of December 1865, the population started to leave the hole.

The reason they left was because of the failing oil production here, and petrol would cycle through so fast that by 1870 that population would be down to 281 people.

Pithole is romantically said to have lasted 500 days.

There were still people there in as late as 1878, but the apex of the community was pretty much gone by late 1866.

People had no other economy here but crude oil.

It's like a fish out of water.

When you take the oil away from petrol, you took the economy away.

There was no place here to make a living.

Less than two years after Drake struck oil and towns were booming, war broke out between the North and the South.

That four year battle took its toll on the newly emerging oil industry.

Able bodied men who were once working on the derricks were now called up to serve their country.

By 1865, the Civil War was winding down, and soon both Union and Confederate soldiers flocked to Pennsylvania in search of their fortune.

With the end of the Civil War, we've got thousands, thousands of unemployed guys looking for work.

They've seen action.

They don't want to go back to plowing the farm.

The petroleum industry did have a role in uniting both the Union soldiers and the former Confederate soldiers.

They had read the newspapers.

They had seen the ads.

They had heard about the fortunes.

Obviously, there was great wealth to have been made from the industry in those early days, and everybody was interested in having some work, and the oil industry gave the country something positive to get excited about.

The day began turning their attention to the oil fields, and there were songs with titles like My Pa Has Struck Ile and Oil, oil, Oil and Oil on the brain, And Kole Oil Tommy is my name, Is My name good for any game to-night, my boys good for any game to-night.

Everyone was talking oil, oil and money.

And the money that could be made.

And what we're going to do with that money, we're going to reinvest it in oil.

A lot of excitement, a lot of excitement and greasy mud.

The mud was greasy.

The crude slick.

It attracted some slippery characters to men and women who preyed on the more naive and made their money in dubious ways.

There's one really colorful character named Ben Hogan who was a strong man.

He liked to wrestle.

He was a boxer, and that was his love was was boxing.

But along with boxing comes gambling and oftentimes drinking.

And then he ends up dating French Kate.

Eventually, with Pithole's decline, they move on to Tidioute and then threatened to go up to Warren, but follow the oil fields and end up down in Parker and on a floating barge that was a floating house of entertainment.

There were other personalities, too.

Upon the road I drive the very spiciest of drags behind a pair of thoroughbred $10,000, like John Steele, better known as Coal Oil Johnny.

Yeah, he was colorful, no question about it.

He was a young fellow and he inherited the farm.

It was called The Widow Steel's Farm.

This farm already had a number of big flowing wells at a time when the price of crude was kind of up.

So there was a lot of money coming into this farm.

And he inherited this.

He decided he was going to spend it.

Big fancy coaches entertaining an entire circus troupe of people and paying their way to travel elsewhere and feeding them and closing them.

And just having outlandish parties.

Coil Johnny, in that respect, was an inspiration for the entire country.

They were tired of all the bad news and as much money as this guy wasted.

It was kind of fun and I think the country needed some fun.

The lure of fast fortunes drew one particular oil speculator to the region, who had a lasting impact on history.

When John Wilkes Booth first came to town, he lived in this building here.

Right here?

Yeah.

It was called the United States Hotel at that time, where he roomed with two men that had already been living there, people that we had records of that knew him.

He was always a gentleman, didn't talk politics, was a nice guy.

Booth and a group of fellow actors wanted to get in on the action.

So they invested in a well just outside Franklin in 1864.

But his well that he dig down along the river was dry, and he left the area for Canada before the whole field came in.

And we always kind of wonder what would have happened if he had had a good oil well and maybe stuck around here instead of headed for Washington.

Eventually, the people of Franklin were shocked when Booth assassinated President Lincoln in 1865.

They couldn't believe that this charismatic actor was capable of such treachery in this horrible chapter of American history.

The letter was written by a man by the name of J. Seaton, who lived in Franklin.

Carolee Michener enjoys researching local history.

She's the retired editor of the Franklin News-Herald.

We had a couple of oil booms here during the oil embargo, and I did a lot of stories on that and naturally become interested in history to the manner in which they gather.

Oil is very curious.

Carolee now researches and writes books for the Venango County Historical Society.

Franklin had a population of about 950.

In 1859, by 1863 there were 2000 by the end of the decade, and more than doubled again.

We have a number of records.

It's of an Anglo county historical society, or letters and things that people stayed 1 or 2 years and they didn't make money, so they went back home.

You know, some became quite prominent citizens in Franklin Oil City and throughout the whole region.

Some descendants of those families are still here on my mother's side.

She was in Aigburth.

They were in oil.

Three brothers came over from Mercer County and they drilled their first successful oil wells within six weeks of Drake's.

So they were early and they were gamblers and they had money and then they didn't have it.

And, then they had it and then they didn't have it.

This is my dad Lee Forker like many people in the area, Pam Forker can lay claim to oil ties on both sides of her family.

Her father, Lee, was the former CEO of Quaker State.

Remember their slogan Quaker State your car to keep it running young.

That made Quaker State a household name.

This fortune 500 company had its headquarters in Oil City, along with Wolf's Head and Pennzoil, but by the late 1990s, all three moved their offices out of the Oil Valley.

When I grew up, it seems like everybody in Oil City worked either for Wolf's Head, Pennzoil or Quaker State.

And my father started out in the mailroom at Quaker State, and he ended up working there for 40 years.

These are the first bottles we found out of petrol when I used to go out with my father.

Kathy Borland's family has lived in the oil Valley for more than 250 years.

You know, my father was all about Pithole, so it was Pithole the morning, Pithole in the evening.

He always said he was so, pleased with himself because he only had a high school education.

But he traveled all over the world.

He had friends from all over the world.

They all came to Oil City.

So we had, shakes and, you know, gentleman from Mexico and, and Central America and a lot of people from Scandinavia coming through.

People came from all over the world to this region because the oil industry here set the standards and practices.

Many are still used today.

Things like how to transport the oil, refine it and sell it.

And the steamboats used to come up the Allegheny from Pittsburgh and then tow or push back barges full of oil.

And that's how a fellow named J.J.

Vandergrift got into the oil industry.

He was a steamboat owner.

Shippers on both sides of the creek down here at the mouth of the creek.

They would buy the crude as it came down in these flat boats in barrels, store it in these warehouses, hold it till the refining season.

That is October, November.

Looking forward to winter would come on and then they would in turn put it on bigger barges and take it down to Pittsburgh and sell it for a handsome profit.

When Charles Lockhart and Samuel Kier started buying oil leases up in the Oil Creek Valley and producing oil, they eventually bought their own steamboats.

And Vandergrift, who had already had a steamboat, started buying oil and oil wells.

Families who owned land made money too.

They sold leases to oil drillers and got a percentage of any oil found on their property.

Of all the ways to make money, leasing was the safest because the oil business was dangerous and dirty.

The barrels were heavy, each weighing 350 pounds or more, and transporting them was difficult and slow.

The threat of fire was always there, and every day men risked their lives climbing up and down the derricks.

Think about the derricks.

Would you like to climb up 70ft?

Would be hanging off the side regularly week in and week.

Building and taking them down because they would put up and then and then taken down and put up somewhere else.

And all that's involved with the fires, the explosions, the, the steam, the steam boilers that exploded on these guys.

It was dangerous, heavy, hard work.

The early days in the oil business, there were a number of accidents, a lot of them caused by faulty equipment.

A lot of them caused by lack of knowledge of what to do.

But even knowing what to do wasn't enough.

Oil, by its very nature, is highly flammable, and there was always a threat of a refinery fire.

We did have flooding the.

Of course, the major big fire and flood in Oil City in 1892 was the worst one.

The fire and flood of 1892 started with a dam break in Titusville.

It hit a benzene tank and the benzene came down.

Oil Creek caught fire and eventually came into Oil City and the flames were hundreds of feet high.

It would explode.

And then just just engulf everyone.

A lot of the people who observed the flood and the fire actually perished.

Many of the townspeople went out and little wooden boats and tried to rescue people.

My great grandfather, John Halliday Gordon being one of them.

As soon as Kathy's great grandfather got into his boat, the oil on the water caught fire and exploded.

I think he rescued like 40, 40 some people, but as a result, he was burned all over his face and his hands because he was thrown from his boat and into this, oil burning, oil covered water.

And when it came up, the flames just seared his flesh.

And I think he lingered and then died.

The oil business was often fickle.

Sometimes the crude would flow too freely, and there would be such a glut that you'd get just pennies on the barrel.

When the giant flowing wells up on Oil Creek, the tar form and other places came in, and they were producing their 4000 and 5000 barrels a day, and crude oil was worth less than $0.50, sometimes only a nickel.

The barrel cost $3, and these barrels holding the oil were the same kind used to store whiskey.

In the early years, there was no standard size, and that caused some hard feelings from the buyers, who never knew exactly how much oil they were paying for it.

By 1866, a group of oil men decided to regulate the size of the barrel.

They decided that it would be set at 42 gallons.

That same measurement is still used today, and my great grandfather, had to go to Washington to decide that they should make a standard size barrel 42 gallons, 40 barrel, and two for leakage.

There were many key players in the early oil industry, men like Charles Lockhart and William Frew of Pittsburgh.

They started the Atlantic refinery and there was Charles Pratt of New York, who started out in the whale oil business and then later became one of the biggest crude oil financiers in the country.

But soon they were dwarfed by someone who became the oil giant.

There's a young man in Cleveland named John Rockefeller that started his refinery in 62.

So by 62, 63, he's coming here and tromping up and down the steep valleys, buying oil for his Cleveland refinery.

And the next decade, Rockefeller's company, Standard Oil, began buying up pipelines, buying out local refiners and merging transportation networks.

What he did was to engage in a series of hard nosed business practices, to consolidate and essentially take over the refining industry in the United States.

John D. Rockefeller established an empire built on oil.

Many view it as the dawning of the American business model.

It was the first big industry outside of the railroads that came together on a national basis.

Think about this.

This was no longer just a statewide thing on a national basis and had such an immense impact on, on the economy, create a great deal of wealth.

As a result, those early, fellows, they were in the ultimate start up business.

And that business blossomed into an industry.

And, I doubt if any of them would have thought that it would be the world's largest single industry, as it is today.

In 1902, Rockefeller's business practices were exposed by crusading journalist Ida Tarbell, who was from the oil region and had seen Rockefeller at work firsthand.

Her father and brother had been independent oil producers who were pushed out by Standard Oil.

Tarbell articles in McClure's magazine focused the nation's attention on the monopoly that was Standard Oil.

In 1911, the US government broke up standard.

When the public speaks in a loud and threatening voice, the government usually listens.

For all of Rockefeller's wisdom and his vision for the industry, he underestimated the power of public opinion.

Most of this commerce was located in Oil City.

It was where the producers and refiners came together.

By the 1870s, millions of dollars flowed in and out of the oil exchange.

This was the heart, the soul, the commercial center of the oil industry across the street were the Cleveland refiners.

They had their buyers offices in the old Mercantile building, of course, long gone.

Right on this side of the street was the Pittsburgh farm of Lockhart.

And through the big buyer from Pittsburgh and just across the railroad track was the local firm of, Jacob Vandergrift and George Foreman, who were buying for their, big Imperial refinery just outside of Oil City.

But that commercial center was being eclipsed as oil fields were coming in from other parts of Pennsylvania.

First Bradford, the northernmost oil field in the state.

In the late 1880s, the Bradford field was perhaps the largest field.

It was what we call an elephant in terms of, of, production and produced, probably 80% of the country's requirements for crude oil.

Then west of Pittsburgh, the McDonald field came in.

Other states had oil strikes to West Virginia.

Fields were already pumping.

And in Texas, everyone's heard of Spindletop.

The field discovered in 1901 that came in at an astounding 100,000 barrels a day.

Then oil rigs popped up across the mid-continent and under the California coast, oil was soon discovered all over the world, on every continent, from Asia to Antarctica, with oil flowing, the future seemed bright.

Homes around the world glowed with this inexpensive aluminum.

But just on the horizon was an invention that threatened oil's dominance.

Perhaps the first major bust of the petroleum industry came about, thanks to Thomas Edison and the invention of the dynamo and electricity, the oil industry didn't collapse with the advent of electricity.

There was in the wings another remarkable invention called the internal combustion machine.

And all of those waste products, the naphtha and the gasoline, were suddenly extremely valuable.

Oil has been lucky that way.

There's a new fangled craft called the automobile, which burned gasoline.

The infrastructure was there.

The cans changed from kerosene to gasoline, and the market exploded.

As roads came into place.

The use of petroleum has allowed the phenomenal expansion of transportation, and it has shown us how small the world really is.

Oil today is, really the, the lifeblood of our society.

Our transportation networks run on oil.

They're designed for oil moving away, away from oil.

And the future is probably the challenge in the 21st century.

Today's refineries are built primarily to make, fuel oil, fuel and gasoline and diesel fuel.

Harvey Golubock is the president of American Refining Group in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

They produce many lubricants and motor oils.

It's the oldest continuously operating refinery in the United States.

It was founded in 1881 as the Kendall Refinery, and only refines 100% pure Pennsylvania crude.

The entire barrel of crude is is used in one way or another.

Some parts of the, the barrel are heated to such an extreme that they become gas.

And then we use that gas in the refinery is our fuel.

Other parts are, create gasoline or heating oil.

Diesel fuel, and then lubricants and waxes.

Our society has been built on, on crude oil and, actually on cheap energy.

If you can smell crude oil now, and the oil is still pumping in the valley, that changed the world.

Oil man, Bill Huber is one of the many independent producers in the oil region who pumps Pennsylvania crude.

I'm the third generation.

My granddad drilled this well, then my dad and he worked with him and they they drilled some wells.

And then I drilled some wells here in the 80s, three generations of work here.

We'll be going up through here.

Bill's got dozens of wells on his property in Plumber, Pennsylvania.

Not the big ones you see in the pictures.

The 40ft tall wooden derricks.

Instead, Bill uses stripper wells, small wells that usually produce a few barrels a day.

He's not getting rich from these wells, but they're worth the effort of pumping, and it'll pump that ten barrel head off, and then we'll be looking for a half a barrel a day out of it.

After that.

That's been there 100 years.

The only thing that's changed is we're running with electric motor now.

Originally run on natural gas.

My dad used to bring me in a wicker basket as a baby and set me in the engine house.

I'd go to sleep while he was working around.

Then I started really helping him when I was about 12.

That's a what we call pumping power.

He got two eccentrics off set on each other.

As they go around, they pull these rods back and forth.

It's hard, unscrewing the pipe, pulling this stuff all out.

On the end of the rods, each rod has a well, some of them too.

You kind of get used to it.

People come to work for me and they last maybe two days and they want to find another job.

So the other problem, it's dirty.

If you're going to work here on this, you're going to get dirty.

You may only see the whites of your eyes when you go home at night.

The is mixed with the water.

They say they get it in your blood.

You'd like to quit but can't.

There might be another good well just down here a little bit.

You'd kind of like to stay around, see if you can get the money and drill it and see what it does.

Bill may not always know what a well might produce.

But just down the road is one that's been pumping successfully since 1861.

I'm all the old.

I take care of the mechanic.

well, there's, you know, clinic number one, the oldest continues producing oil well in the world.

The well is now owned by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and is managed by the Drake Well Museum.

Bump it about five times.

Six times a year.

Then it makes about eight barrel every time I go.

But it's already.

It's good.

Smells like money.

Though this valley was once the world's leading oil producer, that is no longer true.

Today.

60% of our oil comes from foreign oil sources, countries like Canada and Saudi Arabia.

We need to find alternatives.

But it's not going to be an overnight process.

It's something that will take a, coordinated policy, energy policy that will, encompass conservation, alternative energies and actually increased, drilling and use of the resources that we have here in this country, resources like natural gas and coal.

But the rising cost of energy these days has led to a new rush to Pennsylvania, this time mainly to explore the huge natural gas deposits in the Marcellus Shale formation.

But 30% of world production comes from gigantic oil fields discovered more than 50 years ago.

More than half of those fields are either in outright decline or showing signs of decline.

So right now, we're sort of in a race to find new oil.

These hills, once filled with derricks, are today green and lush, the former home of many of the largest wells in the area is now Oil Creek State Park, a destination for fishermen, bicyclists and picnickers.

One, two, three and just up the road is the original Drake Wells site, maintained by the Drake Well Museum.

But still, after all these years, what's under this ground can make history and big money for this valley again.

There's lots of oil left in western Pennsylvania.

The trick is going to be to try to get it out.

We have to now apply our best, newest scientific research technology into our oldest Appalachian Basin, Pennsylvania.

Our oil producing sandstones are so dense that the oil doesn't flow easily out of them.

There's no underground pool of oil.

They're developing new methods of drilling where they can go down and then actually turn the drill bit to the side and drill horizontally through that rock layer.

With these new drilling methods, there's some exciting possibilities for our oil industry.

We are now third in the nation in, stripper wells and in stripper wells are wells that basically, produce somewhere around to 1 or 2 barrels a day.

They say that there's 80% of the oil, 80% is still there.

The oil industry is a story of people, and it's not so much work out of the ground.

But who had the will to put that myth down the ground to get the oil?

The man with that will, Edwin Drake, may have never known how his discovery would change the world, even to this day.

And the irony is, Drake launched a multitrillion dollar industry but died nearly penniless.

He failed to take advantage of the many opportunities to make his fortunes from oil, but his perseverance and ingenuity when drilling that well reflects the spirit of the people in the valley that changed the world.

It was more, I think to them than just making money.

I feel that they really and truly believed that they were making the world a better place.

What are the three most important stories here?

One that Drake invented in industry that touches their lives?

Two, that the technology invented here went out of Pennsylvania and all over the world.

And three, that there's a drop of oil in your life every day.

This project was financed in part by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Bureau of Recreation and Conservation, and the National Park Service.

Additional funding provided by the Dr.

and Mrs.

Arthur William Phillips Charitable Trust, the Edith Justus Charitable Trust, the Elizabeth S Black Charitable Trust, the Philo and Sarah Blaisdell Foundation, Petroleum History Institute, and Edward Jones Investments to order a DVD copy of The Valley That Changed the World.

Call shop WQED at one (800) 274-1307, or order online at shopwqed.org.