It’s impossible to know who the first person to discover oil on the banks of Oil Creek in Venango County was, because by the time settlers arrived, Native Americans had been collecting the substance where it seeped out of the ground for generations.

The oil was mostly used as a medicine, treating arthritis and other ailments, until the late 1840s, when a process was invented to distill crude oil into kerosene. That discovery laid the groundwork for the birth of an industry that’s still big business in Pennsylvania — the oil industry.

In August 1859, Edwin Drake, assisted by William “Uncle Billy” Smith, struck oil with the first commercial oil derrick in the world. Their location, near Titusville on the banks of Oil Creek, would be the first commercial oil well in the world, and it would change literally everything.

It can be very hard for a modern person to realize exactly how dark the world was before the widespread adoption of first gaslight, then kerosene lights and then electric lighting.

For millennia, light came from just a few sources: mostly tallow or beeswax candles or lamps fed by oil oil, vegetable oil, and, eventually, from oil produced by catching and processing sperm whales.

For most of history, lamps were very basic, just a reservoir and a wick. By the late 18th century, refinements came along.

Thomas Jefferson was given one of the early oil lamps while in France in the 1780s and wrote home that it put out as much light as six or eight candles.

Each refinement was designed to create a brighter, less smoky, longer-lasting light from the flame. Different kinds of wicks were used, along with different kinds of fuels.

By 1853, lamps were developed that used kerosene, which offered an even brighter flame and could also be used for heating.

Originally refined from coal, a process was developed to produce kerosene from crude oil instead, setting the scene for the drama on the banks of Oil Creek in the summer and fall of 1859.

1859 was the eve of the Civil War and a time of tremendous technological progress in the U.S. The Drake Well wouldn’t have happened if not for some of them.

Samuel Kier owned multiple businesses, from railroads to brickmaking, but he got his start making salt from wells drilled in Saltsburg, in Indiana County. Like many salt wells, his were sometimes fouled with a black, slick liquid — crude oil.

At first, Kier dumped the waste product, but he eventually tried making it into patent medicines.

That didn’t go anywhere, but in 1853, Kier started the world’s first kerosene refinery, located on what’s now Seventh Avenue in Pittsburgh.

Some of the crude oil Kier was making into kerosene had been collected near Titusville.

That location would attract attention from the owners of the Seneca Oil Company, who hired railroad clerk Edwin Drake to be their man on the ground in Titusville.

Drake didn’t have any experience with oil — to be fair, hardly anyone did in the late 1850s — but he could travel for free because of his job with the railroad.

The owners of the company decided to christen him Colonel Drake, despite a lack of military experience.

Once the location was chosen, it was time to find someone to actual get the oil out of the ground.

Drake worked with a Tarentum salt-well driller, William “Uncle Billy” Smith. It was Smith’s idea to sink a cast-iron pipe into the bedrock and then drill down through the pipe, which kept water from flooding the hole.

Progress was very slow, with Smith drilling three feet down daily.

It took weeks for him to hit 69 and a half feet, when the well started to bring a liquid to the surface.

It was Sunday, Aug. 28, 1859, when Smith realized that liquid was oil. He started to pump and filled every container he could with the substance.

The next day, Drake came to work and saw that Smith had made the world’s first intentional oil strike.

It was just in the nick of time, because Drake was almost of out of money. He would nearly always be almost out of money.

But on Aug. 29, 1859, he was the luckiest man in the entire world, standing atop an unknown bounty that seemed certain to bring riches.

And lucky he was.

“No one realized it at the time, but Drake had drilled in the only spot in the region where oil could be found at such a shallow depth as 69 feet,” noted an American Chemical Society's article “Development of the Pennsylvania Oil Industry.”

Drake’s well did spark the first oil boom, creating an industry that would dominate the market until the turn of the 20th century and is still a major player in the state’s economy.

But Drake himself wouldn’t get rich.

Neither he nor Smith thought to patent their method of drilling for oil, and a lack of money meant Drake was never able to buy up large tracts of land to drill on.

Because there was no patent to protect the method, other people started imitating Drake’s way of drilling almost immediately and there was an immediate boom as people scrambled to cash in.

That boom was a blessing and a curse. It’s part of the reason the Drake Well only operated for about two years. Despite its status as the first, the well never made a profit, and so was closed in 1861.

Drake had lost everything to speculation by 1863, and the Seneca Oil Company sold the property in 1864.

Drake would eventually get an annual pension from Pennsylvania in recognition of his

For decades, the site was mostly abandoned, with some drilling tools and the original drivepipe left behind, but almost nothing else. About 30 years after the original well, someone bought the property, built a new derrick and pumped souvenir bottles of oil, and in 1934, the location became a state park.

The park has both a museum and a replica of the original derrick, reconstructed based on photographs from the 1860s.

It’s a reminder of the start of an industry that in Pennsylvania alone has produced as much as 1.4 billion barrels of oil and at least 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.