The Petroleum Centre Daily Record (Petroleum Center, Pa.)

• 1869–1873
• Newspaper

Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.

1,219 issues from 1869 to 1873, published in Petroleum Center, Pennsylvania, digitised for Chronicling America.

The world’s first commercially successful oil well struck black gold on August 27, 1859, in Titusville in Venango County. Within weeks, oil derricks and boom towns sprouted. Petroleum Centre, a company town of the Central Petroleum Company, was staked out in spring 1864 on Oil Creek between Titusville and Oil City. (Petroleum Centre is spelled as “Center” in some writings, obeying the 1891 edict of the United States Board on Geographical Names.)

Without government, public services, or law enforcement, “Vice in every form flourished and acts of violence were of frequent occurrence,” Herbert C. Bell wrote in his 1890 History of Venango County, Pennsylvania, Its Past and Present. He added that Petroleum Centre was not “without moral balance. When the objectionable elements went too far they were promptly attended to, by mob law.” Petroleum Centre supported a bank (the only brick building in town), three churches, an opera house, stores, many saloons and houses of ill repute, and one newspaper. William Howard Longwell started the Pithole Daily Record in September 1865 with partners Charles C. Wicker and Warren C. Plummer. Oil was found in January 1865 in what quickly became Pithole City. By September, the population was 15,000, plummeting by November when the wells failed.

Longwell moved his newspaper to Petroleum Centre in May 1868, renaming it the Petroleum Centre Daily Record, subtitled “continuation of the Pithole Daily Record,” with Plummer as editor. The four-page…

Genres

News

Published in

Petroleum Center, Pennsylvania, United States

Language

English

Collection

Chronicling America

Licence or status

None stated by the archive

Rights

The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.

Credit

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities

Who can read it

Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)

Archive

Library of Congress