TITUSVILLE  , a

city of Crawford county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., on Oil Creek, about 42 M . S. by E. of Erie . Pop . (woo), 8244, of whom 1573 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 8533 . Titusville is served by the Dunkirk, Allegheny Valley & Pittsburg, and the Pennsylvania railways . It has the Benson Memorial library (1904), and in Woodlawn Cemetery there is a monument (erected by Henry H . Rogers in 1902) to Colonel Edwin L . Drake (1819-188o), who here sank the first oil well (692 ft. deep) in America in August 1859 and who is buried here . Titusville was the principal centre in Pennsylvania of the opposition to the Standard Oil Company ; but after 1875, when John D . Archbold (b . 1848), a leader of the Independents, became a director of the Standard, few of the Titusville operators remained independent . It was in the Titusville district that the natural gas industry of Pennsylvania was first established about 1872 .

There are various manufactures, and in 1905 the value of the factory products was $3,249,890 . The first

settlement was made here in 1796 by Samuel Kerr and Jonathan Titus (in whose honour the place was named) . Titusville was incorporated as a borough in 1847 and was chartered as a city in 1866 . On the 5th of June 1892 Oil Creek rose suddenly, overflowed its banks and wrecked many oil tanks along the bottom-lands . A large part of the water was covered with oil, which soon caught fire . About 6o persons were drowned or burned to death, and about a quarter of the city was destroyed .