Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom (review)

Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom. By Brian Black. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+235. $42.50.

I happened to read the first few chapters of Brian Black's Petrolia one unusually balmy February afternoon, sitting on a bench by the River Cam in the quaint village of Grantchester, a couple of miles upstream from Cambridge. The bucolic scenery--meandering river fringed with drooping willows flowing lazily through water meadows--has changed little over the past few centuries. This quintessential pastoral environment has attracted a bevy of famous writers over the past century--Grantchester's most famous resident and eulogist being the poet Rupert Brooke. In his best known poem, "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" (1912), Brooke evoked the apparent timelessness of the place:

Grantchester! Ah,Grantchester! There's peace and holy quiet there
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?

Few settings could provide a more jarring contrast to the turbulent world of brutal intrusion and bewilderingly rapid transformation that was the blighted industrial landscape of northwestern Pennsylvania's "Oildorado"--the world's major oil producing region between 1859 and 1873. For the themes that Black returns to time and again are the absence of permanence, what he dubs the "ethic of transience" (p. 91), and the acceptability of despoliation and the lack of remorse.

If the Granchester Meadows exemplify the aesthetic ideal of the picturesque--heaven on earth--then Oil Creek is definitely "hell on earth," the epitome of "industrial vandalism" (a Wendell Berry quotation that provides Black with one of the many stimulating epigrams that precede each chapter). The birthplace of our modern, petroleum-fueled civilization may be located well to the east of the Mississippi, but Black incorporates it within a "Greater Western" history. This is another classic story of rampant exploitation of the natural resources of the "commons"--as well as of people--by arrogant, greedy, and careless forces, of bleak and makeshift boomtowns that barely constituted communities, of ruins and messes, natural and human, left behind for someone else to clear up. Here, for Black, is the perfect symbol of American profligacy, the mother of all technoindustrial desecrations, the ancestral home of a process and mentality that spawned a succession of notoriously toxic places like Hanford and Love Canal. Black's task is to find out what the tragic saga of boom and bust means for people and place. His basic theme is nicely encapsulated in the title of economist Thomas Power's 1998 critique of Western communities dependent on natural resource extraction: Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies: The Search for a Value of Place (a book Black does not cite).

The generous batch of John Mather's arresting photographs are one of the book's most appealing features, particularly since the author often beautifully integrates revealing analysis of individual images into his narrative. The most haunting image, for this reviewer, is the foursome of dejected young female "oil dippers," sitting on or leaning against barrels, pails in hand (p. 88); scooping the liberally spilled oil off the surface of Oil Creek with tin cups provided families with extra income. Yet again, the backdrop consists of ragged stumps. My second favorite photo shows two dairy cows wading in the oily river at Petroleum Centre (p. 98).

Petrolia is a wonderful demonstration of the possibilities of historical studies of technology and culture. Black's detailed coverage of the mechanics of drilling and transportation, and of the rules of capture, never becomes tedious and is attractively complemented by reflection on the notion of the technological sublime and examination of the tone of contemporary media coverage of the oil boom. The author is clearly deeply troubled by the squalor and dislocation ("this book salutes the people and places that remain to tell the story when the industry has moved elsewhere" [p. xii]), but his tone is never shrill (more Leo...