“Most people in Titusville thought that Drake was crazy to drill for oil when you could just soak it up from the creek,” Brice said. Drake formally received the military title during the 1959 Oil Centennial when Pennsylvania made him a colonel in the Pennsylvania National Guard.ĭrake and his second wife and their two children stayed first at the American Hotel in Titusville and later moved into a house on East Main Street (now the high school gym site). Drake’s wife said “his eastern buddies gave him the nickname Colonel” because of his service in the Michigan militia. It was not entirely made up, said the lecturer. The title was thereafter attached to his name,” Brice said. “To make Drake appear important in the eyes of the Titusville people, Townsend used the unofficial title of ‘Colonel’ and addressed letters to him at Col.
Edwin l drake first american oil well free#
Townsend contacted Drake to go to Titusville - “he had a free railroad pass (as a former conductor) and they didn’t have to pay for transportation,” Brice said - under the auspices of a new company, the Seneca Oil Co. of New York in 1854, a company that soon was taken over by a New Haven group led by James Townsend. Struck by the idea that crude oil, as seen in medicinal and illumination advertising, might be obtained by drilling in the same method used to obtain salt water, Bissell became aware of oil seepages in western Pennsylvania, particularly along Oil Creek. While there, he became acquainted with influential individuals, including George Bissell, a Dartmouth graduate and later superintendent of the New Orleans school system. Drake and his surviving child, a 4-year-old son, moved to New Haven, Conn., where they lived in the Tontino Hotel at a cost of $9 a week for room and board. He married and began a family, only to have “unbelievable tragedy” over the space of six years, said Brice, when his wife and three children died between 18. In tracing Drake’s early life as a child (born 1819) growing up in the Catskills of New York and later in Vermont, Brice said Drake worked on the Erie Canal, labored on his uncle’s farm and worked as a hotel clerk in Michigan, served briefly in the Michigan militia, sold drygoods in Connecticut and New York City. “…(Oil) is the magical elixir, thanks to modern chemistry and the persistence of Col. “How special to live in an area where an event changed the world,” Brice told his audience. His research was supported by a grant from the Oil Region Alliance of Business, Industry and Tourism and is dedicated to longtime oilman and Meadville resident Samuel Pees who, said Brice, “got me involved in the oil industry.” Brice’s talk was part of the Barbara Morgan Harvey Center Lecture series, now in its fifth year.īrice, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, said his book has been two years in the making and is due soon for publication. Brice, Ph.D., for his new book, Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry, were outlined at a public program Thursday at Venango Campus. Highlights in research done by William R. 27, 1859, had as ignominious an end as did the wood apparatus that housed his well - tossed aside without a thought given to posterity.
The former railway agent and onetime dry goods salesman who launched the petroleum industry along Oil Creek on Aug.
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