Sold for $889

Bradford, Pennsylvania, ca. 1881. Large engraved folding pocket map, with hand-coloring, by J.A. Seymour. Publisher's black cloth-covered boards, stamped in gilt; map cleanly detached from boards; map with numerous manuscript annotations, noting names of landowners and the locations of producing, drilling and dry wells.

Scarce relic of the Allegany County, New York oil boom: a cadastral map of the region with manuscript additions showing the locations of oil wells.

The Pennsylvania oil rush--the first such boom in America--had begun in earnest in the 1860s in the Oil Creek Valley near Titusville. But by the 1870s it had begun to die down. Seeking new areas for drilling, in 1881, on a geologist's advice, an investor group drilled a well on the Reading Farm in Richburg, New York, about a hundred miles northeast of Titusville. The well came in at 70 barrels on its first day, and sparked the oil boom of 1881.

Within days, hundreds of people began to flood into the valley, and within ten months there were between 4,500 to 5,000 people in Bolivar, and 7,000 in Richburg. Production that first year reached over 6 million barrels in Allegany County. The Richburg Oil Boom would prove short-lived, but would have a great impact on the life of the town's young playwright L. Frank Baum. Some have argued that the brick road between Richburg and Bolivar would prove the basis for his yellow brick road of Oz and that the concept of the Tin Man needing oil to survive was inspired by the boom.

The surveyor and engraver of this map is likely to be John A. Seymour, a city engineer from nearby Bradford, Pennsylvania. 

Scarce, only two examples located by OCLC (Pennsylvania State and Stanford).