Today our friends Wayne & Coleen that we just left in Ontario a few weeks ago, were coming to visit. They had been over in Lancaster, PA for a show. They arrived around 3 PM Saturday and were staying till Monday morning. Linda said, “Now we can show them where I grew up”.
Saturday afternoon we didn’t do much other than find out the Holiday Inn Express down the street was booked solid so they had to get a hotel in Franklin, 8 miles away. Who’d of thought there would be such a run on rooms in this little burg. After securin’ a room we all came back to Seneca and had a nice supper at the local Bob Evans restaurant. After we talked for a while then said our goodnights.
Sunday we started the Grand Tour of the ‘Valley that changed the World’. We started first at the McClintock well, the oldest continuous producing oil well in the world. 
Drilled in August of 1861 it still produces oil today.
Our next stop was just a drive by cause there is really no place to stop and nothing left to see. Rouseville used to be the home of the refinery’s outside Oil City, Quaker State, Pennzoil & Wolfs Head too I believe. Today there are two storage tanks left and the rest is a clean-up site, probably a super-fund site.
We then drove on to Oil Creek State Park and the Petroleum Center train station for the Oil Creek & Titusville Railroad. Petroleum Center was one of many boom towns that came and went during the heyday of the oil industry here during the 19th century. The station has a wealth of information on the ‘Oil Boom’. We picked up a book called ‘History of the Oil Creek Valley’, chocked full of pictures. It covers all the little burgs that popped up during the oil boom, of coarse most didn’t survive long. They have a diorama at the station of Petroleum Center during the heyday and most of the buildings were constructed so the town could be torn down & moved to a different location in 30 days.
After visiting Petroleum Center we headed to Drake Well in Titusville. This is a part of Oil Creek State Park I believe. Col. Edwin Drake, who was considered a lunatic for his theory of drilling for oil, was hailed a hero after drilling 69 feet into the earth along Oil Creek in Titusville on August 29, 1859 & hitting oil. The Well is still located in the spot where he changed history for all time. Today it pumps with the same wood fired boiler and steam driven machinery that he used then.
These early pioneers in the oil industry used a lot of ingenuity to accomplish there ends. They developed a method to pump many wells from one central power supply tied together by rod line.
Photo courtesy of Samuel T. Pees Oil History website.
This is a pushrod system that was featured on the blog on July 29th.
For direction changes in the pushrods.
Need to run the pushrods under the road.
How ‘bout over the road.
Wayne was really interested in all the machinery as was I. The ingenuity was amazing these folks used, but I guess this was after the industrial revolution and ingenuity was king.
We really had a great time with you Wayne & Coleen and await our next visit in November in Florida, or will it be earlier, only time will tell.
We found our own niche at Petroleum Center
After seein’ that again my funny bone is hurtin’ and I’m outa’ here. Hope to see ya down the road as we’re;
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