T.B. T.B. Whitacre wrote those lines on July 30, 1865 to his grandfather. In January, just seven months ago, he and hundreds of others, most of whom were speculators, were led to an oil strike near Pithole Creek at Holmden Farm. In May, in the green forest of the Venango Valley, a settlement was spread out full of trees, pines, rattlesnakes, bears, deer and porcupines. Throughout August, it was easily overgrown with inhabitants and debris and obstructed by houses. Through Christmas 1865, nearly 20,000 people, including Whitacre, lived there.

Until all of this, only two farms populated this land, and the inhabitants could rely on their fingers.
In January 1866, the third busiest post office in America was in full service after only Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Fifty-four hotels lined the avenues, the first in the country to be completely lit by oil and so dark as a deep marsh. Three churches were also present with theatres, two trains and the county’s first daily newspaper. And here was installed the world’s first pipeline.
“I don’t think in such a short period there was a city built,” Whitacre wrote in wonder. “About 1,000 carpenters are constructing homes, they claim. Someone can hardly hear himself talking, the sound of the hammer and the chatter of the crowds cause too much noise in town. You don’t know the large number of people here.

The first hotel, the Astor, was constructed in one day. The Chase House and Danforth House were both situated on the intersection of Holmden Street and First Street and were opened on Christmas Eve 1865. The Jewelry Shop of Isham was on Holmden Street too. The restaurant Terrapin Lunch was like that. Dr. Christie ‘s house on First Street, Prather and Wadsworth’s bank building, along with homes, dance houses and law bureaux, was born, producing a beautiful, muddy place, founded on wealth, desire and greed. All collapsed after oil collapsed.

This became the world’s fastest-growing settlement in the valley of America.
The population will decline to less than 10 percent in one year’s time. It had vanished within four years. The Danforth House sells for just $16 as firewood.

Western Pennsylvania was the oil region, and Pithole was the best and worst for a fleeting moment in history. This held all the hopes and ambition and business that would succeed and fail.

Once Col. Drake first found oil here in Western Pennsylvania ‘s green wilderness, America was at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution and was actively trying to find the solution to the need for gasoline. Thanks to strong demand , the price of whale oil was only economical for the wealthy to light their homes at night. Lard oil, tallow oil, and shale oil were produced, but nothing inexpensive burned brilliantly, cleanly, and safely.

It was a issue that slowed the growth of urbanization and industrialisation. No lights at night meant no work at the plants or open shops in the cities.

Oil was the hero. Oil was hero. The Drake Well boom started in Western Pennsylvania, 12 miles from here. The first well drilled along Pithole Creek, Frazier Well, found oil on January 7, 1865, delivering an unheard of 250 barrels of oil daily.
Speculators got $8 a barrel, marking the launch of the Pithole oil boom and the construction of the frontier metropolis with the eye wink. But Pithole was soon a survivor of the excess of resources. The wells produced so much oil that by 1866 a deficit cut the price to $2,50 a gallon.

The population fell from 20,000 in 1865 to less than 2,000 in less than one year.

In short, all remnants of the city vanished.

The entire community was bought for $1,500 by a businessman to clear the debt. The former newspaper editor acquired the property 100 years later and donated it to the Historical and Museum Commission of Pennsylvania. It is creepy to walk down its streets and now muddied roads. The only sound you detect is the breeze on the mountain ‘s face.

A hawk is overhead, as some bucks skirt back the hemlock, the pines and the luxuriant forests that cover the scarred lands once ravished by the flood of oil. Trout fishing is still plentiful and scat indicates the presence of bears.
Pithole is a ghost city today. The words of what was once lost for a long time. We are reminded that we go every day through once flowing cities and villages: Rust Belt cities along the Ohio river, silk villages in Carolinas or towns along lines that are no longer halted by trains and highways.

Although the demise of Pithole was so swift that it lost nostalgia, nobody else was invested in it. Slow deaths in many towns and communities become more traumatic as they fail to survive. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, even larger cities such as Richmond, New York and Portland are experiencing the impact of protests and riots and that emptiness that happens when people just stop coming to town.
Many wells and foundations exist, but all that remains here are stairs to the Pithole Methodist Church’s rectory on the top of a hill overlooking the area. It proceeds to the heavens symbolically. A plaque set on the church altar in 1959 reads, “It remained after everything was gone.”