A Famous Oil Town
Originally published in the Paint, Oil and Drug Review on April 3, 1889
In consequence of the renewed activity of some of the old wells in the Pennsylvania field, many items of interest are being resurrected in relation to the early days of the oil excitement.
Petroleum Centre, Venango County, was, as its name indicates, an oil town par excellence. Some of the most famous wells known in the history of the industry were located in its neighborhood. A forty-barrel well was struck on the Rynd farm, midway between Petroleum Centre and Rouseville a few days ago. This fact has revived interest in the locality, and it is predicted that a large number of wells will be drilled as soon as spring opens. It is not probable, however, that Petroleum Centre will ever awake from the lethargy into which it sank when Mother Earth refused longer to respond to the demands of the oil men, and the subterranean resources of her oleaginous wealth became sterile.
In its palmy days this town made for itself a phenomenal name, not alone in relation to the prolificacy of its wells but by the profligacy and general dissipation of the greater portion of the population — some ten thousand — who had been attracted by the generous response which the territory made to the drill.
At this time Petroleum Centre was the headquarters for the business done between Oil City and Titusville. Like many another ephemeral town of its kind, its present status reflects little of its former activity. Should it become necessary to take official record of the number of its present inhabitants, the census officer will have an easy task, for there are scarcely twenty families there now. An oil country paper, speaking of the early characteristics, thus limns the once famous town:
“In its best days Petroleum Centre was the wickedest town in the oil country, perhaps in the world. In this particular it was much ahead of Pithole, that has had the general reputation of being the toughest oil region town. Ben Hogan, now engaged in missionary work at Jamestown, N.Y., can relate many thrilling experiences which came to him when he was in the midst of his wicked ways, at Pithole and Petroleum Centre. The Centre flourished long after Pithole ceased to exist, supporting a daily newspaper twelve years later — the same newspaper, under a new name, that had chronicled the strange record of Pithole.”
As the wells gave out, the people deserted the town for more promising fields, removing their houses and taking them along. Most of them went to the oil fields in Clarion and Butler Counties.
Thus, it may be said, that if the wicked town has not expiated in sackcloth and ashes the sins of its early days, the natural process of effacement and the long period of somnolence which the little that remains of it has enjoyed, will supply sufficient material from which a moral can be deduced by any one desirous to make the application.