Drake Well

Drake Oil Well
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. National Historic Landmark
Replica engine house and derrick in June 2012
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Location	Cherrytree Township, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Nearest city	Titusville, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Coordinates	41°36′39″N 79°39′27.7″W / 41.61083°N 79.657694°W / 41.61083; -79.657694
Built	1859 (1859)
Built by	Edwin Drake, William A. Smith
NRHP reference No.	66000695[1]
Significant dates
Added to NRHP	November 13, 1966
Designated NHL	November 13, 1966

The Drake Well is a 69.5-foot-deep (21.2 m) oil well in Cherrytree Township, Pennsylvania, the success of which sparked the first oil boom in the United States. The well is the centerpiece of the Drake Well Museum located 3 miles (5 km) south of Titusville.

Drilled by Edwin Drake in 1859, along the banks of Oil Creek, it is the first commercial oil well in the United States. Drake Well was listed on National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966. It was designated a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 1979. The well was designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark in 2009, on the sesquicentennial of the strike.

The Drake Well is often referred to as the first commercial oil well, although that title is also claimed for wells in Azerbaijan, Ontario, West Virginia, Myanmar, Persia, Arabia, Sichuan and Poland.

In the United States before the Drake Well, oil-producing wells were wells that were drilled for salt brine, and produced oil and gas only as accidental byproducts. An intended drinking water well at Oil Springs, Ontario found oil in 1858, a year before the Drake Well, but it had not been drilled for oil. Historians have noted that the importance of the Drake Well was not in being the first well to produce oil, but in attracting the first great wave of investment in oil drilling, refining, and marketing:

The importance of the Drake Well was in the fact that it caused prompt additional drilling, thus establishing a supply of petroleum in sufficient quantity to support business enterprises of magnitude.^[2]