Crude oil may be called Texas tea, but a private collector is auctioning artifacts documenting that the world's oil boom started in northwestern Pennsylvania.

Auctioneer Larry Ploss of Corry hopes that the auction Saturday at a hotel in the appropriately named Oil City will draw national collectors and historians.

"Most of the time, when you talk about oil and gas (memorabilia) people are usually talking about oil cans and globes and signs," said Roxanne Hitchcock, an Oil City historian hired to catalog the items being sold by an anonymous collector. "But much of this is books and papers dealing with the industry itself."

The items include first-edition history books, maps and documents, including some linked to oil industry giants such as H.H. Arnold, once president of Cal-Tex Company, the precursor to Texaco, and Lyman Stewart, founder of the Union Oil Company.

"When you think about how the petroleum industry was driving history in the 20th century, I can certainly see value in these documents," said Todd Houck, archivist at The Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas. "It's a pretty impressive collection."

The auction features oddities as well.

On the block is one of several tulip wood canes that were made from remnants of the world's first commercial oil well -- the Drake Well drilled in Titusville in 1859.

And a Kier's oil bottle. Salt miner Samuel Kier discovered petroleum in his Tarentum salt pits, about 20 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, around 1850 and began selling the crude oil as a medicine for 50 cents a bottle. When he learned the stuff burned too, he established the world's first oil refinery in Pittsburgh to produce lamp oil, historians say.

"There's still old-timers around here who swear by the stuff," Hitchcock said. "I know an old man who tells me when he feels ill he sucks down a shot" of crude oil, even though it's no longer sold as medicine.

"I'm sure it made a good laxative," she joked.

Also being auctioned is an 1878 biography of a brothel owner who converted to Christianity after the Pennsylvania oil bust.

"The Life and Adventures of Ben Hogan, The Wickedest Man in the World" tells about Hogan who, with a madam known as French Kate, ran a string of brothels in Pithole, a Venango County boomtown that grew up around a gusher in May 1865.

Four months later, Pithole had a population of 15,000, 57 hotels and the third-busiest post office in Pennsylvania, according to the Drake Museum and Library Web site.

But when the oil dried up, so did Pithole, which had less than 2,000 residents a year later and faded away in the late 1800s.

Pennsylvania's oil boom didn't last much longer than Pithole's.

By the 1870s, oil companies were moving, first to Ohio and West Virginia, and eventually to Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Latin America -- looking for more productive wells.

Pennsylvania oil reserves were easy to find -- often only hundreds of feet below the surface -- but contained only a fraction of the oil found beneath Texas or Oklahoma, said Glenn Cochran, president of the nonprofit The Colonel, Inc., which runs the Drake Well Museum and Library.

"After a while, we didn't really have the volume to compete with those guys," Cochran said. A single Texas oil field could produce as much oil in a day as the entire Appalachian Basin, composed of Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Cochran said.

The real value of Saturday's auction is for oil buffs looking to keep the region's history alive, said Brian Black, a Penn State-Altoona professor who wrote a history of the region, "Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom."

"There's a real interest in having something from that place now that it's largely gone," Black said. "Academically, it has less value than it does for what I call ... 'buffdom.' They'll have lots of people from the other oil patches around the world, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, buying those things."

The Petroleum Museum at www.petroleummuseum.org