The oil boom affected a massive region stretching from Titusville, in southwestern Pennsylvania, north along the Allegheny River Valley to Olean and as far east as Wellsville. The northern boundary of this rich Pennsylvania crude oil field ran roughly from the famed oil spring in present-day Cuba, into the valley formed by Five Mile Creek in Allegany. South and west, oil could also be found at Tunungwant Creek, running south into Bradford, PA. 

The slimy substance carried on the surface of the aptly named Oil Creek from its source in the hills to the Allegheny River inspired Major Adam Hoops in 1804 to suggest a unique name for the fledgling settlement at the juncture of the two waterways. Hoops, a Revolutionary War officer, had come to the newly acquired western part of New York with orders from Robert Morris to survey the considerable holdings he had purchased through the Holland Land Company, and to look for a suitable “site for a great city on the confluence of the Allegheny and one of its tributaries.” 

Hoops liked what he saw at the point where the Ischua Creek met the Allegheny River. And when Morris went bankrupt, Hoops quickly obtained over 20,000 acres of his holdings, consisting of land that he had surveyed around the confluence in. With little more than his signature, and because of his friendship with Alexander Hamilton, Hoops obtained the deed to the fertile valley plain and the small settlement that had been established in 1765—and began to plan his city. Competing names for the settlement among the inhabitants included “Ischua,” the original name from the natives living in the area, and “Hamilton,” in honor of the former Treasurer of the United States, but neither had gained total support. 

Instead, Hoops had his own idea. He coined the name “Olean” on April 15, 1804, when he wrote to Joseph Ellicott in Batavia. Naming the settlement, as well as the creek flowing into the Allegheny River, Hoops gave instructions to Ellicott as to how the survey of his newly acquired lands should be titled, deriving a name from the Latin word, “Oleum,” meaning oil.

“It is proposed to me at New York to drop the Indian name Ischue or Ischua [and] I have concluded to do as proposed. The neighborhood of Oil Spring suggests a name different in sound tho’ perhaps not of different meaning, which I wish to adopt. It is Olean. You will do me a favor by assisting me to establish this name…To begin; you will greatly oblige me by addressing the first letter you may have occasion to write me after I receive the surveys to the Mouth of Olean.” 

But Hoops, like his contemporaries, did not foresee a great city on the site based upon oil, which at that time was useful only for medicinal purposes and little else. Candles were still used for lighting and wood logs thrown onto the hearth provided heat and fuel for cooking. Instead, Hoops envisioned a transportation hub, with lumber from the nearby hills and food produced on the fertile land being marketed to the thousands of settlers moving west into the Ohio Country via the Allegheny River. Such a dream was not to be, however, and within a few years Hoops fell into financial difficulties and the small village called Olean Point began to struggle as the newly completed Erie Canal replaced the Allegheny as the water route to the West.

Nearly 40 years would pass before oil fueled an energy revolution, sparking an economic boom that would save Olean and give birth to the great city that Hoops and Morris had once envisioned. Colonel Edwin L. Drake first tapped the extensive Marcellus shale formation’s almost limitless holdings of what is called “sweet crude oil” or “Pennsylvania Crude” outside Titusville in 1859. Drake’s adjustments to the drilling techniques developed by Connecticut’s James Townsend enabled him to penetrate deep underground for the abundant pools of oil throughout the region. Drake found such a pool in Titusville at a depth of 69 feet.  Though further drilling was slowed by the Civil War, other speculators seeking the promise of wealth soon followed, and with each successful well the purchase price of the next parcel of land along the Allegheny went higher. 

The use of oil to make lamp kerosene and lubricants for the growing factories of the Industrial Revolution increased the demand. As the demand grew, so too did the price that refiners paid for the crude oil.  Thus, “Wildcatting,” or drilling for oil, became a way to get rich fast. By 1879, the price of a barrel of oil was sufficiently high to drive this “Black Gold Rush.” 

As early as 1861, the search for oil in north Olean and in the Town of Allegany brought an onslaught of land speculation. A placard posted in Olean at the time announced that bids would be received for sinking oil wells along Olean Creek north to Hinsdale. A deed from February 20, 1861, mentioned in an Olean Herald story, included the phrase “a working oil well” in the description of the property where the Bartlett Country Club now stands.

In 1879, an ex-Confederate cavalryman named Orville P. Taylor successfully drilled his “Triangle No. 1” well three and a half miles southwest of Wellsville at a depth of 1,177 feet. With that, the floodgates were opened for others to buy land and begin felling trees to construct the massive wooden drilling rigs that were capable of drilling to such depths. Impoverished by the war, Taylor had come north to get a fresh start with family who had settled in the area. 

But every success story mirrored a failure and even the fortunes made by the lucky ones were easily lost to the unscrupulous criminals and charlatans who lurked everywhere. In towns like Richburg, for example, where the population grew from 180 to a wild frontier town of 7,000 in just nine months after the striking of oil, the legitimate doctors, lawyers, restaurants and other businesses stood next to numerous gambling houses and brothels. Crime grew exponentially, and the numbers of local police and justices of the peace increased to deal with the tremendous rise in arrests. 

Lacking any sophisticated methods for finding oil, eager drillers willingly purchased the services of con-men who worked the oil towns hawking various “skills” for finding oil and selling superstitious devices for locating the substance. Often these shysters were just one step ahead of the law. One of the most bizarre methods for finding oil, and interestingly the most successful, was the divining rod, a device traditionally used to find water. It found favor and recorded a successful track record—not because of the tool’s reliability, but simply because there was so much oil around. 

The fortune that could be made by striking a pool of “black gold” did not come without great risk and toil. The high cost of obtaining a clear title to a plot of land and the expensive equipment needed for the endeavor had to be backed with an ample supply of capital. In addition, the time necessary to build and outfit a drilling rig required almost around-the-clock work. Drilling an oil well was not the work of a single prospector, but often a “company” of men who had pooled their money and committed their labor to the shared effort. Often they were down to their last dollar as the drill plowed deeper into the rock.

At the turn of the 20th century, nearly 200 producing oil rigs covered the valley floor and hillsides around Olean. The first rigs were run by horse power. Later, steam was used to power them, fed with a steady diet of firewood taken from the surrounding hillsides. Later, liquid-fueled engines became widespread with the majority using converted tug-boat engines made in Buffalo by the Buffalo Gasoline Motor Company on Niagara Street.

Standing upward of 65 feet tall with supporting timbers two feet square, each rig took a week to build and start up. A drill bit (actually a weight) was attached to a two-inch hemp rope, which cut through hundreds of feet of rock by pounding down and smashing the thin shale, accompanied by the constant whine of the big wheels driven by leather belts. When the drilling crews were not sloshing around in the ankle-deep mud made by the torrential spring and fall rains or fighting the bitter winter cold, they were slapping at summer’s mosquitos and black flies. Repairs to the equipment were never ending and breakdowns were expensive. Always watchful of the soil and rock brought up from the hole, excitement would build when oil-bearing sand would surface from the shaft. At that point the driller would call for the “shooter.” 

The shooter was a well-paid professional who had what was perhaps the most dangerous job in the entire petroleum industry. He would arrive in a buggy carrying dozens of cans carefully packed and insulated against shock because these containers held highly volatile nitroglycerine. Often pouring almost 25 quarts of nitro into several long tin tubes called “torpedoes” before attaching a detonating cap, the shooter would lower the armed tubes down the shaft. All this had to be done with the upmost of care because any false move would spell disaster. The next step was the launching of the “go devil” – so named by local farmers because it sounded “like the devil coming after them” in the screech or whine it made in a shaft or a pipe. The eight-pound pointed cast iron weight, when forcefully thrown down the shaft by the shooter, would contact the detonating cap and cause an explosion. When the shooter yelled, everyone would run for cover, having only seconds to reach a safe distance. 

If fortune fell upon the owners of the rig, the resulting explosion would send a column of oil cascading up the shaft and through the timbers of the rig, but sometimes a second shot would have to be prepared to get the oil to flow. The company usually had no time to celebrate, however, as the numerous fires routinely used around the camp for cooking or lighting would ignite into raging infernos, fed by the spilling oil, and have to be extinguished by the frantic crew. At that point, one of the oil-soaked men of the company would be dispatched to the nearest town to get a device called an oil saver, which was used to cap the well and divert the flow of oil through a pipe and into the storage barrels. If the well was a good producer, the barrels would be sold to a refiner in the nearest town. This activity would take up the labor of the entire company and the rewards would finally begin to flow into the pockets of the investors. 

Finding great quantities of oil was one thing, but it was fruitless until payment for the discovery could be arranged with a refiner. Thus, it was the start-up of Olean’s first refinery and the building of a pipeline that became the foundation for the booming city that Hoops, Morris and later even Nicholas Devereux, the founder of St. Bonaventure University, envisioned. 

At first, small cottage industries were established by entrepreneurs who built small refining stills, selling them to the wildcatters for the production of kerosene. These small refiners would then peddle the lamp oil locally or sell to another middleman for distribution. But as demand for this new fuel grew, and the successful drilling in Bradford and around Wellsville provided an increased flow of raw material, the small refiners could not keep up with the volume or the booming market needs in the large, East Coast cities. Early on, the Allegheny River provided a means to get the raw oil to market. Using the river as a highway, the oil was poured into wooded barrels, the best of which were made in Salamanca and hauled to “ports” along the river where they were lashed to flat barges and moved downstream to Oil City in Venango County, PA. 

There, a large facility based on Samuel Kier’s Pittsburgh refinery design had been built. But the seasonal freezing and flooding of the river, along with the slow speed of water transport, led to efforts to speed the process and keep up with demand. The expanding market likewise created a demand for larger and more efficient local facilities, closer to the producing fields, to supply sufficient quantities of the new lighting product. Early methods of making fuel that could burn cleanly prompted people like George Bissel to start the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company in Titusville to collect, refine, ship and sell the new lamp oil to the East Coast markets via rail. 

These efforts were mirrored in Olean. Starting in 1861, North Olean became home to William W. Eastman’s Olean Oil Company on West Sullivan Street, which Eastman sold to the Wing, Wilbur & Company Oil Refinery in 1876. He chose the site because it had ready access to the New York and Erie Railroad, which had come to North Olean in 1851. By 1874, the first pipeline into Olean was completed by John H. Dills, bringing over 20,000 barrels of oil a day from the newly-struck Bradford oil fields over the 2,350-foot Rock City Mountain. When fire destroyed the huge Acme refinery in Titusville, the company moved to Olean, where it was later purchased by the Eclipse Oil Company before becoming known as the Vacuum Oil Company (a subsidiary of Standard Oil) in 1890.

Don Otten stayed with Tri-City and was named the NBL’s Most Valuable Player during the 1948-49 season. He continued with the Blackhawks when they joined the NBA in 1949 and then played for four different teams through the 1952-53 season. In 1949, he and his brother Mac (another BGSU star) became the first brothers to play for the same team in an NBA game. And, on November 24, 1949, he broke the NBA record for personal fouls with eight in a single game. He was allowed to remain in the game because the team was down to only five players and league rules allowed those final five players to stay on the court. It’s a unique record, likely to never be broken.

Nat Hickey put himself into a few games while coaching the Bisons at age 44, and two years later he played some additional games for the Providence Steamrollers. This made him the oldest player to ever play in an NBA game, a distinction he still holds.

After selling his interest in the Bisons, Ferris returned to New York State, becoming vice president of the NBL and then general manager of the Syracuse Nats. Leading the reorganization of the Nats, he signed superstar Dolph Schayes away from the BAA’s New York Knicks in 1948, a major coup for the NBL. He also signed Al Cervi and Billy Gabor and those three laid the foundation for Syracuse’s NBA championship team in 1955.

Tensions between the two leagues continued but in the spring of 1949, Ferris began meeting with executives from the BAA about a possible merger. That same year, he convinced four of the five top players from the University of Kentucky’s national championship team to join the NBL and, in a startling development, gave them part-ownership rights in a new team, the Indianapolis Olympians. This was the last straw in the fight between the two leagues and later that year, six teams from the NBL joined 11 teams from the BAA to form the National Basketball Association, with play to begin that fall.

While with the Nats, Ferris teamed up with Syracuse owner Danny Biasone to develop a 24-second shot clock. Something of a math whizz, he devised that the clock time should be 24 seconds by dividing the number of seconds in a 48-minute game (2,880) by the average number of shots taken in a game (120) to get to the magic number. The NBA was initially reluctant to implement the new rule, but scoring jumped by almost 15 points per game when it did during the 1954-55 season. The modern, high scoring professional game came into being almost overnight. Ferris remained in the league for only one more season before starting a very successful career in real estate. He died on June 1, 1993, of Huntington’s disease.

As quickly as the oil was delivered to these expanding refineries, the finished products were shipped out by rail. An Olean Herald story from 1879 estimated that 150 tank cars were leaving the refineries each day. By 1903, Standard Oil had consolidated all refining activities in Olean as the Vacuum Oil Works and by 1931, when the refinery complex became known as Socony-Vacuum Oil Company (Socony stands for Standard Oil Company of New York), new methods of collecting and storing the oil from the regional oil fields were in use. A 3,000-mile pipeline network had been spread throughout the region, bringing the oil to the spreading “farm” of massive storage tanks that popped up like mushrooms. The oil refined in the facility—labeled as the largest in the world at that time—was then sent to the East Coast by a six-inch pipeline running 325 miles to Bayonne, NJ. By 1884, a total of four pipelines were moving 50,000 barrels of oil a day.

For 40 years, a massive checkerboard of storage tanks called the Allegany Tank Farm occupied over 368 acres of the flat bottom land stretching west of the city limits of Olean to the then-tiny campus of St. Bonaventure College. The “tank farm” held 300 such structures, positioned on both sides of the river. Another tank farm followed Olean Creek north nearly to Hinsdale. The largest of the tanks measured 30-feet high and 90-feet in diameter, with a capacity between 30,000 and 80,000 barrels. The sides and bottoms were made of wrought iron plates measuring ten-by-five-feet, a half-inch thick at the bottom and a quarter of an inch thick at the top. Costing up to $16,000 each, a tank’s footprint approached 300 square feet, including a surrounding four-to-five-foot earthen embankment engineered to contain a spill if the tanks were compromised by fire or explosion.

Lightning was the most common cause of fire because the older tanks had wooden roofs. With flammable vapors always present, due to evaporation of the crude oil in warm weather, any strike near a tank would easily ignite the structure. After many such accidents, including a massive one that burned for several days in 1930, preventative measures were instituted to protect the tanks from further damage. Steel rods were erected among groups of tanks and in some cases the wooden roofs were made vapor-tight. In addition, steel cables were attached like spokes on a wheel to the edges of the tank in order to absorb lighting strikes.

The fate of the tank farm and the massive Socony-Vacuum refinery was sealed when a cheaper source of oil was discovered in Texas and Oklahoma. By 1940, the tanks were taken apart and the steel sent off to support the war effort. After the war, much of the land was sold for commercial development along Route 17, including the former Castle Restaurant, Motel and Golf Course complex. A large portion of the former tank farm became the Charles J. Rehler Dairy Bar and Milk Processing Plant before its closure. St. Bonaventure University was also able to expand eastward. Socony-Vacuum retained 50 acres fronting the Allegheny River as a recreation and picnic ground that would later become the city-owned Gargoyle Park (the Gargoyle was the corporate symbol of Socony-Vacuum). By 1950, only a few tanks remained, primarily near the railyard and refinery on Buffalo Street in North Olean near where the Dresser-Rand plant now stands.

Today, the tanks, derricks and refineries have all disappeared, and little remains to enlighten a visitor or educate a native-born resident under the age of 60 about Olean’s oil boom. Other than a mosaic on the front of the Olean Municipal Building, with its representation of an oil derrick, or the eroding footprint of the tank farm’s earthen berm hidden by dense overgrowth to the west of Gargoyle Park, no surviving memorial attests to the region’s incredible 75-year oil run. A glimmer of the ghost of “King Oil” can be seen in the stately Victorian/Colonial Revival homes in three Olean neighborhoods. Many in the Oak Hill Park district, along Main Street to the north of Olean General Hospital and near the stately St. Mary of the Angels Basilica on West Henley Street were built during the oil boom years. Olean’s Bartlett House and St. Bonaventure’s Friedsam Library continue to recall the period with displays and by maintaining reference and research collections, but the connection to this oil-rich past has been weakened and frayed by the passage of time.

The oil chapter in Olean’s history has been eclipsed by the city’s more recent industrial period, which propelled it into yet another economic boom during and after World War II. Fifty years later, a few of these industrial giants began shuttering their doors while others remain, providing a smaller manufacturing base in the area. But the trend of factory closures and consolidation may signal the need for the next big boom.