Emlenton
Franklin
Oil City
Tionesta
Titusville
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Tidioute
Endeavor
Warren
Sheffield
Bradford
Smethport
Ridgway

Styles

Adam
Greek Revival
Classical Revival
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Italianate
Second Empire
Stick
Queen Anne
Shingle
Colonial Revival
Neoclassical
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English Cottage

OIL CITY 

The railroads approached Oil City three ways.  The Allegheny Valley Railroad, a Pennsylvania Railroad affiliate, came up the river from Pittsburgh and reached Oil City’s South Side, then called Laytonia, in 1867.  In 1866, the Oil City and Pithole Railroad, built by Oil City residents Jacob J. Vandergrift and George Forman, arrived in town from Oleopolis up the river.  The Oil City and Pithole was obtained that same year by the Warren and Franklin Railroad which had a line up the Allegheny River to Irvine on the Philadelphia and Erie, a major carrier to the seaboard and another Pennsylvania Railroad affiliate.  That same year, 1866, the Atlantic and Great Western arrived in downtown Oil City by crossing a bridge over Oil Creek.  The Atlantic and Great Western was allied with and eventually owned by the Erie Railroad.  In 1870, the Jamestown and Franklin was extended to Oil City on tracks parallel with the Atlantic and Great Western’s, though it went through the tunnel on the west side of the creek and then up the valley.  The Jamestown and Franklin was associated with the New York Central.  The competition for the crude and refined oil trade being shipped from the region among the big three, long distance trunk lines - the Pennsylvania, the Erie, and the New York Central- resulted in distorted freight rates and rebates which favored the Cleveland refineries and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of Ohio.  The railroad bridge over Oil Creek is particularly significant because it leads west to Cleveland and is a tangible reminder of where and how the railroad rate wars of the late 1860's and early 1870's played out.
 

	Railroad Bridge Over Oil Creek at Oil City, Pennsylvania

Pipelines were used in the 1870's to gather the oil from the producing wells and transport it to the tank cars at railheads.  In 1877, a number of local men including J. J. Vandergrift and Marcus Hulings combined their pipeline interests and those of others to form the United Pipelines.  The pipeline company was in fact controlled by Standard Oil of Ohio and operated as a Standard Oil subsidiary.  Vandergrift was not only the President of the company but sat as a director on the Standard Oil board.  In 1881, the National Transit Company was formed with the purchase of the entire stock of the United Pipelines with its 3000 miles of pipelines and over 30 million barrels of storage capacity.  To this gathering and storage system was added Standard Oil’s long distance pipelines to Buffalo and Cleveland and one under construction from Olean, New York to Bayonne, New Jersey.  Operational headquarters remained in Oil City.  Very soon, this Standard Oil pipeline transportation company was regularly pumping crude oil long distances and taking crude and refined oil traffic away from the very railroads that had  treated Standard Oil so favorably in previous decades.