JohnT
April 30, 2005, 5:08am
41
Heh… I guess you tend to forget about what’s in your own back yard. The birth of the global petroleum industry is certainly a claim to fame, but when you’re from there, you tend to overlook your own history. I remember when I was a kid I was always mystified by the Energy song on Schoolhouse Rock . It gave a rapid, spoken history of energy usage in the United States, and whenever I heard the line, “…and then, in 1859, waaaaaaay out in western Pennsylvania…” I would be struck that where I lived was potentially exotic, potentially waaaaaaay off for someone.
History class in grade school occasionally brought up the Drake well up in Titusville (about forty minutes by car from my native Hermitage.) That was the town that they always talked about, since it was the first, but there’s more to the story, of course. There were a couple of boom towns that sprang up. One was called Oil City, which is still around, and another was called Pitthole, which isn’t. Dad heard about it or knew about it or something, and he took us kids up there one Saturday. There’s a tourist center (or at least there was, back in the early 1980s; I don’t know if it’s still there,) filled with old oil drilling machinery and placards telling you about the history of Pitthole. There was even a short movie about Pitthole, which sprang up in 1865, met two thirds of the world’s crude oil needs in 1866, and burned to the ground in 1867.
A few old building foundations remain, but since it was mostly made of wood, it was gone. I’m not sure why no one moved back. I remember they had a short movie about the short history of Pitthole, and right at the point where it was talking about the fire that destroyed Pitthole, the film started burning! At first I thought it was part of the show, but it was just one of those happy accidents that make funnier truth than fiction.
Come to think of it, we do have something else that’s unique to western Pennsylvania: the Pymatuning Spillway . It’s not petroleum related, but it’s cool as hell. I’ve been there a couple of times, and the ducks really do walk on the backs of the fish. Definitely worth the trip. Not too far north of exit 4A on I-80!
I’d love to see Pithole, a city that grew from mere hundreds to 15,000 people in three months and literally died in a week after the oil gave out, where a tract of land that sold for $30 one year was worth $2,000,000 the next (and $4.78 ten years after the collapse. :eek: )
As for Arkansas, I’d like to take a tour (if possible) of Wal-Mart world headquarters - after all, there’s only one place to see the center of the planets largest corporation, and that’s in NW Arkansas.
