Titusville Historic District

Titusville's historic district covers about 170 acres of level, grid-planned ground in the northcentral part of the city, and holds 503 structures, 472 of them contributing. Its growth follows the oil industry that began after Edwin L. Drake's successful well in August 1859. Before that, the town was a lumber center on Oil Creek, and a few pre-1859 buildings survive, including the William Barnsdall House, built about 1855 in a vernacular version of Greek Revival. Frame houses dominated the first boom years, and by the mid-1860s brick commercial buildings, the first brick church and the first brick residence had appeared. Downtown blocks are mostly Italianate, with later commercial work in Neo-Classical, Beaux Arts and Second Empire forms. Residential streets hold single-family houses on lots of about 9,225 square feet, many shaded by large maples. The district is significant as the surviving core of the town's commercial, cultural and residential buildings from the boom years and the early 1900s.