Pithole: Pennsylvania's Oil Ghost Town
Pennsylvania
About two miles northeast of this marker, one of the most spectacular booms and busts in American history played out in under two years. In January eighteen sixty-five, a well called the United States Number One struck oil on a farm in Venango County, Pennsylvania. Within months a city called Pithole appeared from nothing.
By the summer of eighteen sixty-five it had fifteen thousand residents, two banks, dozens of hotels, a daily newspaper, a post office handling more mail than any city in Pennsylvania except Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and its own short-line railroad. Then the wells began to fail. Oil pressure dropped.
By eighteen sixty-six the population was in freefall. Within a few years the land sold at auction for four dollars and thirty-seven cents. Today the site is a state historic site.
Visitors walk streets that exist only as faint depressions in the grass.
