Each quarter, as I type up my latest column for Western Pennsylvania History magazine, I check the handy dandy word count tool in Microsoft Word…and swear just a little. I’m over my limit, again. I do what I can to rein in the narrative to under 800 words, again. I send my apologies to the editorial team, again. And I shed a metaphorical tear over what I had to cut from my story, again.
Rather than continue to mourn the loss of interesting details or rabbit trails from these Northwestern Pennsylvania stories, I’ll recap them for you here in Word Count. Check back periodically for all the things you didn’t know that you didn’t know about our region’s past!
Today, we’re looking at….
Elizabeth Fletcher Hequembourg
First off, Elizabeth is fast becoming one of my personal heroes. This woman had a natural talent for all things history. And (like yours truly) she loved the stuff and sites of the past. Born in Titusville in 1857, she bridged the gap between the old generation and the new, and I believe she felt that weight. Her father Ruel Danforth Fletcher rubbed shoulders with oil men (and indeed kept Edwin Drake afloat when money ran out for his well that I’m sure you’ve heard of). Her grandparents and great-grandparents were the first families of Titusville, with surnames like Titus and Chase. And when those men and women died, Elizabeth became a torchbearer of that particular past. Sure, we can fault the narrowness of her narratives or the mistakes in her preservation work (just ask me about Pioneer Park cemetery’s headstones), but you can feel the love Elizabeth had for her community’s history in everything she wrote or collected.
My upcoming article focuses on her work with the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter, as part of our region’s America 250 celebrations. But Titusville has a few important anniversaries of its own, and Elizabeth herself was no stranger to hosting heritage programming. I had to smile when I found a program for the fifth annual historical tour of the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society to the Oil Region, organized in part by Elizabeth – you may know that society today as the Heinz History Center, small world!
In 1934, she was gearing up for the Diamond Jubilee of Oil, marking 75 years since Drake transformed the world with the first commercial petroleum well. Elizabeth must have been very busy indeed, sending invitations around the country to a Who’s Who of oil barons, because tucked into an archival box at Drake Well Museum is an RSVP from Emily Folger. THE Emily Folger of THE Folger Shakespeare Library! The Folgers were bitten by the bug of rare book collecting (there’s a Titusville connection there too, but that’s a story for another time) and they started their collection with Standard Oil money. (For a fun read on their lives, check out The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio by Andrea Mays.) Elizabeth clearly had a close friendship with Emily, who calls her “Dear Lizzie” and regrets that she can’t attend the festivities. It shouldn’t have surprised me to see this letter in Elizabeth’s collection, and yet it never ceases to amaze me how strongly connected Titusville was to America’s captains of industry during this period.
Read more about Elizabeth Hequembourg, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and their efforts to keep memories of the past burning bright in the Spring 2026 issue of Western Pennsylvania History, a quarterly publication by the Senator John Heinz History Center.
The Free-Range Historian 