Oil City: Oil on the Brain

From Titusville, I drove down to Oil City, resisting the temptation to drive into Oil Creek State Park (maybe on the next trip) or to take a detour farther east and visit the site of the vanished boomtown of Pithole, which went from being an isolated farm to a town of 15,000 people to being virtually abandoned when the oil ran out, all in the space of a few years. Instead, I set my sights on the Venango Museum of Art, Science and Industry in Oil City, and was rewarded by as provocative an exhibit on oil as I could have wished to see.

This county-run museum is housed in the old post office, a wonderful high-ceilinged place that is, inevitably, enormously expensive to heat and cool, according to the director, Betsy Kellner. (They do have some conservation measures in place—interior storm windows and a new furnace—but inheriting the mixed blessing/burden of this carbon-age structure does seem appropriate for a museum that is trying to pose some pointed questions about our carbon dependency!)

The permanent exhibit, installed in the mid-1990s, is called “Oil: Black Gold or Black Magic?” It’s a beautifully done professonal exhibit, with some pieces of vernacular local memory woven into it in more or less successful ways—an extensively, fully-restored theater organ from Oil City’s stunning Latonia Theater, allusions to native son “Rattlesnake Pete,” an entrepreneur and healer who opened the town’s first museum in the 1890s, an area showcasing local oil brands and products, and a meeting/performance space where temporary exhibits are hung (currently, a show of photographs of remnants of the older oil industry in the area).

Kellner told me that when the museum was first established, in the 1980s and early 90s, the exhibitry had been all temporary and focused on subjects deemed to be of local interest. “But when tourists would come here, they told us they wanted the museum to be about oil,” she said--in other words, oil is Oil City's brand, and that's why tourists came to the museum. With foundation and public funding (much of it via the Oil Heritage Region), the museum had Boston-based Christopher Chadbourne & Associates design a permanent exhibit all about oil.

While there’s some local history here, the main thrust of the exhibit is to expose the taken-for-granted ways that oil has come to permeate modern societies. There’s a wonderful section on plastics (including a 15-minute “Clueless” style video called “Fuel-less”), a graphic representation of who the world’s main producers and consumers of oil are (the U.S. actually produced nine million barrels of oil a day in 2001, but consumed twenty million), and a substantial area devoted to automobility, including a comparison of urban and suburband spatial patterns and how the latter have been shaped—unhealthily—by the car. One exhibit panel asks visitors, "How much oil do you use?" (Americans use an average of three gallons a day, all told, it turns out).
While acknowledging the productive and appealing aspects of the oil economy (for example, the "Society of the Road" section admits that "The road trip has become a classic element of American culture"--so this trip of mine is classic, not merely self-indulgent!), the exhibit pulls no punches when it comes to connecting the dots between oil and its many less desirable consequences: conflict of various kinds, environmental degradation, social disconnections, and so on. I didn't spot the actual terms "peak oil" or "climate change" anywhere (even a decade ago, when the exhibit was mounted, these weren't as common currency as they are now) but the underlying ideas are very present here.

It’s a terrific exhibit, and of course my big question about it is whether visitors are using it in critical or consequential ways. Kellner reported that their school audiences often seemed enlightened or provoked, particularly by the plastics section. (One boy, insisting that compact discs couldn’t possibly be made from oil, told her, “I’m going to have my father come down here and give you a talking-to!”) But it didn’t seem that the museum had any strong linkages with any post-carbon or peak-oil or relocalization kinds of discussions that may be going on in the region.

So the question there is whether this site is, like Lowell National Historical Park and other places that raise good questions about industrial capitalist society, a place where critical museal questioning is rather carefully enclaved away from any real-life applications of the knowledge that is so compellingly on display here. The Venango Museum isn’t as beholden to either local memory or local industry as the Drake Well and many other industrial history sites, and that has given it a freedom to create an exhibit that puts local memory and industry into a much broader context. But does it follow the usual pattern of contextualizing without making actual social connections to groups and people who are working on the issues the museum represents? More research would tell… There's certainly the potential here for some productive linkages with consequential present-day efforts.

A clock outside the Oil City Library proclaims the city to be “The Hub of Oildom” and “Gushing with Pride,” but it’s clear that the loss of industry here is very much an ongoing process, and that the city is still struggling to cope. Population continues to drop, and the big Pennzoil refinery plant north of downtown was demolished about five years ago. Quaker Oil was bought by Shell in 2002, and its operations were subsequently shifted to Houston, continuing the now almost century-old pattern of northeastern American industry moving south and away. A recent edition of a booklet called "Oil City: The Town That Grew Up With Oil," sold in the Venango Museum shop, is book-ended by addenda detailing these and other losses since the booklet was first produced in 1989, leading one to wonder whether Oil City is also likely, eventually, to die with oil.

The city is actively courting artists at present (what deindustrialized town isn't courting artists?), with an active artist relocation program that includes technical assistance and financial incentives to move to Oil City. And this of course prompts my other big question about how much room there will continue to be for these things if that new economy either (a) takes off or (b) fails to take off! Where's that crystal ball when you really need it?

A footnote: A local high school band has made a recording of 1860s popular songs about the Pennsylvania oil boom, including an 1864 ditty called "Oil on the Brain" that is quoted at the beginning of the Venango Museum exhibit:

"Our stocks, like clocks, go with a spring,
Wind up, run down again:
But all our strikes are sure to cause,
'Oil on the Brain.'"

Oil’s axis mundi: Titusville

I started my day yesterday in Titusville, home of the first oil discovery in the region (and the nation, and the world). It’s this anniversary that the oil and gas industry is celebrating next year with its “Oil 150” commemoration. The heritage signage seems geared more for people coming from the south than from the north, so I missed the Drake Well signs on my first pass through town, and fetched up at the Perry Street Station in a mob of tourists.

The mob turned out to be temporary, as the day’s train ride on the Oil Creek and Titusville Railroad was due to leave shortly and everyone but me seemed to be getting on board. I’ve often wondered what the economics of these train-and-trolley tourist ventures are—there are so many of them, and clearly they provide railroad enthusiasts with a reason to play with their great big toys, but I wonder if most of them manage to pay for themselves as well? However, despite the “modes of transportation” connection, I’m not here to think about trains. Armed with directions, I found the Drake Well on my second try.

This has the feel of an older local commemorative museum lightly overlaid with more recent professionalized historical interpretation. Ironically, the site is there largely because the early oil industry itself was so ephemeral. By the 1890s, all that remained of the original Drake Well site was a derelict pipe, and some preservation-minded local people feared that the knowledge of the location of this origin-point might be lost altogether. The property owner, the widow of an early oil explorer, donated the acre of land to a local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who put up a sizeable plaque in 1914.

The American Petroleum Institute funded the upgrading of the site in time for the 75th anniversary of oil’s discovery, in 1934, at which point it became a state historic site. The state built a re-creation of Drake’s engine house and derrick, copied from a photograph, in 1945, and constructed a new and much larger limestone museum in 1964 to house its exhibits and its collections of materials donated by its friends in the industry.

There are references to all of these layers in the Drake Well’s interpretive landscape, making this quite a complex heritage palimpsest. The place comes up strikingly short on critical interpretation (the orientation film is a boosterish "look what oil has done for our world" production), and the woman in the gift shop seemed puzzled when I noted a couple of books for sale about peak oil and the politics of oil power and asked her whether the museum was part of any kind of discussion about those issues. The two exhibitionary moments that seemed to connect even remotely to real-world oil politics were in the entry lobby of the museum, where a bulletin board included a selection of editorial cartoons about oil prices and a group of labeled bottles offered visitors an opportunity to take a “sniff test” to compare the “nose” of crude from different parts of the world, including Venezuela, Iraq, Russia, and Canada, as well as such delicacies as whale and lard oil, for the sake of comparison.

The more salient set of meanings at the Drake Well was about technical knowledge, particularly as embodied in the operating equipment in the museum’s “back forty.” Out on the far reaches of the lawn, an incredible Rube Goldberg network of wires and pumps simulates a working oil field of yesteryear, all moving at a stately and deliberate pace and making a weird series of noises (the 20 horsepower gas engine coughs and wheezes, the unlubricated irod rods squeak in their rings, the hinges of the support mechanisms creak). Most heritage sites have these somewhat ghostly presences, for example in the form of video and audio recordings, but these ones seemed particularly numinous, like a machine whose original momentum hasn’t run down yet. I know there’s actually a lot of skill and labor that goes into keeping this stuff moving, particularly the big “hit or miss” engine, but that labor also has a ghostly quality to it, since the workers are (or at least they were today) pretty invisible, older guys retired from the declining-but-not-really-gone oil industry in the area. This is really a site dedicated to local memory, and it very much has that memorial quality to it.

Going, going, but not gone

Having spent much of the morning acquiring my new e-bike (more on that below), I spent the afternoon driving past seasonally-closed oil museums and discovering that there is actually considerable oil and gas pumping and refining going on here in northwestern PA. I was also ogling fall foliage (there’s a lot of that here, too) and trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to convince myself to maintain a somewhat critical stance toward all this automobility.

I knew the oil museums were going to be closed, although I’d hoped to catch someone at the Pioneer Oil Museum in Bolivar, New York (that’s pronounced BALL-i-ver—“Home of the Deer and the Derrick,” it says on their welcome sign). I was there five years ago, and still have a souvenir bottle of light, sweet Pennsylvania crude that I bought there on my desk. Oil from this part of the country, it turns out, is of exceptionally high quality, and prized for various high-end and specialty uses. It is still pumped, and apparently becomes profitable again as extraction technology improves and whenever imported crude prices spike.



I didn’t realize, though, that the refining business was still so extensive in this part of the world. It’s obviously not the economic mainstay that it once was in places like Bradford and Warren, PA—these towns have all the hallmarks of economic decline and various attempts at revitalization. But there are still sizeable refineries in both places--the American Refining Group in Bradford, pictured below, and the United Refining Company in Warren, where I'm staying tonight. In fact, ARG is refining more petroleum from the Bradford oil field now than at any time in its history, according to its website. United refines about 70,000 barrels of Canadian crude oil a day under the Citgo brand, for distribution to convenience store gas stations.





What was more startling was to discover oil fields in the Allegeny (or Allegany, depending on which side of the NY/PA border you’re on) National Forest. Can you spot the pump in the forest in the image above? I kept driving past these and finally had to stop and tromp into the woods to get a better look. Lo and behold, the Bradford-based Minard Run Oil Company, which has been in existence since 1875, is developing the petroleum resources here, although the project has not been without controversy. It turns out that there’s been a kind of mini-oil boom going on in Pennsylvania in recent years, with 9,000 wells already pumping (almost 5,000 were drilled in 2006 alone) and another 2,000 expected to come online this year.

So the oil industry clearly isn’t gone from this region, and in fact high imported crude prices may help it to rebound somewhat. This raises some intriguing questions which I hope to be able to ponder as I move on tomorrow to the museums that are supposed to be open. Is oil actually leaving western New York and Pennsylvania, or is it here for the long term? If it’s really not leaving for the foreseeable future, how does that affect the usual dynamic of industrial history museums, which, in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s formulation, are “instrumental in the foreclosing of what is shown”*? Are these, in fact, industrial history museums per se, or are they really industry museums, created to celebrate the achievements of local enterprise rather than to interpret it critically or in larger contexts? Is there any potential at these sites for a helpfully retrospective look at how we got so mired in black gold, or is that just wishful anthropological thinking on my part?

And is there a parallel here between an industry that is kind-of-going-but-by-no-means-gone and an oil-driven economy that we-kind-of-know-we-should-unplug-from-but-we’d-really-rather-not-have-to? Today’s drive really made me think about that last point. This is a very beautiful part of the country, and a very beautiful time of year. And I have to admit I really like going for long drives by myself, especially when there’s stunning scenery to look at.



Oh, and the e-bike. The story there is that a guy from Knoxville, PA (pop. approximately 600) went to China in pursuit of machinery that he wanted to sell for his seamless gutter and ductwork business, and he noticed that everybody seemed to be riding electric bicycles, which he’d never seen in the U.S. So now he has two businesses, Liberty Seamless Enterprises and Liberty Electric Bicycle Company.

I bonded with the bike about forty-five seconds into my test ride, and I would post a picture of it here except that at present it’s stuffed into the back seat of my car. (It looks a lot like the bike over the bar in the restaurant where I ate dinner in Warren, PA tonight, except that mine has a battery behind the seat post, it’s not festooned in electric lights, and it’s not pink.) There’s not a ton of room in the back seat of a Jetta, so as much as I’d like to get it out and ride it around some more, I don’t want to undo the work of the three helpful guys at Liberty who helped me wedge it in there.

I’m not complaining about the Jetta, though. We just turned 500 miles on this tank of fuel (about a 25/75 biodiesel/petrodiesel blend) and the gauge is still above a quarter of a tank. Jimmy Carter was right: slowing down to 55 mph does make a difference. It helps a bit to dispel my guilt-induced confusion about whether I should be wholeheartedly enjoying this road trip!

*Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 159.