BOOM THEN BUST The oil town--Pithole, Pa. Pithole, PA         Pithole, PA  is  a n example of just how quickly a particular location could go boom and bust.    In January of 1865 a farm on Pithole Creek sold drilling rights for $100,000.    By the end of December 1865, Pithole, PA was a city of 15-20,000 people (estimates vary)!    It boasted the third busiest post office in Pennsylvania, 54 hotels, almost as many brothels, a large theater and numerous saloons and boarding houses.      In October 1865   Pithole was also the site of the first oil pipeline.      By December 1866, only a few thousand people were left.        Six years later, Pithole was a ghost town. Oil wells in Pennsylvania in 1862    Notice how close the wells are. The wood barrels are to store oil, but a standard barrel size had not yet developed.           Pithole's name came from the presence of oil filled pits lined with old logs. Nobody knew who had dug them or why.  It was certainly known that oil was in th

  The Oil Rush of 1859 Drake's first oil well      The discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania was as spectacular as the discovery of gold in California. The oil rush is not so well known since the Civil War overshadows it.    Even so, the frenzy long outlasted the gold rush and yielded more dollars.     By late 1864, drilling rights were being sold for $100,000.      By the end of January 1866, rights were sold at from $1million to $2 million.      Not only was oil good for making kerosene, advocates claimed, it was unsurpassed as a medical cure all.  The Oil Excitement — the Jeffersonian, PA December 8, 1859             The oil fever is raging in portions of Western Pennsylvania. An exchange published in the Crawford county, and especially in the vicinity of Oil Creek, the fever is epidemic. Everybody is more or less affected, and the attention of the people of the people is pretty generally directed to the reservoirs of wealth that have been discovered, or are supposed to exi

  It’s 1859--Let’s Get Fracking!      The recent rush for underground energy called “fracking” and its attendant environmental consequences has happened before.      Demand for cheaper lighting, not the automobile, drove the first oil boom.       In 1859 when the first successful oil well started producing near Titusville, Pennsylvania, speculators rushed in to buy drilling rights on farms throughout the area. Small farmers were offered more money than they ever expected to see in their lifetime.     Many of the farmers found their land damaged or ruined by oil wells which spewed salt water and oil spills into surrounding streams and rivers.   Farmers downstream from the area suffered the effects too without ever receiving any money.      You might wonder why would petroleum be valuable in era before the automobile? Petroleum had little to no commercial value until a serial entrepreneur and inventor in western New York named Sam Kier invented a lantern that burned kerosene.  Samu

          The Emancipation Proclamation  "One Last Card" by John Tenniel appeared in the October 1862 issue of the British satire magazine Punch ( Tenniel later became famous as the first illustrator of Alice in Wonderland) Emancipation Proclamation             Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was not a straightforward freeing of all slaves. In fact, it pleased nobody except those held in bondage behind Confederate lines on whom it had no effect. It was not meant as a humanitarian gesture, rather as an attempt to entice states in rebellion to rejoin the Union.               It was a political ploy which did not work as intended.             Lincoln waited to issue the proclamation until the Union had won a great military victory—and Union victories were few and minor until September 17, 1862.  US General George McClennan stopped General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army’s advance into Maryland and Pennsylvania at the Battle of Antietam.   It was a battle larger than