Friday, August 28, 2009

Just beat it


Just beat it, originally uploaded by Ryan Wenner.
Thursday the 27th was the 150th anniversary of the first successful commercial oil well, here in Titusville, PA. If you are from the area then you are probably sick of hearing about this. If you’re not from here, then you might have no idea what I’m talking about…So if that’s the case I suggest going on over to the Oil150 website and checking it out. I was involved with the lighting/sound production for the Nitro show at Drake Well Park, but during the day I had some downtime so I went around shooting photos.

I had no idea that Venango County has a blacksmith association, and that they had a shop/display here at the park. Back in 1859, being a blacksmith was probably one of the most bad-ass jobs you could have… second only to the guy who gets to torpedo oil wells with nitroglycerin. I’m sure blacksmith conversational exchanges often went like this:

“What do you do for a living?”

“Well I take this red hot piece of metal here and hammer it between two other pieces of metal to make something bad-ass, like a knife or sword!”

I digress…anyhow, blacksmithing is demonstrated on a regular basis at Drake Well Park, and there is even work available for purchase, so I suggest you head on over and check it out.

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