University Times

Until recently, it was possible to tour the Drake Well Museum in Titusville and walk out with the impression that women essentially did not exist in northwestern Pennsylvania during the oil boom days of the mid-19th century.

As far as could be determined by the museum's exhibits, towns such as Titusville, Oil City and Pithole were the near-exclusive property of dirty roughnecks, fast talking speculators and fortune hunters. The only women seemed to be haggard wives, cooks and prostitutes.

Nowhere in the museum was there any indication that a more refined society existed in Titusville, a world where women were know to dress in Parisian gowns and a Female Benevolent Society performed good works by helping the poor.

Women were so forgotten when the museum opened in the early 1960s that even Edwin Drake sat alone in his display with no indication he had a wife, let alone that she had saved the family from destitution by taking in sewing and boarders after he lost all their money speculating in oil stocks.

Today, a portion of that gap in the record has been filled. Drake now sits behind glass with his wife, Laura, looking over his shoulder and there is an extensive display on Mary Ann Chase Fletcher, granddaughter of Jonathan Titus, founder of Titusville, and the wife of R. D. Fletcher, one of the town's most prominent businessmen. The Chase Fletcher exhibit contains such things as elaborately embroidered shoes, a collection of bonnets covered with intricate embroidery, a leather sewing box with an ivory case for needles, brightly colored silk scarves and an ivory memo book that fans open and on which notes could be repeatedly written with a pencil and erased.

"It's like the keys of a piano. The writing is still on it," points out Cynthia Andes, instructor of humanities and English at Pitt's Titusville campus (UPT). Andes is the person largely responsible for the presence of women in the Drake Well Museum. A seasonal employee of the museum since 1986, she began her drive to bring women into the museum in 1992, when she obtained grants for that purpose from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"They gave us a little bit of seed money and I became the local scholar to do research to construct whatever we thought was needed — public programming, publications, exhibit areas — to bring women into the picture in a more inclusionary manner," says Andes.

As the most famous woman associated with Titusville and Pennsylvania's oil country, Ida Tarbell was chosen as the focus for the first year of the project. The legacy of that turn-of-the-century muckraking journalist who brought down the Standard Oil monopoly was presented in a video and temporary (one day to be permanent) display.

After Tarbell, Andes and her colleagues at the museum decided to focus on the general lives of women in the oil boom days. That led to research into the life of Laura Drake and the placing of a mannequin of Laura alongside her husband in the Drake exhibit. The shift in focus also led to the discovery of Chase Fletcher, a person who came as a complete surprise to the UPT faculty member.

Andes was searching the museum's vault for material on Laura Drake, when she found a box labeled "R. D. Fletcher, Poems and Recipes." When Andes opened the box, she discovered that the material actually had been preserved by the daughter of the businessman. Museum personnel knew about the Fletcher material, but it had never been cataloged. Eventually, Andes found nine R. D. Fletcher boxes containing a large amount of material from his wife. It was the Fletcher collection that really opened a window into the world of women during the oil boom.

In addition to the clothing, household and personal items currently on display in the museum, the Fletcher collection contained letters, diaries, business ledgers and other records. According to Andes, the collection is the most complete record available of women in northwestern Pennsylvania's oil country in the second half of the 19th century.

Wondering what she might do to bring the Fletcher material together into a more coherent whole, Andes decided to write "A Kaleidoscope of Memories," a readers' theatre piece with Mary Ann Chase Fletcher as the ghost narrator. In the piece, which uses actors, but no sets, Mary Ann talks about people she knew when she was alive and the social history of early Titusville.

"The readers' theatre piece has parts for 30 people and everybody has a little bit of a clip from perhaps an obituary or a letter from a sister who saw the funeral entourage of Abraham Lincoln," says Andes. "All of those things, I built into it." The uncovering of the Fletcher collection last year and "Kaleidoscope of Memories" are only two of Andes's most recent efforts to enliven local history and highlight the role of women in Pennsylvania's oil country. Her interest in the two subjects dates back to the nation's bicentennial celebration and includes a decade of her portraying Edwin Drake's mother at the museum and in local schools.

Andes originally became interested in local history because she lives in a house that is 150 years old. While working on the second floor of the garage in 1976, she found a stack of ledgers dating back to the 1830s and flags from the nation's centennial celebration in 1876. The ledgers came from the Mitchell Store in Enterprise, Warren County, and she decided to donate them to the museum.

A few years later, in the early 1980s, Andes chaperoned a Brownie troop on an outing to the Drake Well Museum. During that visit, she realized the program was far too advanced for first graders. Later, she approached the museum director about developing an educational program for young children.

Gathering material on Laura Drake, the mother of Edwin, Andes in 1986 traveled to the Laurel Highlands Creative Life Laboratory near Uniontown where she worked with a storyteller to develop what she had learned into a form suitable for young children. (Drake was married twice. His first wife, who died, was named Philena. His second wife was named Laura, the same as his mother.) "The storyteller helped me use the material as a tidbit for a storytelling presentation as Laura Drake, mother of Edwin Drake," Andes recalls.

From that storytelling start, Andes went on to develop a coloring book, "Drake's Discovery," that tells the story of oil in Pennsylvania. She also built on her role as Mrs. Drake by dressing like a woman from the 1830s, when Drake was a child. Her 30- to 40-minute presentation is geared to second graders, but suitable for children through fourth grade.

"Basically, I do a little storytelling sequence in character," Andes explains. "Then I get out of character to talk about my