Penn historian Jared Farmer recently launched a website about Philadelphia’s fossil fuel economy to help students and residents learn about the local past in larger context.
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Philadelphia Gas Works in an 1890 illustration. It sat on the east side of the Schuylkill River, between Market and Filbert streets.
(Image: David J. Kennedy. Courtesy of Historical Society of Philadelphia, via petrodelphia.org.)
For some 150 years, Philadelphia’s lower Schuylkill River was a major hub for petroleum storage, refining, and distribution. Taking into account riverside chemical works, coal-gas plants, and coal-fired power stations, the area should be considered the nation’s first comprehensive petrochemical corridor, says Penn historian Jared Farmer.
To aid public understanding of this underappreciated side of Philadelphia’s history, Farmer and a team of students, library staff, and freelancers have launched a digital resource, petrodelphia.org.
The “Petrodelphia” website focuses on the industrial zone on both sides of the Schuylkill from Market Street to the Navy Yard. Today, recreational users of the Schuylkill Banks trail are witnessing the post-industrial transformation of this corridor.
The largest single operation, equivalent in size to the Center City District, was the South Philadelphia refinery complex, which operated in different forms from 1866 to 2019. It closed after an explosive accident that sent a toxin into the air and flaming chunks of metal debris flying through the sky, one landing on the other side of the Schuylkill. Subsequently purchased by HRP Group, the refinery has been razed and is currently being redeveloped as the Bellwether District.
Farmer’s website contains information on the lower Schuylkill petrochemical corridor, including a glossary, reference articles, historic photographs, architectural drawings, government documents, and environmental-remediation reports. There are also two mapping tools, one that allows users to see landscape change over time and another that visualizes data about accidents.
Assembling and curating all these resources will facilitate place-based storytelling, he says. “That could mean students narrating histories or content creators making videos or members of the public sharing testimonies,” says Farmer, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and department chair.
It is also a tool for educators, he says. “The idea was to give teachers and students a rich set of primary and secondary sources to work with. Combined with the reference articles and the maps, they now have lots of interpretive material to help them think about the primary sources.”
For the 19th-century transition to mineral energy, few cities were more important than Philadelphia, Farmer says. “Philadelphia was crucial in pushing the U.S. and the world up the ramp to a high-carbon, energy-intensive economy. That wouldn’t have happened the way it did without Philadelphia."
In the coming months, scores of additional images and documents are to be added and the functionality of the two mapping tools improved. Farmer has also tapped the expertise of a recent graduate of the Graduate School of Education to compose lesson plans for elementary, middle, and high school students in Greater Philadelphia.
He is also planning a course on oral history methods to expand the content further, connecting Penn students to community groups in South and Southwest Philadelphia to record the voices and testimonies of residents and workers.
Farmer says he’s excited to see what people do with the website’s content, all of which is freely downloadable and available for sharing and reuse. He imagines social media videos, documentaries, investigative journalism, podcasting, and student projects coming out of it.
“The purpose of the website is not to generate more scholarship for the sake of scholarship but to facilitate more stories for the sake of understanding,” Farmer says. “There are so many important Philly stories that have yet to be told.”
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