The McDonald Oil Field
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Just west of Pittsburgh, in a landscape that today looks completely ordinary, lies the site of what was briefly the most productive oil field on earth. Oil was first struck near McDonald in eighteen ninety. Within two years the field had climbed to the top of global output rankings.
In eighteen ninety-one and eighteen ninety-two, the McDonald Oil Field yielded more petroleum than any other field in the world. That same year, eighteen ninety-one, Pennsylvania recorded its all-time highest annual oil production: roughly thirty-two million barrels in a single calendar year, a figure the state has never approached since.
Within three miles of this marker stood the two wells that set Pennsylvania's record for daily production rates, the Mevey Number One and the Mathews Number One. The boom was ferocious and short-lived, as most Pennsylvania oil booms were. Within a decade the fields were in steep decline. But for those two years in the early eighteen nineties, the hills around McDonald were the energy capital of the planet.
