After oil was discovered near Titusville in 1859, Union City's railroad connections and lumber businesses helped the small community build an oil-barrel industry, with Woods and Johnson's barrel factory employing 70 workers by 1870 and claiming to be the nation's largest producer of oil barrels. As the oil boom declined in the 1870s, Union City, with about 1,500 inhabitants, continued to rely on wood-products industries such as lumber, barrels, wooden pumps, shovel handles, caskets, and chair making, though agriculture still dominated the local economy. That began to change in 1881 with the construction of Union City Chair Co. on Crooked, now Market, Street. Though destroyed by fire three times in its first 26 years, the factory was rebuilt in brick in 1908 and helped establish Union City's reputation as a furniture center. Over 119 years, its workers produced millions of hardwood chairs before the plant closed in 2000, and for most of its first 90 years the company was owned and managed by people affiliated with the Caflisch family. By 1913, Union City Chair Co., Shreve Chair Co., Standard Chair Co., and others were producing thousands of chairs each day. Fires repeatedly struck the industry, including the destruction of Shreve Chair Co. in 1913, when dynamite was used to blow up four piles of timber to keep the flames from reaching two other industrial plants, and the blast was heard in Corry and felt in Lincolnville, eight miles from Union. Although 300 employees were left out of work, a rebuilt Shreve plant on Fourth Avenue made its first furniture shipment only five months later; the company was sold in 1939 and eventually failed. Standard Chair Co. on South Main Street operated from 1898 until it became part of Ethan Allen's Cherry Hill Division in 1966, and Ethan Allen's nearly 250 employees produced about 2,700 dining room chairs, 400 dining room tables, and 300 to 500 other tables each week. At least a dozen chair and furniture manufacturers operated in Union City between the first documented company in 1867 and the closure of the Ethan Allen plant in 2003, as thousands of area residents across generations made millions of chairs, tables, and other furniture and gave the community its early motto, "Union City Seats the World!"