Drake Well Museum and Park’s annual lecture series, Wisdom and Wine: Home in the Oil Region, kicks off on March 10, 2022. Guests will enjoy a lecture from regional experts featuring the people, places, and events of local petroleum history. Doors to the museum will open at 5:30 p.m. for a wine tasting happy hour by Brokenstraw Valley Winery, charcuterie, and refreshments, and the lectures begin promptly at 6:30 p.m.

Admission to each lecture is free for current members of the Friends of Drake Well and $5 for the public. Admission to the happy hour event proceeding the lectures is an additional $5 for members and nonmembers. During the happy hour, in addition to wine tasting, guests will be able to purchase a bottle of wine to take home and a glass of wine to enjoy with the lecture.

Reserve your spot by calling 814-827-2797 or email drakewell@verizon.net.

Topic – Recipes of the Oil Region
Lecturer: William Moore

Looking at what people in the Pennsylvania Oil Region in general and in Titusville in particular ate in the period 1870 through 1905, as evidenced by the local cookbooks of the time, leads to a number of questions. What did they eat? And why?

BIO: Bill Moore is a Crawford County native, who had an early fascination with Titusville, since his parents loved its old buildings, and he ended up a big fan himself. Bill is an avid family historian, and has been interested in the many ethnicities who flocked to the oil regions, though tracing them has been more challenging than most (which made them more interesting, he thinks.) He identified and assembled biographies and short family sketches of the graduates of the 1st 20 classes of Titusville High School (1871-1890), as well as of the women who appeared in the society pages in the 1870s (which he found while reading the newspapers for High School news.) That opened a new field for him, since most genealogy is based on male lineages, so then he researched and prepared biographies of the women (and a few men) who submitted recipes to the Titusville community cookbooks (1876-1903) . He was senior author of “Oil Boom Architecture” about the buildings of Titusville and Pithole, 1840-1910, joint author of a postcard history of Meadville in 2012, and joint author of African Americans in Crawford Co. 1800-1900.