History & local legend
Pleasantville’s oil boom has an unusual origin story involving Abraham James, a spiritualist medium who said the dead could help locate underground resources. While traveling with three companions near William Porter’s farm south of the borough, James crossed a fence, moved through a field and fell to the ground. He pressed a penny into the soil to mark the place his spirit guides had selected for a well.
James secured a lease and financing, and a derrick rose over the marked spot. In February 1868, the drilling reached oil more than eight hundred feet below the surface. The venture was named Harmonial Well No. 1. Its agent subsequently reported to Pennsylvania’s geologists that it had averaged about one hundred barrels a day for three months.
The successful well helped draw investors and drillers to the Pleasantville field, where derricks soon crowded the surrounding farms. Contemporary spiritualists celebrated it as evidence of guidance from beyond the grave, tying a productive oil discovery to the trance and the penny that supposedly determined its location.
Sources
- J. M. Peebles, The Practical of Spiritualism, narrative of James’s companions, the penny and a contemporary newspaper report from the well
- John F. Carll, Oil Well Records and Levels, Pennsylvania Second Geological Survey (1877), p. 18, well 24, agent Norman Potter’s log and production figures
- John J. McLaurin, Sketches in Crude-Oil, pp. 168–169, the 1867–1868 discovery and oilfield
- Pleasantville Borough, Venango County, municipal location
- Esri street address for the public borough reference
- University of California library copy of McLaurin, plate of Pleasantville in 1871
