Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Rouseville, PA

Rouseville is a borough in Venango County, in the heart of Pennsylvania's original oil region along Oil Creek.

The community was renamed Rouseville in February 1861, from Buchanan Farms, in honor of oilman Henry R. Rouse.

Henry Rouse was one of 19 people killed when the Little and Merrick oil well at Rouseville exploded and burned on April 17, 1861 — as he lay dying, he dictated a will that provided generously for roads and the poor.

Three-year-old Ida Tarbell, who grew up to become the famous muckraking critic of the oil industry, was living in Rouseville at the time of the 1861 explosion.

Rouseville's post office opened in 1862, in the first rush of the Pennsylvania oil boom, and the borough was incorporated in 1900.

Rouseville's population peaked at 1,059 in 1930 and has declined with the oil economy ever since — the 2020 census counted 456 residents.

The 2000 census counted 472 people in 204 households in Rouseville, with an unusually old population for the region — a median age of 44 and more than a quarter of residents aged 65 or older.

Pennsylvania Route 8 runs through Rouseville as its Main Street, and the whole borough covers only about 0.9 square miles at roughly 1,260 feet above sea level.

The McClintock Well No. 1, drilled in 1861 and famed as the world's oldest producing oil well, stands just outside the borough, and Oil Creek State Park and the Drake Well Museum near Titusville preserve the surrounding oil heritage.