Titusville, Pennsylvania: Drake Well Museum

Where Edwin Drake sparked America's first oil boom -- in Pennsylvania. Outdoor derricks and monuments; indoor museum.

It is quite nice that Allison wants to give the credit of oil discovery to the first Englishman to sail around the world - but I'm willing to bet that northwestern PA was not one of his stops. Especially since he circimnavigated from 1577 to 1580 and died in 1596. Oil was "discovered" in 1859.

It was first drilled by Col. Edwin L. Drake (portrayed by Vincent Price in the visitor center's film -- which isn't boring if you're a student of history) after he observed the natives in Titusville skimming small amounts of it from Oil Creek. He found that process ineffective and invented the derrick.

Corroborating evidence found at Drake Well's web site -- also a fine place to get info on Pithole visitor's center, which looks like it's only open on June 5th.

Titusville has the Drake Well museum, where oil was discovered for the first time in the US by a white man, Francis [correction: Edwin] Drake. The museum's kind of cool, with lots of neat artifacts (including a picture of a wagon used to haul explosives that...well..exploded) but also with an incredibly boring movie about Drake. Close by is Pithole museum, which looks really neat from the outside but it's open only about one day a year and we've never figured out which day that is. Pithole was a boomtown during the oil era, and you can wander around the old house foundations and look through the windows into the museum.