Emlenton history comes home
When Hazel Sheffer Crawford decided to gather up some old family photographs to apply for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, she couldn't have known how important her collection would become to the small town of Emlenton.
Nor could she have known that some 25 years after her death in 1983, her efforts would be the centerpiece of something of a homecoming for this small community in Venango County.
Crawford's collection is a tapestry weaving together the history of the Sheffer family, the Emlenton community and the infant oil industry that gave the town life. It encompasses several hundred images of people, places and events spanning more than 80 years, from the late 1870s through the 1950s.
Those images, contained in their original massive photo albums, have been archived and donated in electronic form to the Pumping Jack Museum in the Crawford Center on Hill Street. The images were donated by Crawford's nephew Rick Sheffer, who now lives in Michigan.
Sheffer will return to his hometown Sept. 6 to talk about his aunt's collection, his family history and the importance of the discovery of oil in the area.The museum display and Sheffer's talk and slide show are being held in conjunction with a regional celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Drake Well, the first U.S. oil well, installed in Titusville in 1859.The Sheffer family roots stretch back to German immigrants arriving around 1770 in the wilderness that was Westmoreland County at the time, with Sheffer's great-grandfather George Mansfield Sheffer eventually landing in Emlenton around 1885.George, the town's last Civil War veteran, worked in the oil fields and opened a number of machine shops, including Sheffer's Machine Shop in Emlenton. He also held five patents, his great-grandson said, including a tool to fish tools out of wells and a co-patent on the Daisy engine."I grew up in Emlenton," Sheffer said. "I was born in Oil City, and so I consider it my number one home even though I've been here (in Michigan) for 30 years."His aunt had been a telephone operator for the former People's Telephone Company. She began collecting family photos to document her application to the DAR, Sheffer explained. As townspeople entered the office to pay their telephone bills, they saw her sorting photos and began to offer their own pictures for the collection."I suppose it gave them some place to put pictures they didn't know what to do with," said Nancy Kingsley of Emlenton, a board member of the Pumping Jack Museum and Historical Association in Crawford Center."It's wonderful," she said of the archive. "This enriches what we already have here."
Kingsley said one of her favorite historic photos shows the town on one of its more festive days of the year."There is one photo I'm very fond of," she said. "It shows horses and buggies coming down the Emlenton hill and the bridge. We don't know the year, but people are coming to the farmers and merchants annual picnic. It was quite a big thing. Thousands of people would come and celebrate it every year."What became an ongoing labor of love for Crawford included "not only pictures, but articles as well. She collected histories of the area," Sheffer said. "She was kind of like the town historian, de facto."Sheffer said he remembers visiting his aunt to find her "hunkered over the table with her photos, and she'd say, 'Come here. Look at this.'"She tried to put captions on photos when she could identify who the people were," he said. "And of course, that's precious to the people in the town who are getting older and who might be able to identify the rest."Even a quarter century after her death, it's clear Crawford's photos have a significant, even personal, connection to the town and its people."Many people knew of the collection, and when (Mrs. Crawford) died, they knew the collection had gone from the area," Kingsley said. "And they were hoping it would come back.""I knew this (collection) had to be repatriated back to the town," Sheffer agreed, "and it's also so much a part of my family."
He said that digitizing the collection offered the perfect solution. The digital archive will become part of the resources of the museum, and yet the collection can remain a part of the Sheffer family history. Sheffer noted the actual albums will be on display during his presentation."I haven't quite exhausted what I can learn from those," he said.Sheffer will speak at the Crawford Center auditorium at 7 p.m. Sept. 6. Admission is free, but donations to the museum will be accepted.
<B>WHAT: </B>Photography slide show and talk on historic Emlenton presented by Rick Sheffer<B>WHEN: </B>7 p.m. Sept. 6<B>WHERE: </B>Crawford Center auditorium at 603 Hill Street<B>INFO: </B>Admission is free, but donations will be accepted. More information about the museum can be found at www.pumpingjack.com.
