Since 2014, the Iranian state has undertaken efforts to preserve decommissioned sites of petroleum production and consumption, in part by repurposing these buildings into museums documenting the history of the nation’s oil industry. A recent Ministry of Petroleum initiative is working to open oil industry museums in notable locations, such as at port cities and drilling rigs in the oil-bearing Southwest. The first ever oil museum in the country, however, was established in the small northeastern city of Sabzevar, nearly a decade prior to the state’s official foray into preserving Iran’s “industrial heritage.” Housed at an unassuming mid-century gas station, the Sabzevar Oil Museum chronicles the city’s development into a minor oil depot by the 1930s, which primarily serviced Mashhad before railways and pipelines linked the city to Tehran in the 1960s. While this city seems largely peripheral to key sectors of the Iranian oil industry, I argue that the anomalous Sabzevar Oil Museum helps to articulate an alternative socio-cultural history of the ‘national’ resource of oil – one that pushes back against conventional state and academic histories of Iranian development and industrialization. First, my presentation will combine archival research into Sabzevar’s industrial history with visual analysis of the oil museum’s photographic and technological artifacts in order to reflect on the museum’s curatorial choices and its attempted interventions into the national narrative of Iranian oil. Then, borrowing from critical energy theory, I will explore how the Sabzevar Oil Museum helps demonstrate that oil in Iran remains a relational social and cultural phenomenon, whose meaning in the shared social imaginary continues to be generated and circulated through the nation’s material infrastructures. In this sense, I intend to use Sabzevar as a launching point to reflect on the historiography of the national oil industry and its connections to Iranian political modernity. In light of state efforts to communicate a unified, national narrative of Iranian oil history in its museum initiatives, I contend that it is important to take notice of ‘unexceptional’ sites whose geographical and spatial staging suggest an array of experiences of Iranian “oil modernity” stratified by regional developments and infrastructural networks. Thus, in this presentation I hope to reflect on how processes of uneven fossil-fueled development remain deeply implicated with histories of modern ‘nation-making’ as well as contemporary debates over Iran’s national cultural heritage.