Park at N41°31.649',
W79°40.425' >
Follow the access road down
to the bike trail. Be careful crossing the RR
tracks.
Placed with permission from
the Park Manager.
This cache may contain
one or more unactivated Oil Creek State Park/Kennerdell Tract,
Clear Creek State Forest geocoin. This is a brand new coin,
trackable on geocaching.com. Please only take one per cacher, and
help us spread the word about these two great resources in the Oil
Region!!
Funkville 1864
The Empire Well in 1863
Funkville
The production of the Pennsylvania Oil Region in 1860, the
first full year after Drake Well, was no better than 500,000
barrels, probably less actually went to market. The pace of
production for the first half of 1861 remained the same, not enough
to displace coal oil or to build a petroleum refining industry.
This changed in May 1861 at Funkville on Oil Creek. Funkville is
the name given to a long gone, small village built around the wells
and property of A. B. Funk, a wealthy lumberman from Warren County.
When Funk heard of Drake’s success in August 1859, he bought
both the Upper and Lower McElheny Farms on either side of Oil Creek
just north of what became Petroleum
Center.
A. B. Funk had his son drill a well at this site to a depth
sufficient to find the Oil Creek third sand, an oil sand thought to
be particularly promising. Funk’s son found the third sand at
460 feet in May 1861. At a time when most wells were pumpers
producing no more than 20 barrels a day when on the pump,
Funk’s well came in at 300 barrels a day and flowed freely
without the need of a pump. In those days, all flowing wells were
referred to as fountain wells; this well became known as
Funk’s Fountain Well. Funk’s success began a very
deliberate exploratory effort to find the third sand beneath the
Oil Creek Valley. A stone’s throw south of Funk’s
Fountain, a group of producers leased a plot from Funk and drilled
deep, down to the third sand. They called their well the Empire. In
September of that year, the Empire came in at 3,000 barrels a day.
A hundred feet or so up Oil Creek on the nearby Espy Farm, the
Buckeye came in that same month at 1,000 barrels a day from the
third sand.
South of the old Funkville site on the Tarr farm is where
William Phillips put down a number of successful wells for the
Pittsburgh firm of Phillips & Frew. The Phillips No. 2 came in
October 19, 1861 at 4,000 barrels of oil a day. There was so much
oil they could not store it, they could not afford barrels to
package it, could not market it. Sadly, the success of the big
wells like the Empire and the Phillps No. 2 killed the price of
crude oil.
In the locale between Funkville and the Tarr Farm on Oil
Creek, down there in the third sand beneath Oil Creek, the nation
found sufficient petroleum to build a new industry, an industry
designed to produce kerosene in great
volume.