The Allegheny River was a prime transportation route for all manner of goods for more than 200 years. The original river traffic focused on cut timber that was loaded in communities up and down the river and sent south to the larger cities, especially Pittsburgh, to meet consumers’ needs. Then came the iron ore industry that shuttled iron from the region’s many iron furnaces to smelting operations downriver. Barges laden
A family’s photograph album, small in size but chocked full of pictures, showcases an earlier time in Oil City. The collection, owned by the late Charlotte Parsons Davies of Oil City and donated in her honor to the Oil City Heritage Society, focuses on family, industry, civic affairs and more in 1910. The collection belonged to Silas R. Parsons, Charlotte Davies’ father. Silas, son of John Trick Parsons and Roxyette
The Oil City area has traditionally drawn a wide assortment of politicians in search of voter support and the entourage has included presidents, senators, congressional members and more. The region has played host to aspiring candidates as well as incumbents and retired national leaders. Four presidents – George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford – claim top honors as the highest ranking office-holders to travel to the
The Oil Valley boasted dozens of oil companies and several refineries in its early history. Key among the refiners were Quaker State, Pennzoil and Wolf’s Head. Altogether, the trio accounted for more than two-thirds of all motor oil sold in the U.S. However, there was a fourth entity that boasted a sizable refining capacity plus a scattering of gasoline and lube stations throughout the region. It was known as the
Oil City’s first street was Main Street, a six-block avenue that was also the settlement’s only street as oil speculators roamed the hillsides in 1860 just a year after Col. Drake’s successful oil well near Titusville. It was described in an April 1865 edition of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine this way: “Oil City consists of only one street, winding down the west side of Oil Creek and the Allegheny River.
Not since the Great Fire and Flood of 1892 had the City of Oil City embarked on such a major project in a prime business district. That was the cry for action that began in 1958 and ended in 1963 with a dramatic transformation of the East End neighborhood. It would be the first of three such redevelopment projects that would alter the East End, the Main Street area and
Siverly, one of Oil City’s most unique neighborhoods, was the last one to give up its independence as a separate borough when it finally merged with the City of Oil City in 1910. There are several unusual claims as to the riverfront community – it once boasted the largest inland refinery in the world; it claimed a factory that was the largest manufacturing plant in the world for oil and
Oil City was in the national news on April 10, 1984, and the local reaction was anything but positive. The page one story was in the prestigious Wall Street Journal newspaper and was titled “So You’ve Landed A Headquarters Job? Don’t Smile So Fast.” Susan Carey, a staff reporter for the Journal, a daily newspaper with the largest circulation in the U.S. at that time, wrote about the tribulations facing
Oil City once claimed a large and thriving Jewish population with dozens of families living in neighborhoods throughout the town. In the 1920s, about 155 Jewish families lived within the city’s boundaries while Franklin, Titusville and Clarion claimed slightly smaller numbers. The influx of Jewish families to the Oil Valley began within a year of Col. Edwin Drake’s successful oil well near Titusville in 1859. Roxanne Hitchcock of Oil
Many Oil City residents earned high recognition as well as enormous wealth. Others, meanwhile, have shared ties with those individuals who had both fame and money. The relationships included leading U.S. businessmen, company founders, and philanthropists. Here’s a quick look at some of those brushes with fame and fortune: Andrew Carnegie In 1900, public library enthusiasts, including the Belles Lettres Club members, were eager to establish a free-standing library in