What did Mobey Dick, John D. Rockefeller and the Pattin brothers have in common? They all benefited from the Pennsylvania oil boom.
The oil had been there, almost since time began. It was so close to the surface that in some places around Titusville it oozed out onto the ground. The Native Americans had collected it for centuries to use as an insect repellent and ointment. Beyond that it had little value. The early European settlers regarded it as a nuisance because the soil it contaminated was no good for growing crops but the mid nineteenth century would see a drastic change.
In 1849 if you stayed up after sunset you lit a candle or a lamp that burned whale oil. The demand was huge and fleets of whaling ships roamed the seas. As many as 15,000 right whales were being turned into barrels of oil in a single year. Whale oil was the world’s illuminant of choice but it was also expensive. A Pennsylvania resident by the name of Samuel Kier began to experiment with ways to refine the crude oil that was so abundant in the area into a usable fuel. In 1850 he formed a company to market his improved lighting oil as “Carbon Oil.” Kier’s business met with success so he soon had many imitators.
A group of New York investors formed a company they called the Pennsylvania Rock Oil company and hired a man named Edwin Drake to prospect for oil in the region. You might think that he was a geologist but that was not the case. Drake was an unemployed railroad conductor with no previous experience in prospecting for oil. Consequently, he drilled a lot of dry holes before he finally struck oil in August of 1859. The Oil Creek Boom was off and running. Production that year was only 2000 barrels but by 1873 over ten million barrels were pumped from the ground.
In the 70’s John D. Rockefeller’s company, Standard Oil, began buying up land and oil wells in an effort to monopolize oil production, By 1882 he had largely succeeded. Pennsylvania oil peaked at 31 million barrels in 1891 and the region was soon passed by other states like Texas and Oklahoma as the center of the oil industry, but the region would continue to pump oil for decades to come. The abundance of petroleum resulted in falling prices. With petroleum selling for 7cents per gallon, few would pay $2.00 a gallon for whale oil. It wasn’t long before Mobey had a lot fewer Ahabs chasing him around the Seven Seas, and that, Greta, was how the petroleum industry saved the whales.
In 1888 Winfield and Douglas Pattin formed a partnership with J.G. Hall to open a machine shop in the town of Marietta, Ohio. The oil boom was in full swing in the surrounding countryside so the new shop naturally catered to the needs of the petroleum industry. In 1895 Hall sold the brothers his interests in the company and the name changed to Pattin Brothers & Co. In the early years steam engines supplied the power for drilling wells so the new company added them to their product inventory but within a few years gas engines had largely replaced their steam engines.
Douglas Pattin was killed when a natural gas leak exploded and leveled a large part of the factory. Winfield would run the firm until 1913 when he contracted pneumonia and died while on a business trip. A man named William Meister who had signed on as an apprentice in 1891 and worked his way up into management, took the helm and ran the company up to the mid 1940’s when Patin Brothers & Co. was purchased by the Acme Fishing Tool Co.
The engine shown here was used to pump natural gas in a pipeline from the oilfields. It dates from the early 1900’s according to a sign posted above the display. It is part of the Foothills Antique Power Association of NC’s collection that is on permanent display at the Hickory American Legion Fairgrounds in Newton, NC.
Sources:
www.coolspringpowermuseum.org The flywheel Sept. 2014 Pattin Brothers : Ohio’s Oil Field engine by Paul Harvey
enwikipedia.org/wiki/pennsylvania_oil_rush
petroleumhistory.org/oilhistory/pages/whale/whale.html
sjvgeology.org/history/whales.html
