This project originated in 2020, the year the South Philadelphia Refinery Complex permanently closed, and the year when principal investigator Jared Farmer moved to Philadelphia to join the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, Farmer began teaching courses on Pennsylvania fossil fuel history and began doing collaborative research with students. Over time, the primary output of Farmer’s “Petrosylvania” project came into focus: A freely accessible public-facing website for collecting and curating historical sources about the lower Schuylkill River petrochemical corridor, and for sharing scholarship that synthesize that information. With technical help from Penn Libraries, Farmer launched this website in 2025, in advance of the US Semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) in Philadelphia.

How to use this site

There are any number of ways to use this site—no right or wrong way. If you want to start by reading, the best entry point is “Reckoning with Fossil Fuel in Philadelphia,” located under the Reference tab. This summary document includes a detailed timeline of the petrochemical corridor.

After that, consider these pathways:

Reference articles

Read one or more of the six encyclopedia-style articles, which range in length from 7,500 to 20,000 words. Each of these articles (under the Reference tab) includes a bibliography. Readers lacking background in fossil fuel history may want to peruse the two shortest articles: “Pennsylvania Coal and Philadelphia” and “Petroleum Industry and Greater Philadelphia.” Others may prefer to go straight to the longest article: “South Philadelphia Refinery Complex.” All the reference works can be downloaded.

Historic images

Visual learners may choose to begin by browsing 200+ downloadable images, grouped into five collection types: 1) architectural, 2) low-angle views, 3) aerial photography, 4) newspaper headlines, and 5) news photography. All of them are tagged under the genre “image.” You can search for specific images using geographic or descriptive keywords that you encounter in the reference works. For example: ARCO, Atlantic Refining, bridge, DuPont, Center City, explosion, expressway, fire, firefighters, Gibson Point, Girard Point, Grays Ferry, Gulf, incinerator, north yard, Passyunk Avenue, PGW, pollution, Quartermaster Depot, Point Breeze, Schuylkill River, storage tank, tanker ship, Tasker Homes, Yankee Point, and so on.

Explore collections

To do original research in primary and secondary sources related to the lower Schuylkill petrochemical corridor, you can browse 400+ downloadable documents, including “grey literature” (e.g., environmental remediation reports and government documents). These texts have been grouped into sixteen collection types:
  • air quality
  • DSCP [Defense Supply Center Philadelphia] remediation
  • energy policy
  • HRP [Hilco Redevelopment Partners]
  • PGW [Philadelphia Gas Works]
  • Penn sustainability
  • Pew reports
  • public health
  • refinery history and policy
  • refinery remediation
  • regional planning
  • Standard Oil
  • student projects
  • urban planning
  • urban sustainability
  • water quality
    • You can also browse these sources based on genre:
  • archival document
  • book
  • city document
  • Commonwealth document
  • corporate document
  • data sheet
  • federal document
  • image
  • metropolitan document
  • NGO document
  • legal document
  • reference work
  • research article
  • university document

    • Targeted searching

    Use the website’s search bar for targeted searching by keyword, personal name, place name, year, etc. This will work for texts as well as images.

    Chronological browsing

    Browse all the items, both texts and images, chronologically.

    Lesson plans

    Read the lesson plans, which have been designed for social studies teachers at the elementary, middle, and high school levels in Greater Philadelphia. The curriculum may also be of interest to college educators anywhere who offer courses on energy history, energy policy, environmental justice, labor history, urban environmental history, city planning, or the built environment. The lesson plans could also could be pertinent, in a comparative way, for residents, activists, and planners in other urban zones with legacy refineries (e.g., Linden, New Jersey; Brooklyn, New York; and Richmond, California).

    Interactive maps

    Explore the two mapping tools:

  • Historic maps consists of planar (top-down) aerial photographs, satellite images, and a variety of published maps. The historic date range runs from 1867 (just after the formation of Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company) to 2019 (the year the former Atlantic refinery exploded for the last time). There are also up-to-date maps and satellite views. All the cartographic scans have been georeferenced and georectified (pinned and aligned) for easy comparison. Atop each base map you can overlay visual information like ZIP Codes, zoning boundaries, census data, and the “Areas of Interest” (environmental remediation zones) that comprise the former refinery complex. There are also future-oriented overlays that visualize risk scenarios for “100-year floods” and sea-level rise related to global warming. By layering and unlayering, and by zooming in and zooming out, you can see how the built environment has changed over time, and appreciate how those changes relate to social and physical factors. These layered maps have inherent visual interest, but you will gain more from them as you learn about Philadelphia and its fossil fuel history from the textual side of the website.
  • Accident mapper allows you to see when and where 186 known petrochemical accidents occurred along the lower Schuylkill River, as superimposed on a current map. The date range is 1866 to 2019. Each dot represents one accident. The color red indicates fatal; orange indicates injurious; and blue indicates non-injurious. Zoom in until you can distinguish individual dots, then click on any one to see associated information. (Users with data visualization skills may wish to create their own maps or infographics using underlying data. Browse the genre tag "data sheets" for a pair of sheets — one listing injurious accidents and another listing total accidents. A third sheet with data on accident victims is available to professional researchers on request.)

    • Additional information

    Everything on this website is public domain, or in Creative Commons license, or sharable under the fair use doctrine.

    It is highly recommended that all users also consult the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, a website maintained by Rutgers University–Newark.

    Users interested in the legal and technical sides of environmental remediation should be aware of Philadelphia Refinery Legacy Remediation, a website maintained by Evergreen Resources LLP.

    For up-to-date information on the redevelopment of the former refinery complex, see The Bellwether District, a website maintained by HRP.

    For visualizing environmental justice data about Philadelphia, three mapping tools are useful: Drexel University’s Green Living Plan for Philadelphia, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s PennEnviroScreen, and Public Environmental Data Partners’ reconstruction of the EPA’s EJScreen (discontinued by the White House in February 2025).

    Other important resources include Hidden City Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the American Oil and Gas Historical Society.

    One large class of primary sources crucial to the “Petrosylvania” project cannot be included here: proprietary scans from ProQuest Historical Newspapers and Newspapers.com. Serious researchers may want to use such subscription services to supplement this website.

    Much of the information on this website was compiled by student research assistants from newspaper accounts. Journalists, past and present, are known to make mistakes—and researchers are fallible, too. It is inevitable, despite fact-checking, that a certain number of errors persist. Readers are encouraged to do follow-up research. Indeed, this public-facing digital history project has been designed to aid just that.

    The deepest purpose of “Petrosylvania” is to inspire and facilitate scholarship, storytelling, and sharing. Many important stories about America’s first petrochemical corridor remain to be told.