Olean: Where Standard Oil Was Born

The city of Olean takes its name from the Latin word for oil, and that is no accident. For roughly sixty years following the Civil War, this corner of Cattaraugus County was one of the most important oil-producing regions on earth.

The area was first settled in eighteen oh four as a lumber camp, and the town's founders noticed the oily seeps along the creek beds and named the place accordingly. But it took half a century before anyone figured out how to extract the oil in meaningful quantities. The first serious drilling at Rock City, southwest of town, began in eighteen seventy-seven, and what drillers found there was astonishing: an oil field that geologists later ranked as New York's first major commercial producer.

What followed transformed the region. In eighteen seventy-four, the Olean Petroleum Company completed a fourteen-mile pipeline from the Pennsylvania fields to town, and by eighteen seventy-seven oil was flowing into Olean at twenty thousand barrels a day. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil took notice immediately. Standard built a refinery here and then, in eighteen eighty-one, laid the first long-distance crude oil pipeline ever constructed, stretching three hundred fifteen miles from Olean to Bayonne, New Jersey, crossing mountains and rivers along the way. For a period in the early eighteen eighties, Olean operated the largest oil tank farm in the world, a vast city of steel storage tanks on the edge of town.

Historians who have studied this period say that from the end of the Civil War to the nineteen thirties, the fields around Olean and neighboring Allegany County were, collectively, the largest oil-producing region in the world, and that no other region came close.

The oil gradually played out, and Olean found other industries. But the name it carries, and the elegant late-Victorian downtown that oil money built, trace back to those decades when this small city was at the center of the modern world's most important industrial story.