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OIL CITY 

	The Allegheny River at Oil City, Pennsylvania

To fully appreciate both the natural beauty of Oil City and the essential transportation, management and financial roles in the oil industry the community played in the late nineteenth century, you must get out on the town’s four bridges...and look around.  The Allegheny River flows from east to west as it passes by.  Oil Creek completes its journey south to join the Allegheny River at Oil City.  Oil City did not exist before the discovery of oil along the banks and small tributaries of Oil Creek in the early 1860's.
 

	Oil Creek at Oil City, Pennsylvania

The crude oil was shipped down Oil Creek in wood barrels carried on flat bottom boats.  The boats were of shallow draft, but a successful journey still required the creek be flooded by natural rains or snow melt.  In the dry weather, dams were constructed until the pools behind were of sufficient height for a man-made flood.  The dams were let go in sequence, and the resultant rush of water allowed hundreds of boats filled with thousands of barrels of oil to race wildly down the Oil Creek Valley to a fate not always certain.  Sometimes, the stampede of oil-filled boats did not make it to the river before wrecking on the piers of the Center Street bridge and creating a massive pileup of splintered boats, broken barrels and a monumental black, foul smelling, oozing mess.  Ice jams and major floods are not uncommon along Oil Creek.  In the nineteenth century, several catastrophic fires occurred as a result of these floods.  The Great Flood and Fire of 1892 destroyed most every structure constructed of wood in Oil City’s North Side commercial district on both sides of Oil Creek.  The loss of life was heavy.
 

	Oil Creek Entering the Allegheny River at Oil City, Pennsylvania

In the 1860's, Oil City was the staging area where much of the oil gathered in the Oil Region was shipped to the rest of the world.  For five years the oil from the creek was transferred to larger flat bottoms or bulk barges for shipment down the river to Franklin or Pittsburgh.  Difficult, if not impossible, to navigate in the summer, the river proved alluringly beautiful and frustratingly undependable for shipping crude out of the region.  More dependable transportation was required and was provided by the coming of the railroads.