Welcome to the Lehigh Valley Landmarks with Leon podcast series, celebrating 250 years of independence. I'm your host, Rachel Leon. Since being elected in 2022 and serving as Vice President of Bethlehem City Council, I'm humbled by the opportunity to serve the diverse communities that make up our great city. But to understand where we're going, we need to understand our past. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story about the 250 years that made the Lehigh Valley and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, known as the Christmas City, as we explore historic landmarks.
“They don’t call it the Bissell well, although he thought of it. They don’t call it the
Townsend well, although he financed it. We call it the Drake Well because it was the project manager, Edwin Drake, who kept the project alive in the face of ridicule, derision, and the starvation of his family.” — Dr. William R. Brice, of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.
In the summer of 1874, a sick and aging man arrived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, hoping that the mineral springs at Lechauweki Springs in Fountain Hill might ease his pain. By then, almost no one outside the oil regions remembered his name. Yet Edwin Laurentine Drake had done something that changed modern life forever. He had helped launch the American petroleum industry.
Edwin Drake was born on March 29, 1819, in Greenville, New York. He grew up working odd jobs in New York and Vermont and settled on steady work as railroad conductor for the New York and New Haven Railroad. At 38 years old Drake was stricken with muscular neuralgia, a painful condition that left him unable to continue working full-time. But he retained the benefit of a railroad pass.
In the 1850s, the Seneca Oil Company was looking for someone to investigate oil deposits near Titusville, Pennsylvania. They chose Drake, partly because he still had railroad access and partly because they wanted someone who could be taken seriously by the local community. To strengthen that image, company president James Townsend gave him the title of “Colonel.” Drake had no formal engineering training. He had something else: persistence.
At Titusville, Drake faced a problem that repeatedly threatened the project. Groundwater kept flooding the early digs, so he borrowed an idea from salt well drillers.
He drove cast-iron pipe down through the unstable soil and continued drilling through the pipe itself until the bedrock was reached. It was a simple solution, but it was a breakthrough.
On August 27, 1859, the drill bit reached a depth of sixty-nine and a half feet. The next morning, driller Billy Smith looked into the hole and saw crude oil rising up. With that moment, the Pennsylvania oil rush began. What had been a local experiment became the start of an industry that would reshape transportation, lighting, manufacturing, and the global economy.
Drake’s story did not end with success. He never patented the drilling method that made the well possible. He also lost his savings in oil speculation in 1863. By the late 1860s, his family was living in poverty.
Word of his hardship spread. Residents of Titusville raised money on his behalf. In 1872, the state of Pennsylvania granted him an annuity of $1,500 a year. That support allowed Drake and his wife to move to Bethlehem, where he hoped the springs at Fountain Hill might ease his chronic pain. They settled into a house on Wyandotte Street, now part of the South Bethlehem Historic District.
Drake lived his final years in Bethlehem quietly and modestly. He died there on November 9, 1880, at the age of sixty-one. The man whose work helped open the petroleum age ended his life far from the oil fields, in a town better known for iron, steel, and Moravian history.
After his death, the oil industry began to honor him more visibly. In 1902, his remains were moved to Nisky Hill to Woodlawn Cemetery in Titusville. There, a memorial statue called The Driller marks his burial site. On the original well site, the Drake Well Museum and Memorial Park preserves the place where the first successful oil well in the United States was drilled. The museum stands as a reminder that a single act of persistence in 1859 changed the course of American history.
In Bethlehem, Drake’s memory is preserved more quietly. A Pennsylvania historical marker at his former home on Wyandotte Street notes that he lived there in the last years of his life. It is a modest marker for a man whose work had an outsized impact.
Information for this episode was provided by the Bethlehem Area Public Library’s local history resources, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and historical research by Dr. William R. Brice of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.
