The village of Rockton, located squarely in Clearfield County’s Union Township, is a crossroads town on the mountain, which bears the same name.
It has been, for 180 years, a historical link, where roads that connect Clearfield to DuBois and Luthersburg both converge and then diverge.
Early-settling families worked hard to farm the mountain soil. A grist mill and small trader- and craft-businesses soon followed.
Like so much of Clearfield County, the logging and lumbering industry became the economic dominator for decades. It also appears that early oil industry speculators and entrepreneurs staked their claim in the Rockton area.
The photo, possibly dating from the late 1870’s, shows an oil drilling rig in the vicinity of Little Anderson Creek, near Rockton. The background hill looks to have been already clear cut.
Northwest Pennsylvania gave birth to the modern oil industry with the sinking of Edwin Drake’s well, in Titusville, in 1859.
Oil patch towns grew at lightning speed in the years following the Civil War and many went bust just as quickly. A few fortunes were made, but many other investors and workers had to move on to other occupations in order to make a living.
As early as 1877, the Clearfield Republican newspaper reported a story of the drilling of two test wells near Stump Creek in adjacent Brady Township.
By February of 1880, it determined that oil was not found as it said, “When the drill stopped, the well was 1682 feet deep, and about 16 inches in the sand.
“The easing … is defective, and the hole in consequence, is full of salt water”. It also complained that the steam powered drilling engine only put out nine-horsepower instead of the required fifteen and the boiler was too small.
The DuBois Courier noted that some persons who visited the Stump Creek wells insisted that oil had been “planted” there. By April, the Republican printed a letter from Troutville that said, “The well at Stump Creek is idle at present.”
Clearfield County would not fuel an oil driller’s dream of riches. Lumber, coal and, much later, natural gas, would drive its resource extraction economy for more than a century.