The most interesting thing I learned was that the tall rigs were used only for digging the wells. Once oil was discovered, the rigs were dismantled, moved, and set up again somewhere else. Once they were moved out of the way, then the pumps were brought in and installed.
Oil discovery back in the 1930s was hit or miss. Now they have sophisticated equipment to search for oil, but back then, they basically guessed. Sometimes they hit big; sometimes it was a big waste of money, time and labor. The drilling rigs didn't actually drill; they pounded and broke the sand. I wish I recorded my tour because there was too much information to properly remember. It would take hours of research to find out the correct terminology for certain objects or processes. I will do my best without relaying wrong information.
Cog wheel that supplies the motion to the rig and looking up the shaft of the rig:
The drilling holes. The center hole is the actual drill. The outer hole I think was for shooting water into the drilling area, but I'm not sure. Each hole used different tools.
The lighter-colored vertical post was called a "widow saver" or "life saver." It stopped the leverage arm from crashing down on the workers should something in the mechanism break. The right picture shows different cleaning and sizing tools. Most tools were made right at the rig with a blacksmithing area right on the rig's platform.
Drilling rope:
These are plugs that are put into the hole once it is drilled or once no more oil is being pulled from the hole.
The EPA doesn't allow plugs like this any more. The drilled holes now have to be filled with cement and sealed.
This is a boiler. Along with oil, the drilling also extracted natural gas. For years, the gas just dissipated into the air, but eventually they discovered that the gas could be used to power their machinery. If I remember correctly, gas was used to power the boiler to produce steam, but I don't remember what the steam was used for.
The engine that powers the rig and the belts that ran between flywheels:
Centrifugal flywheel used to power the oil extracting pump:
Inside the museum -- this is the lab where they tested sand samples.
The white plugs are sand samples. The sand is not loose, but is caked and porous. The pores of the sand are filled with oil. Sand has different variations of pore patterns, which used different methods to test and extract the oil:
Display of different oils from Pennsylvania and surrounding areas. To the right is a display of wrenches and threading dies. They don't look much different today than they did nearly 100 years ago:
The picture on the left is an oil filling station. When you drove into a gas station, the attendant would pump oil from the tank into a glass bottle. Then he would bring the bottle over to your car and fill it with oil. The picture on the right is a fire engine from the 1930s. It was steam powered.
This last set of pictures is an oil rigger's home. There was a specific name for it, but I don't remember. Nearly all homes looked the same, many of which are still standing today. The last picture is my tourguide, who is nameless because I never caught her name:
