Henry R. Rouse and the Rouseville Oil Well Disaster

On April seventeenth, eighteen sixty-one, an oil well at the edge of Oil Creek Valley exploded and caught fire, killing around nineteen people in one of the earliest disasters of the Pennsylvania oil boom. Among the dead was Henry R. Rouse, a former teacher and Warren County legislator who had invested successfully in oil leases in the region that would soon bear his name.

As he lay dying from his burns, Rouse dictated a will that left generous provisions for road construction and care of the poor in the surrounding area. Among its residents at the time was a three-year-old girl named Ida Tarbell, who would grow up to become one of the most celebrated investigative journalists in American history and a fierce critic of the oil industry that had already shaped, and then killed, the man the town was named for.