COOLSPRING, Pa. — Obscure bits of Butler history will roar back to life this spring in the Jefferson County village of Coolspring.

Butler’s neglected past as a center for engine manufacturing resurfaced when the Coolspring Power Museum opened its doors last weekend for its 2013 season.

The museum houses 250 vintage engines — 150 of them in working order — including 10 from long-forgotten Butler machine shops, said Paul Harvey, the museum founder and one of its directors.

Harvey said Butler supported at least 10 engine manufacturers between 1900 and 1930 to service the booming Pennsylvania oil industry.

“I am sure that there were 10,” said Harvey. “It had the most engines in Pennsylvania. Other oil towns, Oil City, Bradford, Franklin, had engine makers, but none really diversified like Butler did.”

“The engines were used in machine shops and printing shops, in electrical generation and to run the oil pumps and power the oil-drilling rigs,” Harvey said. “The engines were built to what the oilmen wanted and were in the 10- to 12-horsepower range.”

“They were doing so much drilling, so much producing here,” said Pat Collins, administrative director of the Butler County Historical Society.

“There wouldn’t have been a Drake well without Uncle Billy Smith of Butler going up there and drilling that well with his equipment,” Collins said.

Why did Butler become such a big engine manufacturer?

“That’s a question that still haunts me,” Harvey said. “The Butler field came in 1890, as opposed to the Drake well in 1859. The manufacturing was a little more sophisticated.”

“Before it was steam engines, and they were cumbersome. With gasoline engines, you just turned on the gas cock when you wanted it to go,” Harvey said.

“A lot of good men came from a long way away, attracted by the black gold, but instead of going out and prospecting, they set up a machine shop,” he said.

“If the market was there, two or three machine shops couldn’t keep up with the demand,” he said. He said it was easy to identify an engine built in Butler because there were only one or two foundries operating at the time.

Harvey said the development of the electric motor put an end to the gas engines made in Butler.

“When the demand went, the engines faded away,” Harvey said.

But not entirely. The names of the old engine manufacturers linger on in unexpected places.

“Thomas Wharton Phillips made his money leasing and selling oil land,” Harvey said. “But he also had Phillips engines. I doubt he got his hands dirty, but there is a patent taken out by an Arthur Clark of Butler for Phillips for a two-cycle uniflow design. There’s nothing else like it.”

Spang and Co. was started by George Spang, a Butler engine maker.

“One of the companies, Wise, is still in business as the Wise Machine in downtown Butler,” Harvey said.

Harvey has made several trips to the Butler Library to research the city’s engine history.

The Coolspring Power Museum is an outgrowth of Harvey’s fascination with all types of engines.

“The museum is built around my engine collection on the old family farm,” said Harvey, who is a doctor at Brookville Hospital.

“We incorporated in 1985. We are halfway between Brookville and Punxsutawney on Route 36.”

The museum, housed in 15 pole barn buildings, opens regularly on the third full weekend of the month in April and then continues through October.