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Frank Cleveland's Oil Refinery

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The striking of oil in Pennsylvania’s first well, the world's first successful oil well in Titusville, was a boon to all of Northwestern Pennsylvania, including Erie County. Like many people, a young Frank Cleveland took advantage of the rush to oil wealth, which by the 1870s was a stable business, and opened a refinery in the City of Erie. His oil venture lasted only a few years, but an ambitious Cleveland looking for more opportunities would soon to be the impetus to Erie’s most well-known manufacturers of engines and boilers. Frank F. Cleveland was born in Steuben County, New York, on January 11, 1853. With the outbreak of oil excitement in Pennsylvania, Frank Cleveland, in the 1870s, started an oil refinery in Erie, and continued to engage in that business for six years. Afterwards, he made successful investments in oil lands, and then embarked in the business of manufacturing mill and machinery castings in Erie, under the firm name of Cleveland & Company. In 1879,

Erie's Rush to Oil

The Pennsylvania oil rush was a boom in petroleum production, which occurred in northwestern Pennsylvania from 1859 to the early 1870s. It was the first oil boom in the United States. The discovery soon fueled refineries that were producing a new and highly coveted consumer product: kerosene. The oil rush began in Titusville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania, in the Oil Creek Valley when Colonel Edwin L. Drake struck rock oil there. Titusville and other towns on the shores of Oil Creek expanded rapidly as oil wells and refineries shot up across the region into Erie County. Oil quickly became one of the most valuable commodities in the United States and railroads expanded into western Pennsylvania to ship petroleum to the rest of the country. By the mid-1870s, the oil industry was well established, and the rush to drill wells and control production was over. Pennsylvania oil production peaked in 1891, and was later surpassed by western states such as Texas and Califor