Feeding The Boom

Jul 25
5 min read

Oil Region Tales — Episode 7

Listen to Episode 7

In the early Oil Region, finding petroleum was only part of the challenge. Thousands of workers, travelers, teamsters, and speculators arrived faster than new towns could house or feed them.

In this episode of Oil Region Tales, we visit the farmhouse tables, crowded taverns, grocery stores, and hotel dining rooms that kept the boom moving. From shared dishes at Pithole’s Holmden farmhouse to seventy-five-cent meal tickets and packed dining rooms at Shaffer’s Farm, feeding the Oil Region quickly became an industry of its own.

The wells produced petroleum, but the kitchens kept the boom alive.

Listen to Episode 7 of Oil Region Tales:

Interpretive sketch inspired by the farmhouse tables, crowded taverns, hotel dining rooms, and unnamed workers who fed laborers, travelers, and fortune seekers during Pennsylvania’s early oil boom, when even finding a meal became part of the rush. Illustration created for the Venango Museum.

People came to Pithole Creek chasing wells, leases, jobs, and profits. But before they could pursue any of those things, they needed something more ordinary: they needed dinner.

Oil Region writer John J. McLaurin later recalled that visitors ate at the Holmden farmhouse before Pithole’s first hotel was built. Food came on large serving dishes, and everyone helped themselves.¹

McLaurin wrote his account more than thirty years after Pithole’s boom, so it is a later recollection rather than a report from the time. Still, it captures the problem clearly: people arrived before the town was ready to feed them.

Pithole’s first hotel, the grandly named Astor House, was said to be a simple balloon-frame building put up in just one day.¹ The people came first. The dining rooms had to catch up.

Waiting for a Chair

This problem was not limited to Pithole. In November and December 1864, writer J. H. A. Bone spent three weeks traveling through Venango County’s oil country. He warned future visitors to carry a lunch (or at least crackers and cheese) in case they could not reach a tavern by dinner. He also suggested that anyone unwilling to endure bad roads, rough accommodations, and disappointing meals might be better off turning back.²

At Shaffer’s Farm, Bone watched passengers leave the train and rush toward the hotel. They crowded through a narrow passage leading to the dining room, only to discover that they needed to buy a seventy-five-cent meal ticket before entering.² Those who already had tickets entered and filled the available chairs. The newcomers had to push their way back toward the bar and buy tickets while the dining room filled.

Bone reported that one tavern at Shaffer’s Farm served between two hundred and four hundred people every day. He was less impressed by the food. The price, he joked, was first-class, even when the meal was not.²

At Shaffer’s Farm, eating took money, patience, and quickness. A chair did not stay empty for long.

The Groceries Arrive

At first, feeding the boom meant making do with whatever was available: a farmhouse table, a quickly built hotel, or a crowded tavern dining room. But hunger soon became business.

Charles H. Harris’s 1866 history of the Oil Region devoted several pages to the businesses appearing in Petroleum Centre. Harris wrote in a very positive, sometimes promotional style, praising nearly every owner he mentioned. Even so, his account provides a valuable near-contemporary record of the town’s growing food economy.

According to Harris, Alex Van Valen and S. Pellett opened a large grocery store in Petroleum Centre in the spring of 1865. Harris said they brought the first stock of groceries into the local market and initially faced little competition.³

Competition soon followed. George W. King opened a store that, according to Harris, supplied the “necessities of life.” As Petroleum Centre grew, King and his sons opened a second location. H. C. Coulter opened another grocery in the spring of 1866, choosing a spot near the railroad terminus.³

Restaurants appeared too. John Schuyler erected a building and opened what Harris described as a first-class restaurant. Part of another building owned by Miller and Pfeiffer was also used as a restaurant. Hall and Moulton opened a grocery house beside the Petroleum Centre House, giving nearby residents easier access to supplies.³

In a short time, food moved beyond the farmhouse table. It became part of the boom economy.

Selling More than a Meal

Hotels did not sell beds alone. McLaurin later described the Morey-Farm Hotel, just above Pithole, as charging twenty-one dollars a week for board. Guests found gas lighting, steam heat, a telegraph office, a barber shop, waiters, spring mattresses, and cooking that he compared favorably with meals in larger cities.¹

The difference is striking. At the beginning of the rush, newcomers helped themselves from shared dishes at the Holmden farmhouse. As Pithole grew, a nearby hotel was selling food, warmth, service, communication, and comfort together. That did not mean every meal was good or every dining room was comfortable. Bone’s experience at Shaffer’s Farm makes that clear. But people kept arriving.

A worker needed breakfast before heading toward the wells. A teamster needed food before returning to the road. A traveler needed dinner while waiting for transportation. A speculator might eat quickly, make a deal, and leave for the next town. Every one of them had to be fed.

The Work Behind the Meal

The surviving accounts are much better at naming hotel owners, merchants, and restaurant proprietors than they are at naming the people who performed the daily work. Someone had to receive deliveries and keep the kitchens supplied. Someone had to keep the stove burning. Someone had to prepare the food, carry it into the dining room, clear the tables, wash the dishes, and begin again for the next crowd.

McLaurin noted that Black waiters worked at the Morey-Farm Hotel, but he did not preserve their names.¹ Much of the other kitchen and dining-room labor remains just as anonymous. Those unnamed workers were not separate from the petroleum industry’s story. Their labor made the rush possible.

The Oil Boom Had to be Fed

The early Oil Region is remembered through flowing wells, wooden derricks, barrels, leases, pipelines, railroads, and fortunes. But the boom also depended on farmhouse kitchens, grocery shelves, hotel dining rooms, meal tickets, crowded tables, and people waiting for a chair.

Oil brought thousands of people into the valley. Food helped keep them there. The wells produced petroleum. The kitchens kept the boom alive.

Discover more stories from the Oil Region at the Venango Museum in Oil City, Pennsylvania.

Sources

McLaurin, John J. Sketches in Crude-Oil: Some Accidents and Incidents of the Petroleum Development in All Parts of the Globe. Harrisburg, Pa., 1896.
Bone, J. H. A. Petroleum, and Petroleum Wells: What Petroleum Is, Where It Is Found, and What It Is Used For. New York: American News Company; Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1865.
Harris, Charles H. History of the Venango Oil Regions, and Other Places of Note in the Oil Regions. Titusville, Pa.: Titusville Morning Herald Office, 1866.

Venango Museum archival research notes and earlier compiled blog materials.