| The tapping of the first commercial oil well by Edwin Drake and Billy Smith in 1859 and the ensuing boom in western Pennsylvania was much more than simply an economic discovery. Contained in the technology and efforts of these boomers was a revolution in land use--an ecological revolution--that rationalized a method of exploiting the environment and developing resources that was unprecedented. Not only was the actual act of drilling for a liquid mineral a new innovation, but the manner with which the industry would develop and be administered would have watershed importance to American attitudes toward future modes of industrial development. The single most effective source for understanding this change is the extractive landscape itself, including the manifestations of social and cultural changes in the local human community.;The scene of the first oil boom was disseminated worldwide through lithographs, written description, and later through photographs. In this industrial scene, Americans shaped a vision of progress that would influence much of the heavy industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By combining progressive views with an obviously abused and overwrought natural landscape, the early industry helped to shape the ethics with which the broader culture defined acceptable use of natural resources. In the model of Petrolia, Americans were given a commodity of such significance that it overwhelmed the meaning of a place and made it worth sacrificing.;Petrolia is a work of environmental history that seeks to resist separating humans from their surrounding landscape. Instead, this dissertation seeks to consider the ongoing shifts in the relationship between humans and nature as a series of revolutions that can be witnessed on the landscape. In each of these, technology enables the human to impact the physical environment more intensely or in different ways. With this paradigm in mind, Petrolia becomes merely one of the sites from which such an interaction can be chronicled. Upon closer inspection, this site becomes unique for a number of reasons, but particularly the exploitation made possible by a liquid mineral regulated only by the rule of capture.;Much more than regional history, Petrolia places this region and episode as one of the models for the ethics that would guide later industrial development. Using theoretical models from cultural anthropology, cultural geography, material culture, and industrial archaeology, Petrolia probes the cultural and social impact of massive technological transformation through the physical landscape that such change created. Based on the analysis of photos and other more traditional historical sources, this dissertation recreates the 1860s landscape of the world's first oil boom in order to unearth patterns of change in environmental ethics and values guiding land-use that were brought about by the second or later industrial revolution in the U.S. |
