Pithole City

The story

Pithole is the definitive oil boomtown: farmland in January 1865, one of the largest towns in Pennsylvania by that autumn, and effectively gone within two years. When wells struck along Pithole Creek, speculators and roughnecks poured in; the town was laid out in May and incorporated in December with something like fifteen thousand residents, 50-plus hotels, three churches, a theater, and the third-busiest post office in the state.

It was also a proving ground for the young petroleum industry — the world's first successful oil pipeline was built here in 1865 to move crude out to the railroad, breaking the teamsters' stranglehold. But the wells shallowed fast, a chain of banks collapsed in the 1866 panic, and fires did the rest. As new strikes opened elsewhere in the county, people left and literally took their houses with them. The post office closed in 1877.

Nothing was rebuilt over it, which is why Pithole is so eerie today. The state historic site mows the old street grid into the grass so you can walk the outlines of a vanished city — First Street, Holmden Street, the hotel lots — reading a place that exists only as lines in a meadow.

What remains today

The mowed outlines of the street grid, marker signs where buildings stood, and a small visitor center; the townsite itself is an open field.