The First Oil Pipeline in America

In the fall of eighteen sixty-five, workers laid an iron pipe roughly five miles through the Pennsylvania hills. At the time it seemed like a simple engineering fix. It turned out to be the idea that would shape how petroleum moves around the world.

The pipeline ran from the oil fields at Pithole, one of the most feverish boomtowns in American history, to a railhead on the Oil Creek Railroad. Before the pipe, teamsters hauled oil by barrel through rutted roads, and they fought the pipeline with sabotage and threats. But the pumps prevailed. Oil moved faster and cheaper than horses ever could. When the Pithole wells ran dry, the pipeline fell out of use, but the idea it proved could not be unburied. This ground marks the birth of an industry.