Uncle Billy Smith: The Man Who Drilled the First Oil Well

History remembers Colonel Edwin Drake as the man behind the world's first successful oil well, drilled near Titusville, Pennsylvania in August eighteen fifty-nine. But the person who actually made it work was a blacksmith named William A. Smith, known to everyone as Uncle Billy.

Drake hired Smith and his sons to operate the steam-powered percussion drill. When the bit dropped into a crevice at sixty-nine and a half feet the crew stopped for the day, and the next morning it was Uncle Billy who found oil rising in the hole. He had built the drilling tools himself in his blacksmith shop, not far from here near Tarentum.

The well launched the modern petroleum industry. Thousands of wells followed within months across Pennsylvania and eventually the world. According to the state marker, Uncle Billy Smith died in eighteen ninety and is buried roughly one hundred twenty feet to the southeast of this marker.