Golf in Franklin

Franklin is the seat of Venango County, a small city on the Allegheny River at the mouth of French Creek that has maintained its identity through the long decline of the Pennsylvania oil industry. Oil Creek, twenty miles north at Titusville, was where Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well in America in 1859, and the subsequent oil boom transformed Venango County into one of the wealthiest counties in the state for a generation. The refineries and derricks are gone, but the Victorian architecture they funded remains in Franklin's residential neighborhoods. French Creek joins the Allegheny at Franklin, and the confluence gives the city its geographic character. Nine holes suit a community of Franklin's size — a small county seat with a stable but modest population that values recreational access without the infrastructure demands of a regulation-length course.