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 – Pipelines, Pumpjacks, and Powerhouses: Vignettes of Northwestern Pennsylvania’s Historic Oil Boom Landscapes
Lecturer: Dr. Charles (Chuck) E. Williams

In the early 1990s, Dr. Charles E. Williams began exploring the landscapes of northwestern Pennsylvania to develop a research program in forest biology. Although the region’s oil boom had passed a century before, the infrastructure that remained in the regenerating forests – pipelines, old pumpjacks, and defunct powerhouses – became a source of interest. One question led to another, and eventually the oil region’s historic landscapes, and the cultural, economic and environmental factors that shaped them, became a research focus. In this talk, Chuck describes his journey to document and understand the historic oil boom landscapes of northwestern Pennsylvania, which culminated in the book Western Pennsylvania’s Oil Heritage.

BIO: Charles E. (Chuck) Williams is a biologist and archaeologist with particular interests in the past and present landscapes of northwestern Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region at large. His current research focuses on landscape archaeology and environmental history, particularly historic environments of the Allegheny River Basin, use of remote sensing in landscape prospection, and archaeology of the nineteenth-century iron industry in northwestern Pennsylvania. Chuck was a Fulbright Scholar in environmental history and archaeology at the University of Iceland and was Professor of Biology at Clarion University of Pennsylvania for 15 years. Chuck is currently Lead Faculty in Natural Sciences for Columbia Southern University. He earned his Ph.D. in biology at Virginia Tech and recently completed an MA in archaeology and heritage from the University of Leicester.