Oil and Gas Museum

Local museum dedicated to the upper Ohio Valley oil boom

A determinedly hands-on local museum on Market Street, opened in 1989 and crammed into a former hardware store. The collection is overwhelmingly artefacts of the West Virginia oil and gas boom of the 1860s through the 1900s — wooden well pumps, blacksmith tools, period maps, hundreds of donated photographs, and the kind of small machinery that almost never survives in larger institutions.

It is exactly the kind of museum that an industrial town deserves and rarely gets. Admission is by donation and the founder-curator is still often on the floor and happy to talk. Allow an hour, two if you are interested.

things to do museum
A story
Parkersburg sits at the southern end of the Volcano-Burning Springs oilfield, the area where modern American oil production effectively began. The first commercial oil well in West Virginia was drilled at Burning Springs in 1860, less than a year after Drake's better-known well in Pennsylvania, and during the Civil War a Confederate raid set fire to the wells and oil barges on the Little Kanawha — one of the first deliberate attacks on oil infrastructure in history.

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