Oil City, PA

Oil City, PA, is formerly the home and headquarters of both Pennzoil and Wolf's Head Oil.  Both companies have been sold and resold since I was a kid, and neither one has much of anything around here anymore.  The fossil fuel industries are greedy and inhumane.  They pillage and leave, and this ragged old borough bears all the marks of a discarded boomtown.  And yet, this place is situated nicely in the valley of the Allegheny River in its more northerly reaches.

 Oil City is my hometown, and this house was our home.  Built in 1900, it was in our family until about 2003.  It doesn't look bad from the street, but it's needed a roof for as long as I can remember.  Whoever bought it never re-roofed it, and now I suspect it's unlivable.  Oil City is a great town to buy a huge, decaying Victorian and spend your life fixing it up.  

In this photo, there's an old yellow bucket in the trash heap in the yard.  That's one of my grandpa's Pennzoil buckets.  He used to have stacks and stacks of them all over the house, and even under this wrap-around porch...which is no more.  There was a porch swing in the back, near the bay window.  Though the house is three stories in the front, it's a full five stories in the back, counting a sub-basement (or wine cellar) with a walk-out entrance into the steep woodlot out back.  

The whole town looks pretty rough these days, though it's especially sad to see our home in this condition.  We kids always believed the place was haunted, but the stories--the ghost stories as well as the true childhood memories--none of them really matters anymore.  A homeplace can fall into ruin, but it has planted itself in the hearts and lives of those who once loved it, and in that way it re-creates itself in all the other places of their lives.  I had the occasion to pass again through Oil City en route--circuitously--to New York for a beautiful early autumn cruise to the Maritime Provinces of Canada: New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  Both places are unspeakably beautiful, though I only got a handful of unsatisfactory photos.  It might be interesting to take a "sacred places pilgrimage" of Canada's east coast.