Wamsutta Oil Refinery - Henry H. Rogers

Henry H. Rogers

Perhaps realizing both the trend and opportunity, in 1861, in Fairhaven, 21 year-old Henry Huttleston Rogers pooled his savings of approximately $600 with a friend, Charles H. Ellis. They set out to western Pennsylvania and its newly discovered oil fields. The young partners began their small Wamsutta Oil Refinery at McClintocksville, Pennsylvania, near Oil City. The name "Wamsutta" was apparently selected in honor of their hometown area of Fairhaven, Massachusetts in New England. Wamsutta was the son of a Native American chief who negotiated an early alliance with the English settlers of the Plymouth Colony in the 17th century. The name chosen for the new refinery may also have derived from the Wamsutta Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Opened in 1846, it was a major employer. (The Wamsutta Company was the first of many textile mills that gradually came to supplant whaling as the principal employer in New Bedford).

Rogers and Ellis, and their Wamsutta Oil Refinery, made $30,000 their first year. This amount was more than 3 entire whaling ship trips from back home could hope to earn during an average voyage of more than a year's duration. He was regarded as very successful when Rogers returned home to Fairhaven for a short vacation the next year. There, in 1862, he married his childhood sweetheart, Abbie Palmer Gifford. Abbie returned with him to the oil fields where they lived in a one-room shack along Oil Creek and he and Ellis worked the Wamsutta Oil Refinery.