The California Oil Museum an A-Z oil museum listing by state, including additional links for the large number of museums found in California, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
Hundreds of technology exhibits at community petroleum museums offer insight into the nation’s energy heritage, which began with an 1859 oil discovery drilled 69.5 feet deep in Pennsylvania. Many museums are staffed with volunteer docents who worked in the industry and can teach young people about complex modern business.
Alabama
Choctaw County Historical Museum
This small but notable museum features a collection of rare fossils, including the vertebrae from a giant whale that once swam in the prehistoric seas that covered Choctaw County. Visitors can see bottles of oil from Alabama’s first oil well, discovered in 1944 at Gilbertown.
The museum, on 40 Melvin Road, also is home to a complete Linotype “hot lead” letterpress newspaper print shop used to produce The Choctaw Advocate in the early years of this century. A one-room cabin, located on the west side of the museum, is constructed from logs dating back to the mid-1840s.
Alaska
Gustavus Petroleum Museum
oil museums
Gustavus is a gateway to Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. Photo courtesy Robert Blodgett.
Perhaps the most remote of oil museum in America, the Gustavus Dray store and petroleum museum offers a pre-World War II replica Mobil service station with working 1937 “Wayne 60” gasoline pumps. The southeastern Alaska panhandle is where the Alaska Steam Coal & Petroleum Syndicate drilled the first Alaska oil well at the beginning of the 20th century.
According to Alaska geologist and historian Robert B. Blodgett, Gustavus is just one of two ways (air or ferry) to enter the giant Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve. But Gustavus’ visitors are limited to those who can afford the airfare and bed and breakfast costs, he adds. The other way to view the park or oil museum is on a cruise ship, “but those folks do not get off in Gustavus, so have no access to seeing the museum.”
Arkansas
Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources
oil museums
Smackover has celebrated its petroleum heritage with an annual “Oil Town Festival.”
Officially opened to the public in 1986, the Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources is situated in the midst of the historic Smackover oilfield. The Busey No. 1 well near El Dorado “blew-in with a gusty fury” on January 10, 1921. The Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources, one mile south of the once oil-rich town of Smackover, is in the heart of the oilfield.
Surrounded by 20 acres of south Arkansas woodlands, the museum collects and exhibits oil – and brine – industrial history. It also documents a fascinating social history that accompanied the state’s oil boom of the 1920s.
Colorado
Denver Museum of Nature & Science
oil museums
Visitors can view 545 million years of the earth to see what the Denver area once looked like.
An “Ancient Denvers” permanent exhibit features the geology beneath the city:
“From massive cliffs to jagged peaks to layer upon layer below the earth’s surface, rock formations hold tantalizing clues to hundreds of millions of years of geologic history along Colorado’s Front Range. These clues have revealed that over eons of time, the region has changed dramatically.”
Florida
Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing
“Enjoy the ride” staff say at of the Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing in Ocala, just off Interstate 75. The private museum, which opened in 1976, includes almost 300 cars on exhibit in two main buildings. About 90 racing cars chronicle evolution of automotive technologies and the history of the sport of drag racing. Another 50 rare vehicles can be seen in the nearby antique car building.
Museum founder and CEO Don Garlits was the first drag racer to officially surpass the 170, 180, 200, 240, 250, and 270 miles per hour marks in the quarter-mile. Garlits says his museum’s mission is to preserve the history of drag racing and develop a national archive and library for educating the public “on the history and progress of all racing and presenting the uniqueness of this sport auto racing.”
In addition to a collection of “Big Daddy” Garlits’ own “Swamp Rat” cars (hand fabricated black race cars that carried him to 144 national event wins), exhibits include memorabilia from other top names in the sport. The museum, which is home to the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame, also has many early gasoline pumps exhibited amid the high-performance cars.
