VII. THE VALLEY OF PETROLEUM…

VII. THE VALLEY OF PETROLEUM

WONDERFUL SCENES ON OIL CREEK—MUD AND GREASE GALORE—RISE AND FALL OF PHENOMENAL TOWNS—SHAFFER, PIONEER AND PETROLEUM CENTRE—FORTUNE’S QUEER VAGARIES—WELLS FLOWING THOUSANDS OF BARRELS—SHERMAN, DELAMATER AND “COAL-OIL JOHNNIE”—FROM PENURY TO RICHES AND BACK—RECITALS THAT DISCOUNT FAIRY-TALES.

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“I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and cry, ‘’Tis all barren.’”—Sterne.

“This beginning part is not made out of anybody’s head; it’s real.”—Dickens.

“Some ships come into port that are not steered.”—Seneca.

“God has placed in his great bank—mother earth—untold wealth and many a poor man’s check has been honored here for large amounts of oil.”—T. S. Scoville, A. D. 1861.

“Ain’t that well spittin’ oil?”—Small Boy, A. D. 1863.

“Wonderful, most wonderful, marvelous, most marvelous, are the stories told of the oil-region. It is another California.”—John W. Forney, A. D. 1863.

“Derricks peered up behind the houses of Oil City, like dismounted steeples, and oil was pumping in the back-yards.”—London Post, A. D. 1865.

“From this place and from this day henceforth commences a new era.”—Goethe.

“The chandelier drives off with its splendor the darkness of night.”—Henry Stanton.

“The onlookers were struck dumb with astonishment.”—Charles Kingsley.

“Either I will find a way or make one.”—Norman Proverb.

“I bid you look into the past as if it were a mirror.”—Terence.

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Forty-three farms of manifold shapes and sizes lay along the stream from the Drake well to the mouth of Oil Creek, sixteen miles southward. For sixty years the occupants of these tracts had forced a bare subsistence from the reluctant soil. “Content to live, to propagate and die,” their requirements and their resources were alike scanty. They knew nothing of the artificial necessities and extravagances of fashionable life. To most of them the great, busy, plodding world was a sealed book, which they had neither the means nor the inclination to unclasp. The world reciprocated by wagging in its customary groove, blissfully unconscious of the scattered settlers on the banks of the Allegheny’s tributary. A trip on a raft to Pittsburg, with the privilege of walking back, was the limit of their journeyings from the hills and rocks of Venango. Hunting, fishing and hauling saw-logs in winter aided in replenishing the domestic larder. None imagined the unproductive valley would become the cradle of an industry before which cotton and coal and iron must “hide their diminished heads.” No prophet had proclaimed that lands on Oil Creek would sell for more than corner-lots in London or New York. Who could have conceived that these bold cliffs and patches of clearing would enlist ambitious mortals from every quarter of the globe in a mad race to secure a foothold on the coveted acres? What seventh son of a seventh son could foresee that a thousand dollars spent on the Willard farm would yield innumerable millions? Who could predict that a tiny stream of greenish fluid, pumped from a hole on an island too insignificant to have a name, would swell into the vast ocean of petroleum that is the miracle of the nineteenth century? Fortune has played many pranks, but the queerest of them all were the vagaries incidental to the petroleum-development on Oil Creek.

The Bissell, Griffin, Conley, two Stackpole, Pott, Shreve, two Fleming, Henderson and Jones farms, comprising the four miles between the Drake well and the Miller tract, were not especially prolific. Traces of a hundred oil-pits, in some of which oak-trees had grown to enormous size, are visible on the Bissell plot of eighty acres. A large dam, used for pond-freshets, was located on Oliver Stackpole’s farm. Two refineries of small capacity were built on the Stackpole and Fletcher lands, where eighteen or twenty wells produced moderately. The owner of a flowing well on the lower Fleming farm, imitating the man who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, sought to increase its output by putting the tubing and seed-bagging farther down. The well resented the interference, refusing to yield another drop and pointing the obvious moral: “Let well enough alone!” The Miller farm of four-hundred acres, on both sides of the creek, was purchased in 1863 from Robert Miller by the Indian Rock-Oil Company of New York. Now a railroad-station and formerly the principal shipping-point for oil, refineries were started, wells were drilled and the stirring town of Meredith blossomed for a little space. The Lincoln well turned out sixty barrels a day, the Boston fifty, the Bobtail forty, the Hemlock thirty and others from ten to twenty-five, at an average depth of six-hundred feet. The Barnsdall Oil-Company operated on the Miller and the Shreve farms, drilling extensively on Hemlock Run, and George Bartlett ran the Sunshine Oil-Works. The village, the refineries and the derricks have disappeared as completely as Herculaneum or Sir John Franklin.

George Shaffer owned fifty acres below the Miller farm, divided by Oil Creek into two blocks, one in Cherrytree township and the other in Allegheny. Twenty-four wells, eight of them failures, were put down on the flats and the abrupt hill bordering the eastern shore of the stream. Samuel Downer’s Rangoon and three of Watson & Brewer’s were the largest, ranking in the fifty-barrel list. In July of 1864 the Oil-Creek Railroad was finished to Shaffer farm, which immediately became a station of great importance. From one house and barn the place expanded in sixty days to a town of three-thousand population. And such a town! Sixteen-hundred teams, mainly employed to draw oil from the wells down the creek, supported the stables, boarding-houses and hotels that sprang up in a night. Every second door opened into a bar-room. The buildings were “balloon frames,” constructed entirely of boards, erected in a few hours and liable to collapse on the slightest pretext. Houses of cards would be about as comfortable and substantial. Outdo Hezekiah, by rolling back time’s dial thirty-one years, and in fancy join the crowd headed for Shaffer six months after the advent of the railway.

Start from Corry, “the city of stumps,” with the Downer refinery and a jumble of houses thrown around the fields. Here the Atlantic & Great-Western, the Philadelphia & Erie and the Oil-Creek Railroads meet. The station will not shelter one-half the motley assemblage bound for Oildom. “Mother Cary is plucking her geese” and snow-flakes are dropping thickly. Speculators from the eastern cities, westerners in quest of “a good thing,” men going to work at the wells, capitalists and farmers, adventurers and drummers clamor for tickets. It is the reverse of “an Adamless Eden,” for only three women are to be seen. At last the train backs to the rickety depot and a wild struggle commences. Scrambling for the elevated cars in New York or Chicago is a feeble movement compared with this frantic onslaught. Courtesy and chivalry are forgotten in the rush. Men swarm upon the steps, clog the platforms, pack the baggage-car, thrust the women aside, stick to the cowcatcher and clamber on the roofs of the coaches. Over the roughest track on earth, which winds and twists and skirts the creek most of the way, the train rattles and jolts and pitches. The conductor’s job is no sinecure, as he squeezes through the dense mass that leaves him without sufficient elbow-room to “punch in the presence of the passenjare.” Derricks—tall, gaunt skeletons, pickets of the advancing army—keep solemn watch here and there, the number increasing as Titusville comes in sight.

A hundred people get off and two-hundred manage somehow to get on. Past the Drake well, past a forest of derricks, past steep cliffs and tortuous ravines the engineer speeds the train. Did you ever think what a weight of responsibility rests upon the brave fellow in the locomotive-cab, whose clear eye looks straight along the track and whose steady hand grasps the throttle? Should he relax his vigilance or lose his nerve one moment, scores of lives might be the fearful penalty. A short stop at Miller Farm, a whiff of refinery-smells and in five minutes Shaffer is reached. The board-station is on the right hand, landings on the left form a semi-circle hundreds of feet in length, freight-cars jam the double track and warehouses dot the bank. The flat-about thirty rods wide-contains the mushroom-town, bristling with the undiluted essence of petroleum-activity. Three-hundred teamsters are unloading barrels of oil from wagons dragged by patient, abused horses and mules through miles of greasy, clayey mud. Everything reeks with oil. It pervades the air, saturates clothes and conversation, floats on the muddy scum and fills lungs and nostrils with its peculiar odor. One cannot step a yard without sinking knee-deep in deceptive mire that performs the office of a boot-jack if given “a ghost of a show.” Christian’s Slough of Despond wasn’t a circumstance to this adhesive paste, which engulfs unwary travelers to their trouser-pockets and begets a dreadful craving for roads not

“Wholly unclassable, Almost impassable, Scarcely jackassable.”

The trip of thirty-five miles has shaken breakfast clear down to the pilgrims’ boots. Out of the cars the hungry passengers tumble as frantically as they had clambered in and break for the hotels and restaurants. A dollar pays for a dinner more nearly first-class in price than in quality. The narrow hall leading to the dining-room is crammed with men—Person’s Hotel fed four-hundred a day—waiting their turn for vacant chairs at the tables. Bolting the meal hurriedly, the next inquiry is how to get down the creek. There are no coupés, no prancing steeds, no stages, no carriages for hire. The hoarse voice of a hackman would be sweeter music than Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” or Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” Horseback-riding is impracticable and walking seems the only alternative. To wade and flounder twelve miles—Oil City is that far off—is the dreary prospect that freezes the blood. Hark! In strident tones a fierce-looking fellow is shouting: “Packet-boat for Oil City! This way for the packet-boat! Packet-boat! Packet-boat!” Visions of a pleasant jaunt in a snug cabin lure you to the landing. The “packet-boat” proves to be an oily scow, without sail, engine, awning or chair, which horses have drawn up the stream from Oil City. It will float back at the rate of three miles an hour and the fare is three-fifty! The name and picture of “Pomeroy’s Express,” the best of these nondescript Oil-Creek vessels, will bring a smile and warm the cockles of many an old-timer’s heart!

Perhaps you decide to stay all night at Shaffer and start on foot early in the morning. A chair in a room thick with tobacco-smoke, or a quilt in a corner of the bar, is the best you can expect. By rare luck you may happen to pre-empt a half-interest in a small bed, tucked with two or three more in a closet-like apartment. Your room-mates talk of “flowing wells—five-hundred-thousand dollars—third sand—big strike—rich in a week—thousand-dollars a day,” until you fall asleep to dream of wells spouting seas of mud and hapless wights wading in greenbacks to their waists. Awaking cold and unrefreshed, your brain fuddled and your thoughts confused, you gulp a breakfast of “ham ’n eggs ’n fried potatoes ’n coffee” and prepare to strike out boldly. Encased in rubber-boots that reach above the thighs, you choose one of the two paths—each worse than the other—pray for sustaining grace and begin the toilsome journey. Having seen the tips of the elephant’s ears, you mean to see the end of his tail and be able to estimate the bulk of the animal. Night is closing in as you round up at your destination, exhausted and mud-coated to the chin. But you have traversed a region that has no duplicate “in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth,” and feel recompensed a thousand-fold for the fatigue and exposure. Were your years to exceed Thomas Parr’s and Methuselah’s combined, you will never again behold such a scene as the Oil-Creek valley presented in the days of “the middle passage” between Shaffer and Oil City. Rake it over with a fine-comb, turn on the X-rays, dig and scrape and root and to-day you couldn’t find a particle of Shaffer as big as a toothpick! When the railroad was extended the buildings were torn down and carted to the next station.

Widow Sanney’s hundred-acre farm, south of the Shaffer, had three refineries and a score of unremunerative wells. David Gregg’s two-hundred acres on the west side of Oil Creek, followed suit with forty non-paying wells, three that yielded oil and the Victoria and Continental refineries. The McCoy well, the first put down below the Drake, at two-hundred feet averaged fifteen barrels a day from March until July, 1860. Fire burning the rig, the well was drilled to five-hundred feet and proved dry. R. P. Beatty sold his two-hundred acres on Oil Creek and Hemlock Run to the Clinton Oil-Company of New York, a bunch of medium wells repaying the investment. James Farrell, a teamster, for two-hundred dollars purchased a thirty-acre bit of rough land south of Beatty, on the east side of Oil Creek and Bull Run, the extreme south-west corner of Allegheny—now Oil Creek—township. In the spring of 1860 Orange Noble leased sixteen acres for six hundred dollars and one-quarter royalty. Jerking a “spring-pole” five months sank a hole one-hundred-and-thirty feet, without a symptom of greasiness, and the well was neglected nearly three years. The “third sand” having been found on the creek, the holders of the Farrell lease decided to drill the old hole deeper. George B. Delamater and L. L. Lamb were associated with Noble in the venture. They contracted with Samuel S. Fertig, of Titusville, whose energy and reliability had gained the good-will of operators, to drill about five-hundred feet. Fertig went to work in April of 1863, using a ten-horse boiler and engine and agreeing to take one-sixteenth of the working-interest as part payment. He had lots of the push that long since placed him in the van as a successful producer, enjoying a well-earned competence. Early in May, at four-hundred-and-fifty feet, a “crevice” of unusual size was encountered. Fearing to lose his tools, the contractor shut down for consultation with the well-owners. Noble was at Pittsburg on a hunt for tubing, which he ordered from Philadelphia. The well stood idle two weeks, waiting for the tubing, surface-water vainly trying to fill the hole.

On the afternoon of May twenty-seventh, 1863, everything was ready. “Start her slowly,” Noble shouted from the derrick to Fertig, who stood beside the engine and turned on the steam. The rods moved up and down with steady stroke, bringing a stream of fresh water, which it was hoped a day’s pumping might exhaust. Then it would be known whether two of the owners—Noble and Delamater—had acted wisely on May fifteenth in rejecting one-hundred-thousand dollars for one-half of the well. Noble went to an eating-house near by for a lunch. He was munching a sandwich when a boy at the door bawled: “Golly! Ain’t that well spittin’ oil?” Turning around, he saw a column of oil and water rising a hundred feet, enveloping the trees and the derrick in dense spray! The gas roared, the ground fairly shook and the workmen hastened to extinguish the fire beneath the boiler. The “Noble well,” destined to be the most profitable ever known, had begun its dazzling career at the dizzy figure of three-thousand barrels a day!

Crude was four dollars a barrel, rose to six, to ten, to thirteen! Compute the receipts from the Noble well at these quotations—twelve-thousand, eighteen-thousand, thirty-thousand, thirty-nine-thousand dollars a day! Sinbad’s fabled Valley of Diamonds was a ten-cent side-show in comparison with the actual realities of the valley of Oil Creek.

Soon the foaming volume filled the hollow close to the well and ran into the creek. What was to be done? In the forcible jargon of a driller: “The divil wuz to pay an’ no pitch hot!” For two-hundred dollars three men crawled through the blinding shower and contrived to attach a stop-cock device to the pipe. By sunset a seven-hundred-barrel tank was overflowing. Boatmen down the creek, notified to come at once for all they wanted at two dollars a barrel, by midnight took the oil directly from the well. Next morning the stream was turned into a three-thousand-barrel tank, filling it in twenty-one hours! Sixty-two-thousand barrels were shipped and fifteen-thousand tanked, exclusive of leakage and waste, in thirty days. Week after week the flow continued, declining to six-hundred barrels a day in eighteen months. The superintendent of the Noble & Delamater Oil Company—organized in 1864 with a million capital—in February of 1865 recommended pulling out the tubing and cleaning the well. Learning of this intention, Noble and Delamater unloaded their stock at or above par. The tubing was drawn, the well pumped fifteen barrels in two days, came to a full stop and was abandoned as a dry-hole!

The production of this marvelous gusher—over seven-hundred-thousand barrels—netted upwards of four-million dollars! One-fourth of this lordly sum went to the children of James Farrell—he did not live to see his land developed—James, John, Nelson and their sister, now Mrs. William B. Sterrett, of Titusville. Noble and Delamater owned one-half the working-interest, less the sixteenth assigned to S. S. Fertig, who bought another sixteenth from John Farrell while drilling the well and sold both to William H. Abbott for twenty-seven-thousand dollars. Ten persons—L. L. Lamb, Solomon and W. H. Noble, Rev. L. Reed, James and L. H. Hall, Charles and Thomas Delamater, G. T. Churchhill and Rollin Thompson—held almost one-quarter. Even this fractional claim gave each a splendid income. The total outlay for the lease and well—not quite four-thousand dollars—was repaid one-thousand times in twenty months! Is it surprising that men plunged into speculations which completely eclipsed the South-Sea Bubble and Law’s Mississippi-Scheme? Is it any wonder that multitudes were eager to stake their last dollar, their health, their lives, their very souls on the chance of such winnings?

Thirteen wells were drilled on the Farrell strip. The Craft had yielded a hundred-thousand barrels and was doing two-hundred a day when the seed-bag burst, flooding the well with water and driving the oil away. The Mulligan and the Commercial did their share towards making the territory the finest property in Oildom, with third sand on the flats and in the ravine of Bull Run forty feet thick. Not a fragment of tanks or derricks is left to indicate that twenty fortunes were acquired on the desolate spot, once the scene of tremendous activity, more coveted than Naboth’s vineyard or Jason’s Golden Fleece. On the Caldwell farm of two-hundred acres, south of the Farrell, twenty-five or thirty wells yielded largely. The Caldwell, finished in March of 1863, at the north-west corner of the tract, flowed twelve-hundred barrels a day for six weeks. Evidently deriving its supply from the same pool, the Noble well cut this down to four-hundred barrels. A demand for one-fourth the output of the Noble, enforced by a threat to pull the tubing and destroy the two, was settled by paying one-hundred-and-forty-five-thousand dollars for the Caldwell well and an acre of ground. “Growing smaller by degrees and beautifully less,” within a month of the transfer the Caldwell quit forever, drained as dry as the bones in Ezekiel’s vision!

Hon. Orange Noble, the son of a New-York farmer, dealt in sheep and cattle, married in 1841 and in 1852 removed to Randolph, Crawford county, Pa. He farmed, manufactured “shooks” and in 1855 opened a store at Townville in partnership with George B. Delamater. The partners and L. L. Lamb inspected the Drake well in October of 1859, secured leases on the Stackpole and Jones farms and drilled two dry-holes. Other wells on different farms in 1860-1 resulted similarly, but the Noble compensated richly for these failures. The firm wound up the establishment at Townville in 1863, squared petroleum-accounts, and in 1864 Mr. Noble located at Erie. There he organized banks, erected massive blocks, served as mayor three terms, built the first grain elevator and contributed greatly to the prosperity of the city. Blessed with ample wealth—the Noble well paid him eight-hundred-thousand dollars—a vigorous constitution and the regard of his fellows, he has lived to a ripe age to enjoy the fruits of his patient industry and remarkable success.

Hon. George B. Delamater, whose parents settled in Crawford county in 1822, studied law and was admitted to the Meadville bar in 1847. He published a newspaper at Youngsville, Warren county, two years and in 1852 started in business at Townville. Clients were not plentiful in the quiet village, where a lawsuit was a luxury, and the young attorney found boring juries much less remunerative than he afterwards found boring oil-wells. Returning to Meadville in 1864, with seven-hundred-thousand dollars and some real-estate at his command, he built the magnificent Delamater Block, opened a bank, promoted many important enterprises and engaged actively in politics. Selected to oppose George K. Anderson—he, too, had a bar’l—for the State Senate in 1869, Delamater carried off the prize. It was a case of Greek meeting Greek. Money flowed like water, Anderson spending thirty-thousand dollars and his opponent twenty-eight-thousand on the primaries alone! This was the beginning of the depletion of the Delamater fortune and the political demoralization that scandalized Crawford county for years. Mr. Delamater served one term, declined to run again and Anderson succeeded him. His son, George W., a young lawyer of ability and superior address, entered the lists and was elected Mayor of Meadville and State-Senator. He married an accomplished lady, occupied a brick-mansion, operated at Petrolia, practiced law and assisted in running the bank. Samuel B. Dick headed a faction that opposed the Delamaters bitterly. Nominated for Governor of Pennsylvania in 1890, George W. Delamater was defeated by Robert E. Pattison. He conducted an aggressive campaign, visiting every section of the state and winning friends by his frank courtesy and manly bearing. Ruined by politics, unable longer to stand the drain that had been sapping its resources, the Delamater Bank suspended two weeks after the gubernatorial election. The brick-block, the homes of the parents and the sons, the assets of the concern—mere drops in the bucket—met a trifling percentage of the liabilities. Property was sacrificed, suits were entered and dismissed, savings of depositors were swept away and the failure entailed a host of serious losses. The senior Delamater went to Ohio to start life anew at seventy-one. George W. located in Chicago and quickly gathered a law-practice. That he will regain wealth and honor, pay off every creditor and some day represent his district in Congress those who know him best are not unwilling to believe. The fall of the Delamater family—the beggary of the aged father—the crushing of the son’s honorable ambition—the exile from home and friends—the suffering of innocent victims—all these illustrate the sad reverses which, in the oil-region, have “come, not single spies, but in battalions.”

James Bonner, son of an Ohio clergyman and book-keeper for Noble & Delamater, lodged in the firm’s new office beside the well. Seized with typhoid fever, his recovery was hopeless. The office caught fire, young Bonner’s father carried him to the window, a board was placed to slide him down and he expired in a few moments. His father, overcome by smoke, was rescued with difficulty; his mother escaped by jumping from the second story.

James Foster owned sixty acres on the west side of Oil Creek, opposite the Farrell and Caldwell tracts. The upper half, extending over the hill to Pioneer Run, he sold to the Irwin Petroleum Company of Philadelphia, whose Irwin well pumped two-hundred barrels a day. The Porter well, finished in May of 1864, flowed all summer, gradually declining from two-hundred barrels to seventy and finally pumping twenty. Other wells and a refinery paid good dividends. J. W. Sherman, of Cleveland, leased the lower end of the farm and bounced the “spring-pole” in the winter of 1861-2. His wife’s money and his own played out before the second sand was penetrated. It was impossible to drill deeper “by hand-power.” A horse or an engine must be had to work the tools. “Pete,” a white, angular equine, was procured for one-sixteenth interest in the well. The task becoming too heavy for “Pete,” another sixteenth was traded to William Avery and J. E. Steele for a small engine and boiler. Lack of means to buy coal—an expensive article, sold only for “spot cash”—caused a week’s delay. The owners of the well could not muster “long green” to pay for one ton of fuel! For another sixteenth a purchaser grudgingly surrendered eighty dollars and a shot-gun! The last dollar had been expended when, on March sixteenth, 1862—just in season to celebrate St. Patrick’s day—the tools punctured the third sand. A “crevice” was hit, the tools were drawn out and in five minutes everything swam in oil. The Sherman well was flowing two-thousand barrels a day! Borrowing the phrase of the parrot stripped of his feathers and blown five-hundred feet by a powder-explosion, people might well exclaim: “This beats the Old Scratch!”

To provide tankage was the first concern. Teams were dispatched for lumber and carpenters hurried to the scene. Near the well a mudhole, between two stumps, could not be avoided. In this one of the wagons stuck fast and had to be pried out, John A. Mather chanced to come along with his photograph apparatus. The men posed an instant, the horses “looked pleasant,” the wagon didn’t stir and he secured the artistic picture reproduced here thirty-five years after. It is an interesting souvenir of former times—times that deserve the best work of pen and pencil, camera and brush, “to hold them in everlasting remembrance.”

The Sherman well “whooped it up” bravely, averaging nine-hundred barrels daily for two years and ceasing to spout in February of 1864. Pumping restored it to seventy-five barrels, which dwindled to six or eight in 1867, when fire consumed the rig and the veteran was abandoned. The product sold at prices ranging from fifty cents to thirteen dollars a barrel, the total aggregating seventeen-hundred-thousand dollars! How was that for a return? It meant one-hundred-thousand dollars for the man who traded “Pete,” one-hundred-thousand for the man who invested eighty dollars and a rusty gun, one-hundred-thousand for the two men who furnished the second-hand engine, and a million—deducting the royalty—for the man who had neither cash nor credit for a load of coal!

None of the other fifty or sixty wells on the Foster farm, some of them Sherman’s, was particularly noteworthy. The broad flat, the sluggish stream and the bluffs across the creek remain as in days of yore, but the wells, the shanties, the tanks, the machinery and the workmen have vanished. Sherman, long hale and hearty, struck a spouter in Kentucky, operated two or three years at Bradford and took up his abode at Warren. It was a treat to hear his vivid descriptions of life on Oil Creek in the infancy of developments—life crowded with transformations far surpassing the fantastic changes of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He died at Cleveland last year.

Among the teamsters who hauled oil from the Sherman well in its prime was “Con” O’Donnell, a fun-loving, impulsive Irishman. He saved his earnings, secured leases for himself, owned a bevy of wells at Kane City and operated in the Clarion field. Marrying a young lady of Ellicottville, N. Y., his early home, he lived some years at Foxburg and St. Petersburg. He was the rarest of practical jokers and universally esteemed. Softening of the brain afflicted him for years, death at last stilling as warm and kindly a heart as ever throbbed in a manly breast. “Con” often regaled me with his droll witticisms as we rode or drove through the Clarion district. “Peace to his ashes.”

Late in the fall of 1859, “when th’ frost wuz on th’ punkin’ an’ th’ bloom wuz on th’ rye,” David McElhenny sold the upper and lower McElhenny farms—one-hundred-and-eighty acres at the south-east corner of Cherrytree township—to Captain A. B. Funk, for fifteen-hundred dollars and one-fourth of the oil. Joining the Foster farm on the north, Oil Creek bounded the upper tract on the east and south and Pioneer Run gurgled through the western side. Oil Creek flowed through the northern and western sides of the lower half, which had the Espy farm on the east, the Boyd south and the Benninghoff north and west. McElhenny’s faith in petroleum was of the mustard-seed order and he jumped at Hussey & McBride’s offer of twenty-thousand dollars for the royalty. Captain Funk—he obtained the title from running steamboats lumbering on the Youghiogheny river—in February of 1860 commenced the first well on the lower McElhenny farm. All spring and summer the “spring-pole” bobbed serenely, punching the hole two-hundred-and-sixty feet, with no suspicion of oil in the first and second sands. The Captain, believing it a rank failure, would gladly have exchanged the hole “for a yellow dog.” His son, A. P. Funk, bought a small locomotive-boiler and an engine and resumed work during the winter. Early in May, 1861, at four-hundred feet, a “pebble rock”—the “third sand”—tested the temper of the center-bit. Hope, the stuff that “springs eternal in the human breast,” took a fresh hold. It languished as the tools bored thirty, forty, fifty feet into the “pebble” and not a drop of oil appeared. Then something happened. Flecks of foam bubbled to the top of the conductor, jets of water rushed out, oil and water succeeded and a huge pillar of pure oil soared fifty yards! The Fountain well had tapped a fountain in the rock ordained thenceforth to furnish mankind with Pennsylvania petroleum. The first well put down to “the third sand,” and really the first on Oil Creek that flowed from any sand, it revealed oil-possibilities before unknown and unsuspected.

More tangible than the mythical Fountain of Youth, the Fountain well tallied three-hundred barrels a day for fifteen months. The flow ended as suddenly as it began. Paraffine clogged and strangled it to death, sealing the pores and pipes effectually. A young man “taught the young idea how to shoot” at Steam Mills, east of Titusville, where Captain Funk had lumber-mills. A visit to the Drake and Barnsdall wells, in December of 1859, determined the schoolmaster to have an oil-well of his own. Funk liked the earnest, manly youth and leased him five acres of the upper McElhenny farm. Plenty of brains, a brave heart, robust health, willing hands and thirty dollars constituted his capital. Securing two partners, “kicking down” started in the spring of 1860. Not a sign of oil could be detected at two-hundred feet, and the partners departed from the field. Summer and the teacher’s humble savings were gone. He earned more money by drilling on the Allegheny river, four miles above Oil City. While thus engaged the Fountain well revolutionized the business by “flowing” from a lower rock. The ex-wielder of the birch—he had resigned the ferrule for the “spring-pole”—hastened to sink the deserted well to the depth of Funk’s eye-opener. The second three-hundred-barrel gusher from the third sand, it rivaled the Fountain and arrived in time to help 1861 crimson the glorious Fourth!

Hon. John Fertig, of Titusville, the plucky schoolmaster of 1859-60, has been largely identified with oil ever since his initiation on the McElhenny lease. The Fertig well, in which David Beatty and Michael Gorman were his partners originally, realized him a fortune. Born in Venango county, on a farm below Gas City, in 1837, he completed a course at Neilltown Academy and taught school several terms. Soon after embarking in the production of oil he formed a partnership with the late John W. Hammond, which lasted until dissolved by death twenty years later. Fertig & Hammond operated in different sections with great success, carried on a refinery and established a bank at Foxburg. Mr. Fertig was Mayor of Titusville three terms, School-Controller, State Senator and Democratic candidate for Lieutenant-Governor in 1878. He has been vice-president of the Commercial Bank from its organization in 1882 and is president of the Titusville Iron-Works. Head of the National Oil-Company, he was also chief officer of the Union Oil-Company, an association of refining companies. For three years its treasurer—1892-5—he tided the United-States Pipe-Line Company over a financial crisis in 1893. As a pioneer producer—one of the few survivors connected with developments for a generation—a refiner and shipper, banker, manufacturer and business-man, John Fertig is most distinctively a representative of the oil-country. From first to last he has been admirably prudent and aggressive, conservative and enterprising in shaping a career with much to cherish and little to regret.

Frederick Crocker drilled a notable well on the McElhenny, near the Foster line, jigging the “spring-pole” in 1861 and piercing the sand at one-hundred-and-fifty feet. He pumped the well incessantly two months, getting clear water for his pains. Neighbors jeered, asked if he proposed to empty the interior of the planet into the creek and advised him to import a Baptist colony. Crocker pegged away, remembering that “he laughs best who laughs last.” One morning the water wore a tinge of green. The color deepened, the gas “cut loose,” and a stream of oil shot upwards! The Crocker well spurted for weeks at a thousand-barrel clip and was sold for sixty-five-thousand dollars. Shutting in the flow, to prevent waste, wrought serious injury. The well disliked the treatment, the gas sought a vent elsewhere, pumping coaxed back the yield temporarily to fifty barrels and in the fall it yielded up the ghost.

Bennett & Hatch spent the summer of 1861 drilling on a lease adjoining the Fountain, striking the third sand at the same depth. On September eighteenth the well burst forth with thirty-three-hundred barrels per day! This was “confusion worse confounded,” foreigners not wanting “the nasty stuff” and Americans not yet aware of its real value. The addition of three-thousand barrels a day to the supply—with big additions from other wells—knocked prices to twenty cents, to fifteen, to ten! All the coopers in Oildom could not make barrels as fast as the Empire well—appropriate name—could fill them. Bradley & Son, of Cleveland, bought a month’s output for five-hundred dollars, loading one-hundred-thousand barrels into boats under their contract! The despairing owners, suffering from “an embarrassment of riches,” tried to cork up the pesky thing, but the well was like Xantippe, the scolding wife of Socrates, and would not be choked off. They built a dam around it, but the oil wouldn’t be dammed that way. It just gorged the pond, ran over the embankment and greased Oil Creek as no stream was ever greased before! Twenty-two-hundred barrels was the daily average in November and twelve-hundred in March. The torrent played April-fool by stopping without notice, seven months from its inception. Cleaning out and pumping restored it to six-hundred barrels, which dropped two-thirds and stopped again in 1863. An “air blower” revived it briefly, but its vitality had fled and in another year the grand Empire breathed its last.

These wells boomed the territory immensely. Derricks and engine-houses studded the McElhenny farms, which operators hustled to perforate as full of holes as a strainer. To haul machinery from the nearest railroad doubled its cost. Pumping five to twenty barrels a day, when adjacent wells flowed more hundreds spontaneously, lost its charm and most of the small fry were abandoned. Everybody wanted to get close to the third-sand spouters, although the market was glutted and crude ruinously cheap. A town—Funkville—arose on the northern end of the upper farm, sputtered a year or two, then “folded its tent like the Arabs and silently stole away.” A search with a microscope would fail to unearth an atom of Funkville or the wells that created it. Fresh strikes in 1862 kept the fever raging. Davis & Wheelock’s rattler daily poured out fifteen-hundred barrels. The Densmore triplets, bunched on a two-acre lease, were good for six-hundred, four-hundred and five-hundred respectively. The Olmstead, American, Canfield, Aikens, Burtis and two Hibbard wells, of the vintage of 1863, rated from two-hundred to five-hundred each. A band of less account—thirty to one-hundred barrels—assisted in holding the daily product of the McElhenny farms, from the spring of 1862 to the end of 1863, considerably above six-thousand barrels. The mockery of fate was accentuated by a dry-hole six rods from the Sherman and dozens of poor wells in the bosom of the big fellows. Disposing of his timber-lands and saw-mills in 1863, Captain Funk built a mansion and removed to Titusville. Early in 1864 he sold his wells and oil-properties and died on August second, leaving an estate of two-millions. He built schools and churches, dispensed freely to the needy and was honest to the core. Pleased with the work of a clerk, he deeded him an interest in the last well he ever drilled, which the lucky young man sold for one-hundred-thousand dollars.

Almost simultaneously with the Empire, in September of 1861, the Buckeye well, on the George P. Espy farm, east of lower McElhenney, set off at a thousand-barrel jog. It was located on a strip of level ground too narrow for tanks, which had to be erected two-hundred feet up the hill. The pressure of gas sufficed to force the oil into these tanks for a year. The production fell to eighty barrels and then, tiring of a climbing job that smacked of Sisyphus and the rolling stone, took a permanent rest. From this famous well J. T. Briggs, manager of the Briggs and the Gillettee Oil-Companies, shipped to Europe in 1862 the first cargo of petroleum ever sent across the Atlantic. The Buckeye Belle stood about hip-high to its consort, a dozen other wells on the Epsy produced mildly and Northrup Brothers operated a refinery.

“Vare vos dose oil-wells now? Gone vhare dogs can’t bow-wow.”

Improved methods of handling and new uses for the product advanced crude to five dollars in the spring of 1864. Operations encroached upon the higher lands, exploding the notion that paying territory was confined to flats bordering the streams. Pioneer Run, an affluent of Oil Creek, bisecting the western end of the upper McElhenney and Foster farms, panned out flatteringly. Substantial wells, yielding fifteen barrels to three-hundred lined the ravine thickly. The town of Pioneer attracted the usual throngs. David Emery and Lewis Emery, Frank W. Andrews and not a few leading operators resided there for a time. The Morgan House, a rude frame of one story, dished up meals at which to eat beef-hash was to beefashionable. Clark & McGowen had a feed-store, offices and warehouses abounded, tanks and derricks mixed in the mass and boats loaded oil for refineries down the creek or the Allegheny river. The characteristic oil-town has faded from sight, only the weather-beaten rail road-station and a forlorn iron-tank staying. John Rhodes, the last resident, was killed in February of 1892 by a train. He lived alone in a small house beside the track, which he was crossing when the engine hit him, the noisy waters in the culvert drowning the sound of the cars. Rhodes hauled oil in the old days to Erie and Titusville, became a producer, met with reverses, attended to some wells for a company, worked a bit of garden and felt independent and happy.

Matthew Taylor, a Cleveland saloonist, whom the sequel showed to be no saloonatic, took a four-hundred-dollar flyer at Pioneer, on his first visit to Oildom. A well on the next lease elevated values and Taylor returned home in two weeks with twenty-thousand dollars, which subsequent deals quadrupled. A Titusville laborer—“a broth of a b’y wan year frum Oireland”—who stuck fifty dollars into an out-of-the-way Pioneer lot, sold his claim in a month for five-thousand. He bought a farm, sent across the water for his colleen and “they lived happily ever after.” The driver of a contractor’s team, assigned an interest in a drilling-well for his wages, cleaned up thirty-thousand dollars by the transaction and went to Minnesota. Could the mellowest melodrama unfold sweeter melodies?

“The jingle of gold is earth’s richest music.”

Although surrounded by farms unrivaled as oil-territory and sold to Woods & Wright of New York at a fancy price, James Boyd’s seventy-five acres in Cornplanter township, south of the lower McElhenny, dodged the petroleum-artery. The sands were there, but so barren of oil that nine-tenths of the forty wells did not pay one-tenth their cost. The Boyd farm was for months the terminus of the railroad from Corry. Hotels and refineries were built and the place had a short existence, a brief interval separating its lying-in and its laying-out.

G. W. McClintock, in February of 1864, sold his two-hundred-acre farm, on the west side of Oil Creek, midway between Titusville and Oil City, to the Central Petroleum Company of New York, organized by Frederic Prentice and George H. Bissell. This notable farm embraced the site of Petroleum Centre and Wild-Cat Hollow, a circular ravine three-fourths of a mile long, in which two-hundred paying wells were drilled. Brown, Catlin & Co.’s medium well, finished in August of 1861, was the first on the McClintock tract. The company bored a multitude of wells and granted leases only to actual operators, for one-half royalty and a large bonus. For ten one-acre leases one-hundred-thousand dollars cash and one-half the oil, offered by a New-York firm in 1865, were refused. The McClintock well, drilled in 1862, figured in the thousand-barrel class. The Coldwater, Meyer, Clark, Anderson, Fox, Swamp-Angel and Bluff wells made splendid records. Altogether the Central Petroleum-Company and the corps of lessees harvested at least five-millions of dollars from the McClintock farm!

RYND FARM “KING OF THE HILLS” PETROLEUM CENTRE-1894- BOYD FARM-1864 STORY FARM.

Aladdin’s lamp was a miserly glim in the light of fortunes accruing from petroleum. The product of a flowing-well in a year would buy a tract of gold-territory in California or Australia larger than the oil-producing regions. Millions of dollars changed hands every week. The Central Company staked off a half-dozen streets and leased building-lots at exorbitant figures. Board-dwellings, offices, hotels, saloons and wells mingled promiscuously. It mattered nothing that discomfort was the rule. Poor fare, worse beds and the worst liquors were tolerated by the hordes of people who flocked to the land of derricks. Edward Fox, a railroad contractor who “struck the town” with eighty-thousand dollars, felicitously baptised the bantling Petroleum Centre. The owners of the ground opposed a borough-organization and the town traveled at a headlong go-as-you-please. Sharpers and prostitutes flourished, with no fear of human or divine law, in the metropolis of rum and debauchery. Dance-houses, beside which “Billy” McGlory’s Armory-Hall and “The.” Allen’s Mabille in New York were Sunday-school models, nightly counted their revelers by hundreds. In one of these dens Gus Reil, the proprietor, killed poor young Tait, of Rouseville. Fast women and faster men caroused and gambled, cursed and smoked, “burning the candle at both ends” in pursuit of—pleasure! Frequently the orgies eclipsed Monte Carlo—minus some of the glitter—and the Latin Quartier combined. Some readers may recall the night two “dead game sports” tossed dice twelve hours for one-thousand dollars a throw! But there was a rich leaven of first-class fellows. Kindred spirits, like “Sam” Woods, Frank Ripley, Edward Fox and Col. Brady were not hard to discover. Spades were trumps long years ago for Woods, who has taken his last trick and sleeps in an Ohio grave. Ripley is in Duluth, Fox is “out west” and Brady is in Harrisburg. Captain Ray and A. D. Cotton had a bank that handled barrels of money. For two or three years “The Centre”—called that for convenient brevity—acted as a sort of safety-valve to blow off the surplus wickedness of the oil-regions. Then “the handwriting on the wall” manifested itself. Clarion and Butler speedily reduced the four-thousand population to a mere remnant. The local paper died, houses were removed and the giddy Centre became “a back number.” The sounds of revelry were hushed, flickering lights no longer glared over painted harlots and the streets were deserted. Bissell’s empty bank-building, three dwellings, the public school, two vacant churches and the drygoods box used as a railway-station—scarcely enough to cast a shadow—are the sole survivors in the ploughed field that was once bustling, blooming, surging, foaming Petroleum Centre!

Across the creek from Petroleum Centre, on the east side of the stream, was Alexander Davidson’s farm of thirty-eight acres. A portion of this triangular “speck on the map” consisted of a mud-flat, a smaller portion of rising ground and the remainder set edgewise. Dr. A. G. Egbert, a young physician who had recently hung out his shingle at Cherrytree village, in 1860 negotiated for the farm. Davidson died and a hitch in the title delayed the deal. Finally Mrs. Davidson agreed to sign the deed for twenty-six-hundred dollars and one-twelfth the oil. Charles Hyde paid the doctor this amount in 1862 for one-half his purchase and it was termed the Hyde & Egbert farm. The Hollister well, drilled in 1861, the first on the land, flowed strongly. Owing to the dearness and scarcity of barrels, the oil was let run into the creek and the well was never tested. The lessees could not afford, as their contract demanded, to barrel the half due the land-owners, because crude was selling at twenty-five cents and barrels at three-fifty to four dollars! A company of Jerseyites, in the spring of 1863, drilled the Jersey well, on the south end of the property. The Jersey—it was a Jersey Lily—flowed three-hundred barrels a day for nine months, another well draining it early in 1864. The Maple-Shade, which cast the majority into the shade by its performance, touched the right spot in the third sand on August fifth, 1863. Starting at one-thousand barrels, it averaged eight-hundred for ten months, dropped to fifty the second year and held on until 1869. Fire on March second, 1864, burned the rig and twenty-eight tanks of oil, but the well kept flowing just the same, netting the owners a clear profit of fifteen-hundred-thousand dollars! “Do you notice it?” A plump million-and-a-half from a corner of the “measly patch” poor Davidson offered in 1860 for one-thousand dollars! And the Maple Shade was only one of twenty-three flowing wells on the despised thirty-eight acres!

Companies and individuals tugged and strained to get even the smallest lease Hyde & Egbert would grant. The Keystone, Gettysburg, Kepler, Eagle, Benton, Olive Branch, Laurel Hill, Bird and Potts wells, not to mention a score of minor note, helped maintain a production that paid the holders of the royalty eight-thousand dollars a day in 1864-5! E. B. Grandin and William C. Hyde, partners of Charles Hyde in a store at Hydetown, A. C. Kepler and Titus Ridgway obtained a lease of one acre on the west side of the lot, north of the wells already down, subject to three-quarters royalty. A bit of romance attaches to the transaction. Kepler dreamed that an Indian menaced him with bow and arrow. A young lady, considered somewhat coquettish, handed him a rifle and he fired at the dusky foe. The redskin vamoosed and a stream of oil burst forth. Visiting his brother, who superintended the farm, he recognized the scene of his dream. The lease was secured, on the biggest royalty ever offered. Kepler chose the location and bored the Coquette well. The dream was a nightmare? Wait and see.

Drilling began in the spring of 1864 and the work went merrily on. Each partner would be entitled to one-sixteenth of the oil. Hyde & Ridgway sold their interest for ten-thousand dollars a few days before the tools reached the sand. This interest Dr. M. C. Egbert, brother of the original purchaser of the farm, next bought at a large advance. He had acquired one-sixth of the property in fee and wished to own the Coquette. Grandin and Kepler declined to sell. The well was finished and did not flow! Tubed and pumped a week, gas checked its working and the sucker-rods were pulled. Immediately the oil streamed high in the air! Twelve-hundred barrels a day was the gauge at first, settling to steady business for a year at eight-hundred. A double row of tanks lined the bank, connected by pipes to load boats in bulk. Oil was “on the jump” and the first cargo of ten-thousand barrels brought ninety-thousand dollars, representing ten days’ production! Three months later Grandin and Kepler sold their one-eighth for one-hundred-and-forty-five thousand dollars, quitting the Coquette with eighty-thousand apiece in their pockets. Kepler was a dreamer whom Joseph might be proud to accept as a chum.

Dr. M. C. Egbert retained his share. Riches showered upon him. His interests in the land and wells yielded him thousands of dollars a day. Once his safe contained, by tight squeezing, eighteen-hundred-thousand dollars in currency and a pile of government bonds! He built a comfortable house and lived on the farm. He and his family traveled over Europe, met shoals of titled folks and saw all the sights. In company with John Brown, subsequently manager of a big corporation at Bradford and now a resident of Chicago, he engaged in oil-shipments on an extensive scale. To control this branch of the trade, as the Standard Oil-Company has since done by combinations of capital, was too gigantic a task for the firm and failure resulted. The brainy, courageous doctor went to California, returned to Oildom and operated in McKean county. He has secured a foothold in the newer fields and lives in Pittsburg, frank and urbane as in the palmiest days of the Hyde & Egbert farm. If Dame Fortune was strangely capricious on Oil Creek, the pluck of the men with whom “the fickle jade” played whirligig was surely admirable.

Probably no parcel of ground in America of equal size ever yielded a larger return, in proportion to the expenditure, than the Hyde & Egbert tract. Six weeks’ production of the Coquette or Maple Shade would drill all the wells on the property. Charles Hyde and Dr. A. G. Egbert cleared at least three-million dollars, the latter selling one-twelfth of the Coquette alone for a quarter-million cash. Profits of others interested in the land and of the lessees trebled this alluring sum. The aggregate—eight to ten millions—in silver-dollars would load a freight-train or build a column twenty miles high! Fused into a lump of gold, a dozen mules might well decline the task of drawing it a mile. Done up into a bundle of five-dollar bills, Hercules couldn’t budge the bulky package. A “promoter” of the Mulberry-Sellers brand wanted an owner of the farm, when the wells were at their best, to launch the whole thing into a stock-company with five-millions capital. “Bah!” responded the gentleman, “five millions—did you say five-millions? Don’t waste your breath talking until you can come around with twenty-five millions!”

A native of New-York, born in 1822, Charles Hyde was fifteen when the family settled on a farm two miles south of Titusville, now occupied by the Octave Oil-Company. At twenty he engaged with his father and two brothers, W. C. and E. B. Hyde, in merchandising, lumbering and the manufacture of salts from ashes. In 1846 he assumed charge of the lumber-mills John Titus sold the firm, originating the thrifty village of Hydetown, four miles above Titusville. The Hydes frequently procured oil from the “springs” on Oil Creek, selling it for medicine as early as 1840-1. From their Hydetown store Colonel Drake obtained some tools and supplies Titusville could not furnish. Samuel Grandin, of Tidioute, in the spring of 1860 induced Charles Hyde to buy a tenth-interest in the Tidioute and Warren Oil-Company for one-thousand dollars. The company’s first well, of which he heard on his way to Pittsburg with a raft, laid the foundation of Hyde’s great fortune in petroleum. He organized the Hydetown Oil-Company, which leased the McClintock farm, below Rouseville, from Jonathan Watson and drilled a two-hundred-barrel well in the summer of 1860. Mr. Hyde operated on the Clapp farm, south of McClintock, and at different points on Oil Creek and the Allegheny River. His gains from the Hyde & Egbert farm approximated two-millions. Starting the Second National Bank of Titusville in 1865, he has always been its president and chief stockholder. In 1869 he removed to Plainfield, New Jersey, cultivating four-hundred acres of suburban land and maintaining an elegant home.

Dr. Albert G. Egbert, born in Mercer county in 1828, belonged to a family of eminent physicians, his grandfather, father, two uncles, three brothers and one son practicing medicine. Predicating a future for oil upon the Drake well, his good judgment displayed itself promptly. Agreeing to purchase the Davison farm, which his modest income at Cherrytree would not enable him to pay for, his sale of a half-interest to Charles Hyde provided the money to meet the entire claim. After the wonderful success of that investment the doctor located at Franklin. He carried on oil-operations, farming and coal-mining and was always active in advancing the general welfare. Elected to Congress against immense odds, he served his district most capably, attending sedulously to his official duties and doing admirable work on committees. In public and private life he was enterprising and liberal, zealous for the right and a helpful citizen. True to his convictions and professions, he never turned his back to friend or foe. To the steady, masterful purpose of men like Dr. Egbert the oil-industry owes its rapid strides and commanding position as a commercial staple. His demise on March twenty-eighth, 1896, severs another of the links that bind the eventful past and the important present of petroleum. Early operators on Oil Creek are reduced to a handful of men whose heads are white with the snows no July sun can melt.

“He has walk’d the way of nature; The setting sun, and music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last.”

The rich pickings around Petroleum Center set many on the straight cinder-path to prosperity. The four Phillips brothers—Isaac N., Charles M., John I. and Thomas M. came from Newcastle to coin money operating a farm south of the Espy. Prolific wells on the Niagara tract, Cherrytree Run, back of the Benninghoff farm, added to their wealth. They cut a wide swath in all the Pennsylvania fields. Three of the brothers have “ascended to the hill of frankincense and to the mountain of myrrh.” Thomas M. was a millionaire congressman. During the heated debates on free-silver, in 1894, he scored the hit of the season by suggesting to convert each barrel of Petroleum into legal-tender for a dollar and let it go at that. Crude was selling at sixty cents, which gave the Phillips proposition a point “sharper than a serpent’s tooth” or a Demosthenean philippic. Dr. Egbert offered Isaac Phillips an interest in the Davidson farm in 1862. The offer was not accepted instantly, Phillips saying he would “consider it a few days.” Two weeks later he was ready to close the deal, but the plum had fallen into the lap of Charles Hyde and diverted prospective millions into another channel.

George K. Anderson figured conspicuously in this latitude, his receipts for two years exceeding five-thousand dollars a day! He built a sumptuous residence at Titusville, sought political preferment and served a term in the State Senate. Holding a vast block of Pacific-Railroad stock, he was the bosom friend of the directors and trusted lieutenant of William H. Kemble, the Philadelphia magnate whose “addition, division and silence” gave him notoriety. He bought thousands of acres of land, plunged deeply into stocks and insured his life for three-hundred-and-fifteen-thousand dollars, at that time the largest risk in the country. If he sneezed or coughed the agents of the insurance-companies grew nervous and summoned a posse of doctors to consult about the case. Outside speculations swamped him at last. The stately mansion, piles of bonds and scores of farms passed under the sheriff’s hammer in 1880. Plucky and unconquerable, Anderson tried his hand in the Bradford field, operating on Harrisburg Run. The result was discouraging and he entered an insurance-office in New York. Five years ago he accepted a government-berth in New Mexico. Meeting him on Broadway the week before he left New York, his buoyant spirits seemed depressed. He spoke regretfully of his approaching departure, yet hoped it might turn out advantageously. He arrived at his post, sickened and died in a few days, “a stranger in a strange land.” Relatives and loved ones were far away when he went down into the starless night of the grave. No gentle wife or child or valued friend was there to smooth the pillow of the dying man, to cool the fevered brow, to catch the last whisper, to close the glassy eyes and fold the rigid hands above the lifeless breast. The oil-regions abound with pathetic experiences, but none surpassing George K. Anderson’s. Wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, the courted politician, the confidant of presidents and statesmen, a social favorite in Washington and Harrisburg, the owner of a home beautiful as Claude Melnotte pictured to Pauline, he drained the cup of sorrow and misfortune. Reverses beset him, his riches took wings, bereavements bore heavily upon him, he was glad to secure a humble clerkship, and death ended the sad scene in a distant territory. Does not human life contain more tears than smiles, more pain than pleasure, more cloud than sunshine in the passage from the cradle to the tomb?

Frank W. Andrews, born in Vermont and reared in Ohio, taught school in Missouri, hunted for gold at Pike’s Peak and landed on Oil Creek in the winter of 1863-4. Hauling oil nine months supplied funds to operate on Cherrytree Run. He drilled four dry holes. One on the McClintock farm and three more on Pithole Creek followed. This was not a flattering start, but Andrews had lots of sand and persistence. Emerging from the Pithole excitement with limited cash and unlimited machinery, he returned to Oil Creek and operated extensively. His first well at Pioneer flowed three-hundred barrels a day. Fifty others at Shamburg, on the Benninghoff farm and Cherrytree Run brought him hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was rated at three-millions in 1870. Keeping up with the tidal wave southward, he put down two-hundred wells in the Franklin, Clarion and Butler districts. Failures of banks and manufactories in which he had a large stake shattered his fortune. With the loss of money he did not lose his manliness and self-reliance. In the Bradford region he pressed forward vigorously. Again he “plucked the flower of success” and was fast recuperating when thrown from his horse and fatally injured. Upright, unassuming and refined, Andrews merited the confidence and esteem of all.

The bluff overlooking Petroleum Centre from the east formed the western side of the McCray farm. At its base, on the Hyde & Egbert plot, were several of the finest wells in Pennsylvania, the Coquette almost touching McCray’s line. Dr. M. C. Egbert leased part of the slope and drilled three wells. Other parties drilled five and the eight behaved so handsomely that the owner of the land declined an offer, in 1865, of a half-million dollars for his eighty acres. A well on top of the hill, not deep enough to hit the sand and supposed to be dry, postponed further operations five years. His friends distanced Jeremiah in their lamentations that McCray had spurned the five-hundred-thousand dollars. He may have thought of Shakespeare’s “tide in the affairs of men,” but he sawed wood and said nothing. Jonathan Watson, advised by a clairvoyant, in the spring of 1870 drilled a three-hundred-barrel well on the uplands of the Dalzell farm, close to the southern boundary of the McCray. The clairvoyant’s astonishing guess revived interest in Petroleum Centre, which for a year or two had been on the down grade. Besieged for leases, McCray could not meet a tithe of the demand at one-thousand dollars an acre and half the oil. Derricks clustered thickly. Every well tapped the pool underlying fifteen acres, pumping as if drawing from a lake of petroleum. Within four months the daily production was three-thousand barrels. This meant nineteen-hundred barrels for the land-owner—fifteen-hundred from royalty and four-hundred from wells he had drilled—a regular income of nine-thousand dollars a day! Cipher it out—nineteen-hundred barrels at four-fifty to five dollars, with eleven-hundred barrels for the lessees—and what do you find? Fourteen-thousand dollars a day for the last quarter of 1870 and nine months of 1871, from one-sixth of a farm sold in 1850 for seventeen-hundred dollars! Say, how was that for high?

James S. McCray, a farmer’s son, born in 1824 on the flats below Titusville, at twenty-two set out for himself with two dollars in his pocket. Working three years in a saw-mill on the Allegheny, he saved his earnings and in 1850 was able to buy a team and take up the farm decreed to enrich him beyond his wildest fancies. He married Miss Martha G. Crooks, a willing helpmeet in adversity and wise counsellor in prosperity. His first venture in oil, a share in a two-acre lease at Rouseville, he sold to drill a well on the Blood farm, elbowing his own. From this he realized seventy-thousand dollars. For his own farm he refused a million dollars in 1871. Sharpers dogged his footsteps and endeavored to rope him into all sorts of preposterous schemes. He told me one project, which was expected to control the coal-trade of the region, bled him two-hundred-and-sixty-thousand dollars! Instead of selling his oil right along, at an average figure of nearly five dollars, he stored two-hundred-thousand barrels in iron-tanks, to await higher prices. In my presence H. I. Beers, of McClintockville, bid him five-thirty-five a barrel for the lot. McCray stuck out for five-fifty. He kept the oil for years, losing thousands of barrels by leakage and evaporation, and sold the bulk of it at one to two dollars. Had he dealt with Beers he would have been six-hundred-thousand dollars richer! Mr. McCray removed to Franklin in 1872 and died some years ago. He rests in the cemetery beside his faithful wife and only daughter. The wells on his farm drooped and withered and the famous fifteen-acre field has long been a pasture. A robust character, strong-willed and kindly, sometimes queerly contradictory and often misjudged, James S. McCray could adopt the words of King Lear: “I am a man more sinned against than sinning.”

The Dalzell or Hayes farm, on which the first well—fifty barrels—was drilled in 1861, boasted the Porcupine, Rhinoceros, Ramcat, Wildcat, and a menagerie of thirty others ranging from ten barrels to three-hundred. At the north end of the farm, in the rear of the Maple-Shade and Jersey wells, the Petroleum Shaft-and-Mining-Company attempted to sink a hole seven feet by seventeen to the third sand. The shaft was dug and blasted one-hundred feet, at immense cost. The funds ran out, gas threatened to asphyxiate the workmen, the big pumps could not exhaust the water and the absurd undertaking was abandoned.

The story of the Story farm does not lack romantic ingredients. William Story owned five-hundred acres south of the G. W. McClintock farm, Oil Creek, the Dalzell and Tarr farms bounding his land on the east. He sold in 1859 to Ritchie, Hartje & Co., of Pittsburg, for thirty-thousand dollars. George H. Bissell had negotiated for the property, but Mrs. Story objected to signing the deed. Next day Bissell returned to offer the wife a sufficient inducement, but the Pittsburg agent had been there the previous evening and secured her signature to the Ritchie-Hartje deed by the promise of a silk dress! Thus a twenty-dollar gown changed the ultimate ownership of millions of dollars! The long-haired novelist, who soars into the infinite and dives into the unfathomable, may try to imagine what the addition of a new bonnet would have accomplished.

The seven Pittsburgers organized a stock company in 1860 to develop the farm. By act of Legislature this was incorporated on May first, 1861, as the Columbia Oil-Company, with a nominal capital of two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars—ten-thousand shares of twenty-five dollars each. Twenty-one-thousand barrels of oil were produced in 1861 and ninety-thousand in 1862, shares selling at two to ten dollars. Foreign demand for oil improved matters. On July eighth, 1863, the first dividend of thirty per cent. was declared, followed in August and September by two of twenty-five per cent. and in October by one of fifty per cent. Four dividends, aggregating one-hundred-and-sixty per cent., were declared the first six months of 1864. The capital was increased to two-and-a-half-millions, by calling in the old stock and giving each holder of a twenty-five-dollar share five new ones of fifty dollars apiece. Four-hundred per cent. were paid on this capital in six years. The original stockholders received their money back forty-three times and had ten times their first stock to keep on drawing fat dividends! Suppose a person had bought one-hundred shares in 1862 at two dollars, in eight years he would have been paid one-hundred-and-seven-thousand dollars for his two hundred and have five-hundred fifty-dollar shares on hand! From a mere speck of the Story farm the Columbia Oil-Company in ten years produced oil that sold for ten-millions of dollars! Wonder not that men, dazzled by such returns, blind to the failures that littered the oily domain, clutched at the veriest phantoms in the mad craze for boundless wealth.

Splendidly managed throughout, the policy of the Columbia Company was to operate its lands systematically. Wells were not drilled at random over the farm, nor were leases granted to speculators. There was no effort to make a big showing of production and exhaust the territory in the shortest time possible. For twenty-five years the Story farm yielded profitably. The wells, never amazingly large, held on tenaciously. The Ladies’ well produced sixty-five-thousand barrels, the Floral sixty-thousand, the Big Tank fifty-thousand, the Story Centre forty-five-thousand, the Breedtown forty-thousand, the Cherry Run fifty-five-thousand, the Titus pair one-hundred-thousand and the Perry thirty-five-thousand. The company erected machine-shops, built houses for employés, and the village of Columbia prospered. The Columbia Cornet Band, superbly appointed, its thirty members in rich uniforms, its instruments the finest and its drum-major an acrobatic revelation, could have given Gilmore’s or Sousa’s points in ravishing music. G. S. Bancroft superintended the wells and D. H. Boulton, now of Franklin, assisted President D. B. Stewart, of Pittsburg, in conducting affairs generally. The village has vanished, the cornet band is hushed forever, the fields are the prey of weeds and underbrush and brakemen no more call out “Columby!” A few small wells, hidden amid the hills, produce a morsel of oil, but the farm, despoiled of sixteen-million dollars of greasy treasure, would not bring one-fourth the price paid William Story for it in the fall of 1859. “So passes away earthly glory” is as true to-day as when Horace evolved the classic phrase two-thousand years ago.

“Man wants but little, nor that little long; How soon must he resign his very dust, Which frugal nature lent him for an hour!”

On the east side of Oil Creek, opposite the southern half of the Story farm, James Tarr owned and occupied a triangular tract of two-hundred acres. He was a strong-limbed, loud-voiced, stout-hearted son of toil, farming in summer and hauling lumber in winter to support his family. Although uneducated, he had plenty of “horse sense” and native wit. His quaint speech coined words and terms that are entrenched firmly in the nomenclature of Oildom. Funny stories have been told at his expense. One of these, relating to his daughter, whom he had taken to a seminary, has appeared in hundreds of newspapers. According to the revised version, the principal of the school expressing a fear that the girl had not “capacity,” the fond father, profoundly ignorant of what was meant, drew a roll of greenbacks from his pocket and exclaimed: “Damn it, that’s nothing! Buy her one and here’s the stuff to pay for it!” The fact that it is pure fiction may detract somewhat from the piquancy of this incident. Tarr realized his own deficiencies from lack of schooling and spared no pains, when the golden stream flowed his way, to educate the children dwelling in the old home on the south end of the farm. His daughters were bright, good-looking, intelligent girls. Scratching the barren hills for a meager corn-crop, hunting rabbits on Sundays, rafting in the spring and fall and teaming while snow lasted barely sufficed to keep the gaunt wolf of hunger from the door of many a hardy Oil-Creek settler. To their credit be it said, most of the land-owners whom petroleum enriched took care of their money. Rough diamonds, uncut and unpolished, they possessed intrinsic worth. James Tarr was of the number who did not lose their heads and squander their substance. The richest of them all, he bought a delightful home near Meadville, provided every comfort and convenience, spent his closing years enjoyably and died in 1871. “Put yourself in his place” and, candidly, would you have done better?

For himself, George B. Delamater and L. L. Lamb, in the summer of 1860 Orange Noble leased seven acres of the Tarr farm, at the bend in Oil Creek. Dry holes the partners “kicked down” on the Stackpole and Jones farms dampening their ardor, they let the Tarr lease lie dormant some months. Contracting with a Townville neighbor—N. S. Woodford—to juggle the “spring-pole,” he cracked the first sand in June, 1861. The Crescent well—so called because the faith of the owners was increasing—tipped the beam at five-hundred barrels. The first well on the Tarr farm, it flowed an average of three-hundred barrels a day for thirteen months, quitting without notice. Cleaning it out, drilling it deeper and pumping it for weeks were of no avail. Not a drop of oil could be extracted and the Crescent was abandoned. Crude was so low during most of its existence—ten to twenty-five cents—that the well, although it produced one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand barrels, did not pay the owners a dollar of profit! Drilling, royalty and tankage absorbed every nickel. Like the victories of Pyrrhus, the more such strikes a fellow achieved the sooner he would be undone!

On the evening of August first, 1861, as James Tarr sat eating his supper of fried pork and johnny-cake, Heman Janes, of Erie, entered the room. “Tarr,” he said, “I’ll give you sixty-thousand dollars in spot cash for your farm!” Tarr almost fell off his chair. A year before one-thousand dollars would have been big money for the whole plantation. “I mean it,” continued the visitor; “if you take me up I’ll close the deal right here!” Tarr “took him up” and the deal, which included a transfer of several leases, was closed quickly. Janes planked down the sixty-thousand and Tarr, within an hour, had stepped from poverty to affluence. This was the first large cash transaction in oil-lands on the creek and people promptly pronounced Janes a fool of the thirty-third degree. An Irishman, on trial for stealing a sheep, asked by the judge whether he was guilty or not guilty, replied: “How can I tell till I hear the ividence?” Don’t endorse the Janes verdict “till you hear the ividence.”

A short distance below the Crescent well William Phillips, who had leased a narrow strip the entire length of the farm, was also urging a “spring-pole” actively. Born in Westmoreland county in 1824, he passed his boyhood on a farm and earned his first money mining coal. Saving his hard-won wages, he bought the keel-boat Orphan Boy and started freighting on the Ohio and Allegheny rivers. The business proving remunerative, he drilled salt-wells at Bull Creek and Wildcat Hollow. On his last trip from Warren to Pittsburg, in September of 1859, he noticed a scum of oil in front of Thomas Downing’s farm, where South Oil City now stands. The story of the Drake well was in everybody’s mouth and it occurred to Phillips that he could increase his growing fortune by drilling on the Downing land. At Pittsburg he consulted Charles Lockhart, William Frew, Captain Kipp and John Vanausdall and with them formed the partnership of Phillips, Frew & Co. Returning at once, he leased from Downing, erected a pole-derrick and proceeded to bore a well on the water’s edge. With no machine-shops, tools or appliances nearer than Pittsburg, a hundred-and-thirty miles off, difficulties of all kinds retarded the work nine months. Finally the job was completed and the Albion well, pumping forty barrels a day, raised a commotion.

The Albion brought Phillips to the front as an oil-operator. James Tarr readily leased him part of his farm and he began Phillips No. 1 well in the spring of 1861. The Crescent’s unexpected success spurred him to greater efforts. Hurrying an engine and boiler from Pittsburg, he started his second well on the flat hugging the stream twenty rods north of the Crescent. Steam-power rushed the tools at a boom-de-ay gait. The first sand, from which meanwhile No. 1 was rivaling the Crescent’s yield, had not a pinch of oil. The solid-silver lining of the petroleum-cloud assumed a plated look, but Phillips heeded it not. An expert driller, he hustled the tools and on October nineteenth, at four-hundred-and-eighty feet, pierced the shell above the third sand. At dusk he shut down for the night. The weather was clear and the moon shone brightly. Suddenly a vivid flame illumined the sky. Reuben Painter’s well on the Blood farm, a mile southward, had caught fire and blazed furiously. The rare spectacle of a burning well attracted everybody for miles. Phillips and Janes were among those who hastened to the fire, returning about midnight. An hour later they were summoned from bed by a man yelling at the Ella-Yaw pitch: “The Phillips is bu’sted and runnin’ down the creek!” People ran to the spot on the double-quick, past the Crescent and down the bank. Gas was settling densely upon the flats and into the creek oil was pouring lavishly. Dreading a fire, lights were extinguished on the adjoining tracts and needful precautions taken. For three or four days the flow raged unhindered, then a lull occurred and tubing was inserted. After the seed-bag swelled, a stop-cock was placed on the tubing and thenceforth it was easy to regulate the flow. When oil was wanted the stop-cock was opened and wooden troughs conveyed the stuff to boats drawn up the creek by horses, the chief mode of transportation for years. The oil was forty-four gravity and four-thousand barrels a day gushed out! In June of 1862, when Phillips and Major Frew, with their wives and a party of friends, inspected the well, a careful gauge showed it was doing thirty-six-hundred-and-sixty barrels! The Phillips well held the champion-belt twenty-seven years. It produced until 1871, getting down to ten or twelve barrels and ceasing altogether the night James Tarr expired, having yielded nearly one-million barrels! Cargoes of the oil were sold to boatmen at five cents a barrel, thousands of barrels were wasted, tens of thousands were stored in underground tanks and much was sold at three to thirteen dollars.

N. S. Woodford, Noble & Delamater’s contractor, had the foresight to lease the ground between the Crescent and the Phillips No. 2. His three-thousand barreler, finished in December, 1861, drew its grist from the Phillips crevice and interfered with the mammoth gusher. When the two became pumpers neither would give out oil unless both were worked. If one was stopped the other pumped water. Ultimately the Phillips crowd paid Woodford a half-million for his well and lease, a wad for which a man would ford even the atrocious Tarr-farm mud and complacently whistle “Ta-ra-ra.” He retired to his pleasant home, with six-hundred-thousand dollars to show for eighteen months’ operations on Oil Creek, and never bothered any more about oil. The Woodford well repaid its enormous cost. Lockhart and Frew bought out their partners at a high price and put the Phillips-Woodford interests into a stock-company capitalized at two-million dollars. The Phillips well—one result of a keen-eyed boatman’s observing an oily scum on the Allegheny River—enriched all concerned. Had Phillips failed to see the speck of grease that September day, who can tell how different oil-region history might have been? Happily for a good many persons, the Orphan Boy was not one of the “Ships that Pass in the Night.” What a field Oil Creek presents for the fervid fancy of a Dumas, a Dickens, a Wilkie Collins or a Charles Reade!

Comrades in business and good-fellowship, William Phillips and John Vanausdall removed to South Oil-City, lived neighbors and died twenty years ago. They resembled each other in appearance and temper, in charitable impulse and kindness to the poor. Phillips drilled dozens of wells—none of them dry—aided Oil-City enterprises and was a member of the shipping firm of Munhall & Co. until its dissolution in 1876. He was the first man to ship oil by steamer, the Venango taking the first load to Pittsburg, and the first to run crude in bulk down the creek. One son, John C. Phillips, and a married daughter live at Oil City and two sons at Freeport.

Heman Janes, of Erie, the first purchaser of the Tarr farm, from 1850 to 1861 shipped large quantities of lumber to the eastern market. Passing through Canada in 1858, he heard oil was obtained from gum-beds in Lambton county, south of Lake Huron, and visited the place. John Williams was dipping five barrels a day from a hole ten feet square and twenty feet deep. The best gum-beds spread over two-hundred acres of timbered land, which Mr. Janes bought at nine dollars an acre, the owner selling because “the stinking oil smelled five miles off.” Leasing four-hundred acres more, in 1860 he sold a half-interest in both tracts for fifteen-thousand dollars and retired from lumbering to devote his attention to oil. Large wells on his Canadian lands enabled him to sell the second half of the property in 1865 for fifty-five-thousand dollars. In February, 1861, he secured a thirty-day option on the J. Buchanan farm, the site of Rouseville, and tendered the price at the stipulated time, but the transaction fell through. In March of that year he went to West Virginia and leased one-thousand acres on the Kanawha River, including the famous “Burning Spring.” U. E. Everett & Co. agreed to pay fifty-thousand dollars for one-half interest in the property, at Parkersburg, on April twelfth. All parties met, a certified check was laid on the table and Attorney J. B. Blair started to draw the papers. At that moment a boy ran past, shouting: “Fort Sumpter’s fired on!” The gentlemen hurried out to learn the particulars. “The cat came back,” but Everett didn’t. A message told him to “hold off,” and he is holding off still. Janes stayed as long as a Northerner dared and was thankful to sell the batch of leases for seventy-five-hundred dollars. In 1862 he sued the owners of the Phillips well for his royalty in barrels. They refused to furnish the barrels, which were scarce and expensive, and the well was shut down for months pending the litigation. The suit was for one-hundred-and-twelve-thousand dollars, up to that time the largest amount ever involved in a case before the Venango court. Edwin M. Stanton, soon to be known as the illustrious War-Secretary, was one of the attorneys engaged by the plaintiff, for a fee of twenty-five-thousand dollars. A compromise was arranged for half the oil. The first oil sold after this agreement was at three dollars a barrel, taken from the first twelve-hundred-barrel tank ever seen in the region. A wooden tank of that size excited more curiosity in those days than a hundred iron-ones of forty-thousand barrels in this year of grace. Janes sold back half the farm to Tarr for forty-thousand dollars and two-thirds of the remaining half to Clark & Sumner for twenty-thousand, leaving him one-sixth clear of cost, the same month he bought the tract. He first suggested casing wells to exclude the water, built the first bulk-boat decked over—six-hundred barrels—to transport oil and was identified with the first practicable pipe-line. Paying seventy-five-thousand dollars for the Blackmar farm, at Pithole, he drilled three dry holes and then got rid of the land at a snug advance. Since 1878 Mr. Janes has been interested in the Bradford field and living at Erie. A man of forceful character and executive ability, hearty, vigorous and companionable, he deserves the large measure of success that rewarded him as an important factor in petroleum-affairs. In the words of the good Scottish mother to her son: “May your lot be wi’ the rich in this warld and wi’ the puir in the warld to come.”

The amazing output of the Phillips and Woodford wells stimulated the demand for territory to the boiling point. Men were infinitely less eager to “read their title clear to mansions in the skies” than to secure a title to a fragment of the Tarr farm. Rigs huddled on the bank and in the water, for nobody thought oil existed back in the hilly sections. Sixty yards below the Phillips spouter J. F. Crane sank a well that responded as pleasantly as “the swinging of the crane.” Densmore Brothers, at the lower end of the farm, drilled a seven-hundred-barreler late in 1861. A zoological freak introduced the animal-fad, which named the Elephant, Young Elephant, Tigress, Tiger, Lioness, Scared Cat, Anaconda and Weasel wells. Reckless speculation held the fort unchecked. The third sand was sixty feet thick, the territory was durable and three-hundred walking-beams exhibited “the poetry of motion” to the music of three-four-five-six-eight-ten-dollar oil. Mr. Janes built a commodious hotel and a town of two-thousand population flourished. James Tarr sold his entire interest in 1865, for gold equivalent to two-millions in currency, and removed to Crawford county. Another million would hardly cover his royalties. Three-million dollars ahead of the game in four years, he could afford to smile at the jibes of small-souled retailers of witless ridicule. If “money talks,” three-millions ought to be pretty eloquent. The churches, stores, houses, offices, wells and tanks have “gone glimmering.” Tarr-Farm station appears no more on railroad time-tables. Modern maps do not reveal it. Few know and fewer care who owns the place once the apple of the oilman’s eye, now a shadowy relic not worth carting off in a wheelbarrow!

Producers have enjoyed quite a reputation for “resolving,” and the first meeting ever held to regulate the price of crude was at Tarr farm in 1861. The moving spirits were Mr. Janes, General James Wadsworth and Josiah Oakes, the latter a New-York capitalist. The idea was to raise five-hundred-thousand dollars and buy up the territory for ten miles along Oil Creek. Wadsworth and Oakes raised over three-hundred-thousand dollars for this purpose, when the panic arising from the war ended the scheme. A contract was also made with Erie parties to lay a four-inch wooden pipe-line from Tarr farm to Oil City. On the advice of Col. Clark, of Clark & Sumner, and Sir John Hope, the eminent London banker, it was decided to abandon the project and apply for a charter for a pipe-line. This was done in the winter of 1861-2, Hon. Morrow B. Lowry, who represented the district in the State Senate, favoring the application. Hon. M. C. Beebe, the local member of the Legislature, opposed it resolutely, because, to quote his own words: “There are four-thousand teams hauling oil and my constituents won’t stand this interference.” The measure failing to carry, Clark & Hope built the Standard refinery at Pittsburg.

Resistance to the South-Improvement-Company welded the producers solidly in 1872. The refiners organized to force a larger margin between crude and refined. To offset this and govern the production and sale of crude, the producers established a “union,” “agencies” and “councils.” In October of 1872 every well in the region was shut down for thirty days. The “spirit of seventy-six” was abroad and individual losses were borne cheerfully for the general good. This was the heroic period, which demonstrated the manly fiber of the great body of oil-operators. E. E. Clapp, of President, and Captain William Harson, of Oil City, were the chief officers of these remarkable organizations. Suspensions of drilling in 1873-4-5 supplemented the memorable “thirty-day shut-down.” At length the “union,” the “councils” and the “agencies” wilted and dissolved. The area of productive territory widened and strong companies became a necessity to develop it. The big fish swallowed the little ones, hence the personal feature so pronounced in earlier years has been almost eliminated. Many of the operators are members of the Producers’ Association, in which Congressman Phillips, Lewis Emery, David Kirk and T. J. Vandergrift are prime factors. Its president, Hon. J. W. Lee, practiced law at Franklin, served twice as State-Senator and located at Pittsburg last year. He is a cogent speaker, not averse to legal tilts and not backward flying his colors in the face of the enemy.

South of the Story and Tarr farms, on both sides of Oil Creek, were John Blood’s four-hundred-and-forty acres. The owner lived in an unpainted, weatherbeaten frame house. On five acres of the flats the Ocean Petroleum-Company had twelve flowing wells in 1861. The Maple-Tree Company’s burning well spouted twenty-five-hundred barrels for several months, declined to three-hundred in a year and was destroyed by fire in October of 1862. The flames devastated twenty acres, consuming ten wells and a hundred tanks of oil, the loss aggregating a million dollars. A sheet of fire, terribly grand and up to that date the most extensive and destructive in Oildom, wrapped the flats and the stream. Blood Well No. 1, flowing a thousand barrels, Blood No. 2, flowing six hundred, and five other gushers never yielded after the conflagration, prior to which the farm was producing more oil than the balance of the region. Brewer & Watson, Ballard & Trax, Edward Filkins, Henry Collins, Reuben Painter, James Burrows and J. H. Duncan were pioneer operators on the tract. Blood sold in 1863 for five-hundred-and-sixty-thousand dollars and removed to New York. Buying a brownstone residence on Fifth avenue, he splurged around Gotham two or three years, quit the city for the country and died long since. The Blood farm was notably prolific, but its glory has departed. Stripped bare of derricks, houses, wells and tanks, naught is left save the rugged hills and sandy banks. “It is no matter, the cat will mew, the dog will have his day.”

Neighbors of John Blood, a raw-boned native and his wife, enjoyed an experience not yet forgotten in New York. Selling their farm for big money, the couple concluded to see Manhattanville and set off in high glee, arrayed in homespun-clothes of most agonizing country-fashion. Wags on the farm advised them to go to the Astor House and insist upon having the finest room in the caravansary. Arriving in New York, they were driven to the hotel, each carrying a bundle done up in a colored handkerchief. Their rustic appearance attracted great attention, which was increased when the man marched to the office-counter and demanded “the best in the shebang, b’gosh.” The astounded clerk tried to get the unwelcome guest to go elsewhere, assuring him he must have made a mistake. The rural delegate did not propose to be bluffed by coaxing or threats. At length the representative of petroleum wanted to know “how much it would cost to buy the gol-darned ranche.” In despair the clerk summoned the proprietor, who soon took in the situation. To humor the stranger he replied that one-hundred-thousand dollars would buy the place. The chap produced a pile of bills and tendered him the money on the spot! Explanations followed, a parlor and bedroom were assigned the pair and for days they were the lions of the metropolis. Hundreds of citizens and ladies called to see the innocents who had come on their “first tower” as green and unsophisticated as did Josiah Allen’s Wife twenty years later.

Ambrose Rynd, an Irish woolen-factor, bought five-hundred acres from the Holland Land-Company in 1800 and built a log-cabin at the mouth of Cherrytree Run. He attained the Nestorian age of ninety-nine. His grandson, John Rynd, born in the log-cabin in 1815, owned three-hundred acres of the tract when the petroleum-wave swept Oil Creek. The Blood farm was north and the Smith east. Cherrytree and Wykle Runs rippled through the western half of the property, which Oil Creek divided nicely. Developments in 1861 were on the eastern half. Starting at five-hundred barrels, the Rynd well flowed until 1863. The Crawford “saw” the Rynd and “went it one better,” lasting until June of 1864. Six fair wells were drilled on Rynd Island, a dot at the upper part of the farm. The Rynd-Farm Oil-Company of New York purchased the tract in 1864. John Rynd moved to Fayette county and died in the seventies. Hume & Crawford, Porter & Milroy, B. F. Wren, the Ozark, Favorite, Frost, Northern and a score of companies operated vigorously. The third sand thickened and improved with the elevation of the hills. Five refineries handled a thousand barrels of crude per week. A snug village bloomed on the west side, the broad flat affording an eligible site. The late John Wallace and Theodore Ladd were prominent in the later stage of operations. Cyrus D. Rynd returned in 1881 to take charge of the farm and served as postmaster six years. Rynd, once plump and juicy, now lean and desiccated, resembles an orange which a boy has sucked and thrown away the rind.

Two museum-curio wells on the Rynd farm illustrated practically Chaplain McCabe’s “Drinking From the Same Canteen.” A dozen strokes of the pump every hour caused the Agitator to flow ten or fifteen minutes. The pious Sunday well, its companion, loafed six days in the week while the other worked, flowing on the Sabbath when the Agitator pump rested from its labors. This sort of affinity, which cost William Phillips and Noble & Delamater a mint of money, was evinced most forcibly on the McClintock farm, west side of Oil Creek, south of Rynd. William McClintock, original owner of the two-hundred acres, dying in 1859, the widow remained on the farm with her grandson, John W. Steele, whom the couple had adopted at a tender age, upon the decease of his mother. Nearly half the farm was bottom-land, fronting the creek, on the bank of which the first wells were sunk in 1861. The Vanslyke flowed twelve-hundred barrels a day, declined slowly and in its third year pumped fourteen-thousand. The Lloyd, Eastman, Little Giant, Morrison, Hayes & Merrick, Christy, Ocean, Painter, Sterrett, Chase and sixty more each put up fifty to four-hundred barrels daily. Directly between the Vanslyke and Christy, a few rods from either, New-York parties finished the Hammond well in May, 1864. Starting to flow three-hundred barrels a day, the Hammond killed the Lloyd and Christy and reduced the Vanslyke to a ten-barrel pumper. Its triumph was short-lived. Early in June the New Yorkers, elated over its performance, bought the royalty of the well and one-third acre of ground for two-hundred thousand dollars. The end of June the tubing was drawn from the Excelsior well, on the John McClintock farm, five-hundred yards east, flooding the Hammond and all the wells in the vicinity. The damage was attributed to Vandergrift & Titus’s new well a short distance down the flat, nobody imagining it came from a hole a quarter-mile off. Retubing the Excelsior quickly restored one-half the Hammond’s yield, which increased as the Excelsior’s lessened. An adjustment followed, but the final pulling of the tubing from the Excelsior drowned the affected wells permanently. Geologists and scientists reveled in the ethics suggested by such interference, which casing wells has obviated. The Widow-McClintock farm produced hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil and changed hands repeatedly. For years it was owned by a man who as a boy blacked Steele’s boots. In 1892 John Waites renovated a number of the old wells. Pumping some and plugging others, to shut out water, surprised and rewarded him with a yield that is bringing him a tidy fortune. The action of the stream has washed away the ground on which the Vanslyke, the Sterrett and several of the largest wells were located. “Out, out, brief candle!”

Mrs. McClintock, like thousands of women since, attempted one day in March of 1863 to hurry up the kitchen-fire with kerosene. The result was her fatal burning, death in an hour and the first funeral to the account of the treacherous oil-can. The poor woman wore coarse clothing, worked hard and secreted her wealth about the house. Her will, written soon after McClintock’s exit, bequeathed everything to the adopted heir, John W. Steele, twenty years old when his grandmother met her tragic fate. At eighteen he had married Miss M. Moffett, daughter of a farmer in Sugarcreek township. He hauled oil in 1861 with hired plugs until he could buy a span of stout horses. Oil-Creek teamsters, proficient in lurid profanity, coveted his varied stock of pointed expletives. The blonde driver, of average height and slender build, pleasing in appearance and address, by no means the unlicked cub and ignorant boor he has been represented, neither smoke nor drank nor gambled, but “he could say ‘damn’!” Climbing a hill with a load of oil, the end-board dropped out and five barrels of crude wabbled over the steep bank. It was exasperating and the spectators expected a special outburst. Steele “winked the other eye” and remarked placidly: “Boys, it’s no use trying to do justice to this occasion.” The shy youth, living frugally and not the type people would associate with unprecedented antics, was to figure in song and story and be advertised more widely than the sea-serpent or Barnum’s woolly-horse. Millions who never heard of John Smith, Dr. Mary Walker or Baby McKee have heard and read and talked about the one-and-only “Coal-Oil Johnnie.”

The future candidate for minstrel-gags and newspaper-space was hauling oil when a neighbor ran to tell him of Mrs. McClintock’s death. He hastened home. A search of the premises disclosed two-hundred-thousand dollars the old lady had hoarded. Wm. Blackstone, appointed his guardian, restricted the minor to a reasonable allowance. The young man’s conduct was irreproachable until he attained his majority. His income was enormous. Mr. Blackstone paid him three-hundred-thousand dollars in a lump and he resolved to “see some of the world.” He saw it, not through smoked glass either. His escapades supplied no end of material for gossip. Many tales concerning him were exaggerations and many pure inventions. Demure, slow-going Philadelphia he colored a flaming vermilion. He gave away carriages after a single drive, kept open-house in a big hotel and squandered thousands of dollars a day. Seth Slocum was “showing him the sights” and he fell an easy victim to blacklegs and swindlers. He ordered champagne by the dozen baskets and treated theatrical companies to the costliest wine-suppers. Gay ballet girls at Fox’s old play-house told spicy stories of these midnight frolics. To a negro-comedian, who sang a song that pleased him, he handed a thousand-dollar pin. He would walk the streets with bank-bills stuck in the buttonholes of his coat for Young America to grab. He courted club-men and spent cash like the Count of Monte Cristo. John Morrissey sat a night with him at cards in his Saratoga gambling-house, cleaning him out of many thousands. Leeches bled him and sharpers fleeced him mercilessly. He was a spendthrift, but he didn’t light cigars with hundred-dollar bills, buy a Philadelphia hotel to give a chum nor destroy money “for fun.” Usually somebody benefited by his extravagances.

Occasionally his prodigality assumed a sensible phase. Twenty-eight-hundred dollars, one day’s receipts from his wells and royalty, went toward the erection of the soldiers’ monument—a magnificent shaft of white marble—in the Franklin park. Except Dan Rice’s five-thousand memorial at Girard, Erie county, this was the first monument in the Union to the fallen heroes of the civil war. Ten, twenty or fifty dollars frequently gladdened the poor who asked for relief. He lavished fine clothes and diamonds on a minstrel-troupe, touring the country and entertaining crowds in the oil-regions. John W. Gaylord, an artist in burnt-cork and member of the troupe, has furnished these details:

“Yes. ‘Coal-Oil Johnnie’ was my particular friend in his palmiest days. I was his room-mate when he cut the shines that celebrated him as the most eccentric millionaire on earth. I was with the Skiff & Gaylord minstrels. Johnnie saw us perform in Philadelphia, got stuck on the business and bought one-third interest in the show. His first move was to get five-thousand dollars’ worth of woodcuts at his own expense. They were all the way from a one-sheet to a twenty-four-sheet in size and the largest amount any concern had ever owned. The cartoon, which attracted so much attention, of ‘Bring That Skiff Over Here,’ was in the lot. We went on the road, did a monstrous business everywhere, turned people away and were prosperous.

“Reaching Utica, N. Y., Johnnie treated to a supper for the company, which cost one-thousand dollars. He then conceived the idea of traveling by his own train and purchased an engine, a sleeper and a baggage-car. Dates for two weeks were cancelled and we went junketing, Johnnie footing the bills. At Erie we had a five-hundred-dollar supper; and so it went. It was here that Johnnie bought his first hack. After a short ride he presented it to the driver. Our dates being cancelled, Johnnie insisted upon indemnifying us for the loss of time. He paid all salaries, estimated the probable business receipts upon the basis of packed houses and paid that also to our treasurer.

“In Chicago he gave another exhibition of his eccentric traits. He leased the Academy of Music for the season and we did a big business. Finally he proposed a benefit for Skiff & Gaylord and sent over to rent the Crosby Opera-House, then the finest in the country. The manager sent back the insolent reply: ‘We won’t rent our house for an infernal nigger-show.’ Johnnie got warm in the collar. He went down to their office in Root & Cady’s music-store.

“‘What will you take for your house and sell it outright?’ he asked Mr. Root.

“‘I don’t want to sell.’

“‘I’ll give you a liberal price. Money is no object.’

“Then Johnnie pulled out a roll from his valise, counted out two-hundred-thousand dollars and asked Root if that was an object. Mr. Root was thunderstruck. ‘If you are that kind of a man you can have the house for the benefit free of charge.’ The benefit was the biggest success ever known in minstrelsy. The receipts were forty-five-hundred dollars and more were turned away than could be given admission. Next day Johnnie hunted up one of the finest carriage-horses in the city and presented it to Mr. Root for the courtesy extended.

“Oh, Johnnie was a prince with his money. I have seen him spend as high as one hundred-thousand dollars in one day. That was the time he hired the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia and wanted to buy the Girard House. He went to the Continental and politely said to the clerk: ‘Will you please tell the proprietor that J. W. Steele wishes to see him?’ ‘No, sir,’ said the clerk; ‘the landlord is busy.’ Johnnie suggested he could make it pay the clerk to accommodate the whim. The clerk became disdainful and Johnnie tossed a bell-boy a twenty-dollar gold-piece with the request. The result was an interview with the landlord. Johnnie claimed he had been ill-treated and requested the summary dismissal of the clerk. The proprietor refused and Johnnie offered to buy the hotel. The man said he could not sell, because he was not the entire owner. A bargain was made to lease it one day for eight-thousand dollars. The cash was paid over and Johnnie installed as landlord. He made me bell-boy, while Slocum officiated as clerk. The doors were thrown open and every guest in the house had his fill of wine and edibles free of cost. A huge placard was posted in front of the hotel: ‘Open house to-day; everything free; all are welcome!’ It was a merry lark. The whole city seemed to catch on and the house was full. When Johnnie thought he had had fun enough he turned the hostelry over to the landlord, who reinstated the odious clerk. Here was a howdedo. Johnnie was frantic with rage. He went over to the Girard and tried to buy it. He arranged with the proprietor to ‘buck’ the Continental by making the prices so low that everybody would come there. The Continental did mighty little business so long as the arrangement lasted.

“The day of the hotel-transaction we were up on Arch street. A rain setting in, Johnnie approached a hack in front of a fashionable store and tried to engage it to carry us up to the Girard. The driver said it was impossible, as he had a party in the store. Johnnie tossed him a five-hundred-dollar bill and the hackman said he would risk it. When we arrived at the hotel Johnnie said: ‘See here, Cabby, you’re a likely fellow. How would you like to own that rig?’ The driver thought he was joking, but Johnnie handed him two-thousand dollars. A half-hour later the delighted driver returned with the statement that the purchase had been effected. Johnnie gave him a thousand more to buy a stable and that man to-day is the wealthiest hack-owner in Philadelphia.”

Steele reached the end of his string and the farm was sold in 1866. When he was flying the highest Captain J. J. Vandergrift and T. H. Williams kindly urged him to save some of his money. He thanked them for the friendly advice, said he had made a living by hauling oil and could do so again if necessary, but he couldn’t rest until he had spent that fortune. He spent a million and got the “rest.” Returning to Oildom “dead broke,” he secured the position of baggage-master at Rouseville station. He attended to his duties punctually, was a model of domestic virtue and a most popular, obliging official. Happily his wife had saved something and the reunited couple got along swimmingly. Next he opened a meat-market at Franklin, built up a nice business, sold the shop and moved to Ashland, Nebraska. He farmed, laid up money and entered the service of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad some years ago as baggage-master. His manly son, whom he educated splendidly, is telegraph-operator at Ashland station. The father, “steady as a clock,” is industrious, reliable and deservedly esteemed. Recently a fresh crop of stories regarding him has been circulated, but he minds his own affairs and is not one whit puffed up that the latest rival of Pears and Babbitt has just brought out a brand of “Coal-Oil Johnnie Soap.”

John McClintock’s farm of two-hundred acres, east of Steele and south of Rynd, Chase & Alden leased in September of 1859, for one-half the oil. B. R. Alden was a naval officer, disabled from wounds received in California, and an oil-seeker at Cuba, New York. A hundred wells rendered the farm extremely productive. The Anderson, sunk in 1861 near the southeast corner, on Cherry Run, flowed constantly three years, waning gradually from two-hundred barrels to twenty. Efforts to stop the flow in 1862, when oil dropped to ten or fifteen cents, merely imbued it with fresh vigor. Anderson thought the oil-business had gone to the bow-wows and deemed himself lucky to get seven-thousand dollars in the fall for the well. It earned one-hundred-thousand dollars subsequently and then sold for sixty-thousand. The Excelsior produced fifty-thousand barrels before the interference with the Hammond destroyed both. The Wheeler, Wright & Hall, Alice Lee, Jew, Deming, Haines and Taft wells were choice specimens. William and Robert Orr’s Auburn Oil-Works and the Pennechuck Refinery chucked six-hundred barrels a week into the stills. The McClintocks have migrated from Venango. Some are in heaven, some in Crawford county and some in the west. If Joseph Cooke’s conundrum—“Does Death End All?”—be negatived, there ought to be a grand reunion when they meet in the New Jerusalem and talk over their experiences on Oil Creek.

SAMUEL Q. BROWN FOSTER W. MITCHELL JOHN L. MITCHELL

Eight miles east of Titusville, at Enterprise, John L. and Foster W. Mitchell, sons of a pioneer settler of Allegheny township, were lumbering and merchandising in 1859. They had worked on the farm and learned blacksmithing from their father. The report of Col. Drake’s well stirred the little hamlet. John L. Mitchell mounted a horse and rode at a John-Gilpin gallop to lease Archibald Buchanan’s big farm, on both sides of Oil Creek and Cherry Run. The old man agreed to his terms, a lease was executed, the rosy-cheeked mistress and all the pupils in the log school-house who could write witnessed the signatures and Mitchell rode back with the document in his pocket. He also leased John Buchanan’s two hundred acres, south of Archibald Buchanan’s three-hundred on the same terms—one-fourth the oil for ninety years. Forming a partnership with Henry R. Rouse and Samuel Q. Brown, he “kicked down” the first well in 1860 to the first sand. It pumped ten barrels a day and was bought by A. Potter, who sank it and another to the third sand in 1861. A three-hundred-barreler for months, No. 1 changed hands four times, was bought in 1865 by Gould & Stowell and produced oil—it pumped for fifteen years—that sold for two-hundred-and-ninety-thousand dollars! This veteran was the third or fourth producing well in the region. The Curtis, usually considered “the first flowing-well,” in July of 1860 spouted freely at two-hundred feet. It was not tubed and surface-water soon mastered the flow of oil. The Brawley—sixty-thousand barrels in eight months—Goble & Flower, Shaft and Sherman were moguls of 1861-2. Beech & Gillett, Alfred Willoughby, Taylor & Rockwell, Shreve & Glass, Allen Wright, Wesley Chambers—his infectious laugh could be heard five squares—and a host of companies operated in 1861-2-3. Franklin S. Tarbell, E. M. Hukell, E. C. Bradley, Harmon Camp, George Long and J. T. Jones arrived later. The territory was singularly profitable. Mitchell & Brown erected a refinery, divided the tracts into hundreds of acre-plots for leases and laid out the town of Buchanan Farm. Allen Wright, president of a local oil-company, in February of 1861 printed his letter-heads “Rouseville” and the name was adopted unanimously.

Rouseville grew swiftly and for a time was headquarters of the oil industry. Churches and schools arose, good people feeling that man lives not by oil alone any more than by bread. Dwellings extended up Cherry Run and the slopes of Mt. Pisgah. Wells and tanks covered the flats and there were few drones in the busy hive. If Satan found mischief for the idle only, he would have starved in Rouseville. Stores and shops multiplied. James White fitted up an opera-house and C. L. Stowell opened a bank. Henry Patchen conducted the first hotel. N. W. Read enacted the role of “Petroleum V. Nasby, wich iz postmaster.” The receipts in 1869 exceeded twenty-five-thousand dollars. Miss Nettie Dickinson, afterwards in full charge of the money-order department at Pittsburg and partner with Miss Annie Burke in a flourishing Oil-City bookstore, ran the office in an efficient style Postmaster-General Wilson would have applauded. Yet moss-backed croakers in pants, left over from the Pliocene period, think the gentle sex has no business with business! The town reached high-water mark early in the seventies, the population grazing nine-thousand. Production declined, new fields attracted live operators and in 1880 the inhabitants numbered seven-hundred, twice the present figure. Rouseville will go down in history as an oil-town noted for progressiveness, intelligence, crooked streets and girls “pretty as a picture.”

You could always count on a lively rustle— The boys knew how to get up and hustle, And of course the girls had plenty of bustle.

The Buchanan-Farm Oil-Company purchased Mitchell & Brown’s interest and the Buchanan Royalty Oil-Company acquired the one-fourth held by the land-owners. Both realized heavily, the Royalty Company paying its stock-holders—Arnold Plumer, William Haldeman and Dr. C. E. Cooper were principals—about a million dollars. The senior Buchanan, after receiving two or three-hundred-thousand dollars—fifty times the sum he would ever have gained farming—often denounced “th’ pirates that robbed an old man, buyin’ th’ farm he could ’ave sold two year later fur two millyun!” The old man has been out of pirate range twenty-five years and the Buchanan families are scattered. Most of the old-time operators have handed in their final account. Poor Fred Rockwell has mouldered into dust. Wright, Camp, Taylor, Beech, Long, Shreve, Haldeman, Hostetter, Cooper, Col. Gibson and Frank Irwin are “grav’d in the hollow ground.” Death claimed “Hi” Whiting in Florida and last March stilled the cheery voice of Wesley Chambers. The earnest, pleading tones of the Rev. R. M. Brown will be heard no more this side the walls of jasper and the gates of pearl. Scores moved to different parts of the country. John L. Mitchell married Miss Hattie A. Raymond and settled at Franklyn. He organized the Exchange Bank in 1871 and was its president until ill-health obliged him to resign. Foster W. Mitchell also located at the county-seat and built the Exchange Hotel. He operated extensively on Oil Creek and in the northern districts, developed the Shaw Farm and established a bank at Rouseville, subsequently transferring it to Oil City. He was active in politics and in the producers’ organizations, treasurer of the Centennial Commission and an influential force in the Oil-Exchange. David H. Mitchell likewise gained a fortune in oil, founded a bank and died at Titusville. Samuel Q. Brown, their relative and associate in various undertakings, was a merchant and banker at Pleasantville. Retiring from these pursuits, he removed to Philadelphia and then to New York to oversee the financial work of the Tidewater Pipe-Line. He procured the charter for the first pipe-line and acquired a fortune by his business-talent and wise management.

“Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, the dog will have his day.”

Born in New York in 1824, Henry R. Rouse studied law, taught school in Warren county and engaged in lumbering and storekeeping at Enterprise. He served in the legislatures of 1859-60, acquitting himself manfully. Promptly catching the inspiration of the hour, he shared with William Barnsdall and Boone Meade the honor of putting down the third oil-well in Pennsylvania. With John L. Mitchell and Samuel Q. Brown he leased the Buchanan farm and invested in oil-lands generally. Fabulous wealth began to reward his efforts. Had he lived “he would have been a giant or a bankrupt in petroleum.” Operations on the John Buchanan farm were pushed actively. Near the upper line of the farm, on the east side of Oil Creek, at the foot of the hill, Merrick & Co. drilled a well in 1861, eight rods from the Wadsworth. On April seventeenth, at the depth of three-hundred feet, gas, water and oil rushed up, fairly lifting the tools out of the hole. The evening was damp and the atmosphere surcharged with gas. People ran with shovels to dig trenches and throw up a bank to hold the oil, no tanks having been provided. Mr. Rouse and George H. Dimick, his clerk and cashier, with six others, had eaten supper and were sitting in Anthony’s Hotel discussing the fall of Fort Sumter. A laborer at the Merrick well bounded into the room to say that a vein of oil had been struck and barrels were wanted. All ran to the well but Dimick, who went to send barrels. Finishing this errand, he hastened towards the well. A frightful explosion hurled him to the earth. Smouldering coals under the Wadsworth boiler had ignited the gas. In an instant the two wells, tanks and an acre of ground saturated with oil were in flames, enveloping ninety or a hundred persons. Men digging the ditch or dipping the oil wilted like leaves in a gale. Horrible shrieks rent the air. Dense volumes of black smoke ascended. Tongues of flame leaped hundreds of feet. One poor fellow, charred to the bone, died screaming with agony over his supposed arrival in hell. Victims perished scarcely a step from safety. Rouse stood near the derrick at the fatal moment. Blinded by the first flash, he stumbled forward and fell into the marshy soil. Throwing valuable papers and a wallet of money beyond the circuit of fire, he struggled to his feet, groped a dozen paces and fell again. Two men dashed into the sea of flame and dragged him forth, his flesh baked and his clothing a handful of shreds. He was carried to a shanty and gasped through five hours of excruciating torture. His wonderful self-possession never deserted him, no word or act betraying his fearful suffering. Although obliged to sip water from a spoon at every breath, he dictated a concise will, devising the bulk of his estate in trust to improve the roads and benefit the poor of Warren county. Relatives and intimate friends, his clerk and hired boy, the men who bore him from the broiling furnace and honest debtors were remembered. This dire calamity blotted out nineteen lives and disfigured thirteen men and boys permanently. The blazing oil was smothered with dirt the third day. Tubing was put in the well, which flowed ten-thousand barrels in a week and then ceased. Nothing is left to mark the scene of the sad tragedy. The Merrick, Wadsworth, Haldeman, Clark & Banks, Trundy, Comet and Imperial wells, the tanks and the dwellings have been obliterated. Dr. S. S. Christy—he was Oil City’s first druggist—Allen Wright, N. F. Jones, W. B. Williams and William H. Kinter, five of the six witnesses to Rouse’s remarkable will, are in eternity, Z. Martin alone remaining.

Warren’s greatest benefactor, the interest of the half-million dollars Rouse bequeathed to the county has improved roads, constructed bridges and provided a poor-house at Youngsville. Rouse was distinguished for noble traits, warm impulses, strong attachments, energy and decision of character. He dispensed his bounty lavishly. It was a favorite habit to pick up needy children, furnish them with clothes and shoes and send them home with baskets of provisions. He did not forget his days of trial and poverty. His religious views were peculiar. While reverencing the Creator, he despised narrow creeds, deprecated popular notions of worship and had no dread of the hereafter. To a preacher, in the little group that watched his fading life, who desired an hour before the end to administer consolation, he replied: “My account is made up. If I am a debtor, it would be cowardly to ask for credit now. I do not care to discuss the matter.” He directed that his funeral be without display, that no sermon be preached and that he be laid beside his mother at Westfield, New York. Thus lived and died Henry R. Rouse, of small stature and light frame, but dowered with rare talents and heroic soul. Perhaps at the Judgment Day, when deeds outweigh words, many a strict Pharisee may wish he could change places with the man whose memory the poor devoutly bless. As W. A. Croffut has written of James Baker in “The Mine at Calumet”:

“‘Perfess’? He didn’t perfess. He hed One simple way all through— He merely practiced an’ he sed That that wud hev to do. ‘Under conviction’? The idee! He never done a thing To be convicted fer. Why, he Wuz straighter than a string.”

Seventy-five wells were drilled on Hamilton McClintock’s four-hundred acres in 1860-1. Here was Cary’s “oil-spring” and expectations of big wells soared high. The best yielded from one-hundred to three-hundred barrels a day. Low prices and the war led to the abandonment of the smaller brood. A company bought the farm in 1864. McClintockville, a promising village on the flat, boasted two refineries, stores, a hotel and the customary accessories, of which the bridge over Oil Creek is the sole reminder. Near the upper boundary of the farm the Reno Railroad crossed the valley on a giddy center-trestle and timber abutments, not a splinter of which remains. General Burnside, the distinguished commander, superintended the construction of this mountain-line, designed to connect Reno and Pithole and never completed. Occasionally the dignified general would be hailed by a soldier who had served under him. It was amusing to behold a greasy pumper, driller or teamster step up, clap Burnside on the shoulder, grasp his hand and exclaim: “Hello, General! Deuced glad to see you! I was with you at Fredericksburg! Come and have a drink!”

The Clapp farm of five-hundred acres had a fair allotment of long-lived wells. George H. Bissell and Arnold Plumer bought the lower half, in the closing days of 1859, from Ralph Clapp. The Cornplanter Oil Company purchased the upper half. The Hemlock, Cuba, Cornwall—a thousand-barreler—and Cornplanter, on the latter section, were notably productive. The Williams, Stanton, McKee, Elizabeth and Star whooped it up on the Bissell-Plumer division. Much of the oil in 1862-3 was from the second sand. Four refineries flourished and the tract coined money for its owners. A mile east was the prolific Shaw farm, which put two-hundred-thousand dollars into Foster W. Mitchell’s purse. Graff & Hasson’s one-thousand acres, part of the land granted Cornplanter in 1796, had a multitude of medium wells that produced year after year. In 1818 the Indian chief, who loved fire-water dearly, sold his reservation to William Connely, of Franklin, and William Kinnear, of Centre county, for twenty-one-hundred-and-twenty-one dollars. Matthias Stockberger bought Connely’s half in 1824 and, with Kinnear and Reuben Noyes, erected the Oil-Creek furnace, a foundry, mill, warehouses and steamboat-landing at the east side of the mouth of the stream. William and Frederick Crary acquired the business in 1825 and ran it ten years. William and Samuel Bell bought it in 1835 and shut down the furnace in 1849. The Bell heirs sold it to Graff, Hasson & Co. in 1856 for seven-thousand dollars. James Hasson located on the property with his family and farmed five years. Graff & Hasson sold three-hundred acres in 1864 to the United Petroleum Farms Association for seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars. James Halyday settled on the east side in 1803. His son James, the first white baby in the neighborhood, was born in 1809. The Bannon family came in the forties, Thomas Moran built the Moran House—it still lingers—in 1845 and died in 1857. Dr. John Nevins arrived in 1850 and in the fall of 1852 John P. Hopewell started a general store. Hiram Gordon opened the “Red Lion Inn,” Samuel Thomas shod horses and three or four families occupied small habitations. And this was the place, when 1860 dawned, that was to become the petroleum-metropolis and be known wherever men have heard a word of “English as she is spoke.”

Cornplanter was the handle of the humble settlement, towards which a stampede began with the first glimmer of spring. To trace the uprising of dwellings, stores, wharves and boarding-houses would be as difficult as perpetual motion. People huddled in shanties and lived on barges moored to the bank. Derricks peered up behind the houses, thronged the marshy flats, congregated on the slopes, climbed the precipitous bluffs and established a foothold on every ledge of rock. Pumping-wells and flowing-wells scented the atmosphere with gas and the smell of crude. Smoke from hundreds of engine-houses, black, sooty and defiling, discolored the grass and foliage. Mud was everywhere, deep, unlimited, universal—yellow mud from the newer territory—dark, repulsive, oily mud around the wells—sticky, tricky, spattering mud on the streets and in the yards. J. B. Reynolds, of Clarion county, and Calvin and William J. McComb, of Pittsburg, opened the first store under the new order of things in March of 1860. T. H. and William M. Williams joined the firm. They withdrew to open the Pittsburg store next door. Robson’s hardware-store was farther up the main street, on the east side, which ended abruptly at Cottage Hill. William P. Baillee—he lives in Detroit—and William Janes built the first refinery, on the same street, in 1861, a year of unexampled activity. The plant, which attracted people from all parts of the country—Mr. Baillee called it a “pocket-still”—was enlarged into a refinery of five stills, with an output of two-hundred barrels of refined oil every twenty-four hours. Fire destroyed it and the firm built another on the flats near by. On the west side, at the foot of a steep cliff, Dr. S. S. Christy opened a drug-store. Houses, shops, offices, hotels and saloons hung against the side of the hill or sat loosely on heaps of earth by the creek and river. One evening a half-dozen congenial spirits met in Williams & Brother’s store. J. B. Reynolds, afterwards a banker, who died several years since, thought Cornplanter ought to be discarded and a new name given the growing town. He suggested one which was heartily approved. Liquid refreshments were ordered and the infant was appropriately baptized OIL CITY.

Peter Graff was laid to rest years ago. The venerable James Hasson sleeps in the Franklin cemetery. His son, Captain William Hasson, is an honored resident of the city that owes much to his enterprise and liberality. Capable, broad-minded and trustworthy, he has been earnest in promoting the best interests of the community, the region and the state. A recent benefaction was his splendid gift of a public park—forty acres—on Cottage Hill. He was the first burgess and served with conspicuous ability in the council and the legislature. Alike as a producer, banker, citizen, municipal officer and lawgiver, Captain Hasson has shown himself “every inch a manly man.”

When you talk of any better town than Oil City, of any better section than the oil-regions, of any better people than the oilmen, of any better state than Pennsylvania, “every potato winks its eye, every cabbage shakes its head, every beet grows red in the face, every onion gets stronger, every sheaf of grain is shocked, every stalk of rye strokes its beard, every hill of corn pricks up its ears, every foot of ground kicks” and every tree barks in indignant dissent.

Such was the narrow ravine, nowhere sixty rods in width, that figured so grandly as the Valley of Petroleum.

A SPLASH ON OIL CREEK.

The dark mud of Oil Creek! Unbeautiful mud, That couldn’t and wouldn’t be nipped in the bud! Quite irreclaimable, Wholly untamable; There it was, not a doubt of it, People couldn’t keep out of it; On all sides they found it, So deep none dare sound it— No way to get ’round it. To their necks babies crept in it, To their chins big men stept in it; Ladies—bless the sweet martyrs! Plung’d far over their garters; Girls had no exemption, Boys sank past redemption; To their manes horses stall’d in it, To their ear-tips mules sprawl’d in it! It couldn’t be chain’d off, It wouldn’t be drain’d off; It couldn’t be tied up, It wouldn’t be dried up; It couldn’t be shut down, It wouldn’t be cut down. Riders gladly abroad would have shipp’d it, Walkers gladly at home would have skipp’d it. Frost bak’d it, Heat cak’d it; To batter wheels churned it, To splashes rains turned it, Bad teamsters gol-durned it! Each snow-flake and dew-drop, each shower and flood Just seem’d to infuse it with lots of fresh blood, Increasing production, Increasing the ruction, Increasing the suction! Ev’ry flat had its fill of it, Ev’ry slope was a hill of it, Ev’ry brook was a rill of it; Ev’ry yard had three feet of it, Ev’ry road was a sheet of it; Ev’ry farm had a field of it, Ev’ry town had a yield of it. No use to glare at it, No use to swear at it; No use to get mad about it, No use to feel sad about it; No use to sit up all night scheming Some intricate form of blaspheming; No use in upbraiding— You had to go wading, Till wearied humanity, Run out of profanity, Found rest in insanity; Or winged its bright way—unless dropp’d with a thud— To the land of gold pavements and no Oil-Creek mud!

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VIII. PICKING RIPE CHERRIES

JUICY STREAKS BORDERING OIL CREEK—FAMOUS BENNINGHOFF ROBBERY—CLOSE CALL FOR A FORTUNE—CITY SET UPON A HILL—ALEMAGOOSELUM TO THE FRONT—CHERRY RUN’S WHIRLIGIG—ROMANCE OF THE REED WELL—SMITH AND MCFATE FARMS—PLEASANTVILLE, SHAMBURG AND RED HOT—EXPERIENCES NOT UNWORTHY OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS.

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“Who can view the ripened rose, nor seek to wear it?”—Byron.

“Black’s not so black, nor white so very white.”—Canning.

“Wild and eerie is the story, but it is true as Truth.”—Hall Caine.

“No two successes ever were alike.”—Hawthorne.

“There is nothing so great as the collection of the minute.”—Vitus Auctor.

“The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth-point goes.”—Kipling.

“The crop is always greater on the lands of another.”—Ovid.

“It didn’t rain, the water simply fell out of the clouds.”—Cy Warman.

“There are days when every stream is Pachlus and every man is Crœsus.”—Richard Le Gallienne.

“We shall not fail, if we stand firm.”—Abraham Lincoln.

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Rich pickings, luscious as the clustering grapes beyond the fox’s reach, were not limited to the wonderful Valley of Petroleum. Live operators quickly learned that big wells could be found away from the low banks of Oil Creek. Anon they climbed the hills, ascended the ravines and invaded the near townships. Very naturally the tributary streams were favored at first, until experience inspired courage and altitude failed to be a serious obstacle. In this way many juicy streaks were encountered, broadening men’s ideas and the area of profitable developments to a marvelous degree. Alaska nuggets are fly-specks compared with the golden spoil garnered from oil-wells on scores of farms in Allegheny, Cherrytree and Cornplanter. Tales of the petroleum-seesaw’s ups and downs, without any “mixture rank of midnight weeds” that savor of “something rotten in Denmark,” need no Klondyker’s imagination, measureless as the ice-floes of the Yukon, to awaken interest and be worthy of attention.

By the side of the romance, the pathos, the tragedy and the startling incidents of the oil-regions thirty years ago the gold-excitements of California and Australia and the diamond-fever of South Africa are tame and vapid. Prior to the oil-development settlers in the back-townships lived very sparingly. Children grew up simple-minded and untutored. The sale of a pig or a calf or a turkey was an event looked forward to for months. Petroleum made not a few of these rustics wealthy. Families that had never seen ten dollars suddenly owned hundreds-of-thousands. Lawless, reckless, wicked communities sprang up. The close of the war flooded the region with paper-currency and bold adventurers. Leadville or Cheyenne at its zenith was a camp-meeting compared with Pithole, Petroleum Centre or Babylon. Men and women of every degree of decency and degradation huddled as closely as the pig-tailed Celestials in Chinatown. Millions of dollars were lost in bogus stock-companies. American history records no other such era of riotous extravagance. The millionaire and the beggar of to-day might change places to-morrow. Blind chance and consummate rascality were equally potent. Of these centers of sin and speculation, strange transformations and wild excesses, scarcely a trace remains. Where hosts of fortune-seekers and devotees of pleasure strove and struggled nothing is to be seen save the bare landscape, a growth of underbrush or a grassy field. Sodom was not blotted out more completely than Pithole, the type of many oil-towns that have been utterly exterminated.

North and west of the lower McElhenny farm, at the bend in Oil Creek, lay John Benninghoff’s two big blocks of land, through which Benninghoff Run flowed southward. Pioneer Run crossed the north-east corner of the property, the greater part of which was on the hills. Five acres on Oil Creek and the slopes on Pioneer Run were first developed. Leases for a cash-bonus and liberal royalty were gobbled greedily. Up Benninghoff Run and back of the hills operations spread. For one piece of ground the owner declined tempting offers, because he would not permit his potato-patch to be trodden down! Some wells pumped and some flowed from twenty-five to three-hundred barrels a day seven days in the week. William Jenkins, the Huidekoper Oil-Company, the DeKalb Oil-Company and Edward Harkins had regular bonanzas. The Lady Herman, which Robert Herman had the politeness to name for his wife, was a genuine beauty. The first well ever cased and the first pump-station—it hoisted oil to Shaffer—were on the hillside at the mouth of Benninghoff Run. The platoon of wells in the illustration of that locality, as they appeared in 1866, includes these and a hint of the barn beside the homestead. The busy scene—pictured now for the first time—was photographed within an hour of its obliteration. The artist had not finished packing his outfit when lightning struck one of the derricks and a disastrous fire swept the hill as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard! Wealth deluged the thrifty land-holder, oil converting his broad acres into a veritable Golconda. He awoke one morning to find himself rich. He was awakened one night to find himself famous, the newspapers devoting whole pages—under “scare-heads”—to the unpretending farmer in the southern end of Cherry tree. “And thereby hangs a tale.”

Suspicious of banks, Benninghoff stored his money at home. Purchasing a cheap safe, he placed it in a corner of the sitting-room and stocked it with a half-million dollars in gold and greenbacks! Cautious friends warned him to be careful, lest thieves might “break through and steal.” James Saeger, of Saegertown, a handsome, popular young fellow, who sometimes played cards, heard of the treasure in the flimsy receptacle. “Jim” belonged to a respectable family and had been a merchant at Meadville. Napoleon melted silver statues of the apostles to put the precious metal in circulation and Saeger concluded to give Benninghoff’s pile an airing. He spoke to George Miller of the ease with which the safe could be cracked and engaged two Baltimore burglars, McDonald and Elliott, to manage the job. Jacob Shoppert, of Saegertown, and Henry Geiger, who worked for Benninghoff and slept in the house, were enlisted. The deed, planned with extreme care not to miss fire, was fixed for a night when Joseph Benninghoff, the son, was to attend a dance.

On Thursday evening, January sixteenth, 1868, Saeger, Shoppert, McDonald and Elliott left Saegertown in a two-horse sleigh for Petroleum Centre, twenty-nine miles distant. At midnight they knocked at Benninghoff’s door. Geiger answered the rap and was quickly gagged, said to be as arranged previously. John Benninghoff, his wife and daughter were bound and the experts proceeded to open the safe. The frail structure was soon ransacked. The marauders bundled up their booty, sampled Mrs. Benninghoff’s pies, drank a gallon of milk and departed at their leisure, leaving the inmates of the house securely tied. Joseph returned in an hour or two and relieved the prisoners from their unpleasant predicament. An examination of the safe showed that two-hundred-and-sixty-five-thousand dollars had been taken! The bulk of this was in gold. A package of two-hundred-thousand dollars, in large bills, done up in a brown paper, the looters passed unnoticed! The alarm was given, the wires flashed the news everywhere and the press teemed with sensational reports. By noon on Friday the oil-regions had been set agog and people all over the United States were talking of “the Great Benninghoff Robbery.”

Saegar and his pals drove back and stopped at Louis Warlde’s hotel to divide the spoils. McDonald, Elliott and Saeger took the lion’s share, Geiger and Shoppert received smaller sums and Warlde accepted thirteen-hundred dollars for his silence. The Baltimore toughs lingered in the neighborhood a week and then sought the wintry climate of Canada, Saeger staying around home. Intense excitement prevailed. Hundreds of detectives, eager to gain reputation and the reward of ten-thousand dollars, spun theories and looked wise. Ex-Chief-of-Police Hague, of Pittsburg, was especially alert. For three months the search was vain. George Miller, whom McDonald wished to put out of the road “to keep his mouth shut,” in a quarrel with Saeger over a game of cards, blurted out: “I know about the Benninghoff robbery!” Saeger pacified Miller with a thousand dollars, which the latter scattered quickly. Jacob Shoppert was his boon companion and the pair spent money at a rate that caused officers to shadow them. Shoppert visited a town on the edge of Ohio and was arrested. Calling for a pen and paper, he wrote to Louis Warlde, the Saegertown hotel-keeper, reproaching him for not sending money. The jailer handed the detectives the letter, on the strength of which Warlde, who had started a brewery in Ohio, and Miller were arrested. The three were convicted and sentenced to a short term in the penitentiary. Geiger’s complicity in the plot could not be proved beyond a doubt and he was acquitted. Officer Hague captured McDonald and Elliott in Toronto, but Canadian lawyers picked flaws in the papers and they could not be extradited. Escaping to Europe, they were heard of no more. Saeger, who had not been suspected until after his departure, went west and was lost sight of for many a day.

Three years later a noted cattle king of the Texas-Colorado trail entered a saloon in Denver to treat a party of friends. The bar-tender, Gus. Peiflee, formerly of Meadville, recognized the customer as “Jim.” Saeger. He telegraphed east and Chief-of-Police Rouse, of Titusville, posted off to Denver with Joseph Benninghoff. They secured extradition-papers and arrested Saeger, who coolly remarked: “You’ll be a devilish sight older before you see me in Pennsylvania.” Their lawyers informed them that a hundred of Saeger’s cowboys were in the city—reckless, lawless fellows, certain to kill whoever attempted to take him away. Rouse and Benninghoff dropped the matter and returned alone. Saeger is living in Texas, prosperous and respected. He is just in his dealings, a bountiful giver, and not long ago sent five-thousand dollars to the widow of George Miller. Perhaps he may yet turn up in Washington as Congressman or United-States Senator. This is the story of a robbery that attracted more attention than the first woman in bloomers.

John Benninghoff was born in Lehigh county, where his ancestors were among the first German immigrants, on Christmas Day, 1801. His father, Frederick Benninghoff, settled near New Berlin, Union county, in John’s boyhood. There the son married Elizabeth Heise in 1825 and in 1828 located on a farm near Oldtown, Clearfield county. Thence he removed to Venango county, living close to Cherry tree village four years. In 1836 he bought a piece of land on the south border of Cherrytree township, near what was to become Petroleum Centre. He added to his purchase as his means permitted, until he owned about three-hundred acres, with solid buildings and modern improvements. He was in easy circumstances prior to the oil-developments that enriched him. Contrary to the general opinion, the robbery did not impoverish him, as one-half the money was untouched. His twelve children—eight boys and four girls—grew up and eight are still living. Selling his farms in Venango, he removed to Greenville, Mercer county, in the spring of 1868 and died in March, 1882. At his death he had sixty-one grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren. He left his family a large estate. The Benninghoff farms, so far as oil is concerned, are utterly deserted.

West and north of Benninghoff were the farms of John and R. Stevenson. On the former, extending south to Oil Creek, Reuben Painter, a live operator, drilled a well in 1863. The contractor reporting it dry, Painter moved the machinery and surrendered the lease. He and his brothers operated profitably in Butler and McKean counties, Reuben dying at Olean in 1892. In November of 1864 the Ocean Oil-Company of Philadelphia bought John Stevenson’s lands. The Ocean well began flowing at a six-hundred-barrel pace on September first, 1865, with the Arctic a good second. Fifty others varied from fifty to two-hundred barrels. Thomas McCool built a refinery and the farm paid the company about two-thousand per cent! The principal wells on both Stevenson tracts clustered far above the flats, the derricks and buildings resembling “a city set on a hill.” Major Mills, justly proud of his King of the Hills, an elegant producer, delighted to visit it with his wife and two young daughters, one of them now Mrs. John D. Archbold, of New York. Painter’s supposed dry-hole, drilled seventeen feet deeper, gushed furiously, proving to be the best well in the collection! Said the Ocean manager, as he watched the oily stream ascend “higher ’n a steeple”: “A million dollars wouldn’t touch one side of this property!” Sinking a four-inch hole seventeen feet farther would have given Reuben Painter this splendid return two years earlier! He missed a million dollars by only seventeen feet! A Gettysburg soldier, from whose nose a rifle-ball shaved a piece of cuticle the size of a pin-head, wittily observed: “That shot came mighty near missing me!” Inverting this remark, Painter had cause to exclaim: “That million came mighty near hitting me!”

“A miss is as good as a mile.”

Various companies bored three-hundred wells on Cherrytree Run and its tiny branches without jarring the trade particularly. Prolific strikes on the Niagara tract, in the rear of the Benninghoff lands, added to the wealth of Phillips Brothers. Kane City, two miles north of Rynd, raised Cain in mild style, “wearing like leather.” Farther back D. W. Kenney’s wells, lively as the Kilkenny cats, stirred a current that wafted in Alemagooselum City. Its unique name, the biggest feature of the “City,” was worked out by Kenney, a fun-loving genius, known far and wide as “Mayor of Alemagooselum.” He and his wells and town have long been “out of sight.” Kane City casts an attenuated shadow.

Rev. William Elliott, who united in one package the fervor of Paul and the snap of Ebenezer Elliott, “the Corn-Law Rhymer,” lived and preached at Rynd. He organized a Sunday-school in Kenney’s parish, which a devout settler undertook to superintend. At the close of the regular service on the opening day, Mr. Elliott asked the pious ruralist to “say a few words.” The good man, wishing to clinch the lesson—about Mary Magdalene—in the minds of the youngsters, implored them to follow the example of “Miss Magdolin.” The older brood tittered at this Hibernianism, the laugh swelled into a cloudburst. Mr. Elliott nearly swallowed his pocket-handkerchief trying to shut in his smiles and a new query was born, which had a long run. It was fired at every visitor to the settlement. Small boys hurled it at the defenceless superintendent, who resigned his job and broke up the school the next Sunday. Possibly Br’er Elliott, when ushered into Heaven, would not be one whit surprised to hear some white-winged cherub from Alemagooselum sing out: “Say, do you know Miss Mag Dolin?”

The scanty herbage on the tail of the parson’s horse gave rise to endless surmises. The animal stranded in a mud-hole and keeled over on his side. Four sturdy fellows tried to fish him out. In his misguided zeal one of the rescuers, tugging at the caudal appendage, pulled so hard that half the hair peeled off, leaving the denuded nag a fitting mate for Tam O’Shanter’s tailless Meg.

A Kane-City youngster prayed every morning and night that a well her father was drilling would be a good one. It was a hopeless failure, finished the day before Christmas. The result disturbed the child exceedingly. That night, as the loving mother was preparing her for bed, the little girl observed: “I dess it’s no use prayin’ till after Kismas, ’cos God’s so busy helpin’ Santa Claus He hasn’t time for nobody else!”

Cherry Run, once the ripest cherry in the orchard, had a satisfactory run. A spice of romance flavored its actual realities. Not two miles up the stream William Reed, in 1863, drilled a dry-hole six-hundred feet deep. Two miles farther, in the vicinity of Plumer, a test well was sunk seven-hundred feet, with no better result. Wells near the mouth of the ravine produced very lightly. Fifty-thousand dollars would have been an extreme price for all the land from Rouseville to Plumer, the tasteful village Henry McCalmont named in honor of Arnold Plumer. In May of 1864 Taylor & Rockwell opened a fresh vein on the run. At two-hundred feet their well threw oil above the derrick and flowed sixty barrels a day regularly. Operators reversed their opinion of the territory. To the surprise of his acquaintances, who deemed him demented, Reed started another well four rods below his failure of the previous year. It was on the right bank of the run, on a five-acre patch bought from John Rynd in 1861 by Thomas Duff, who sold two acres to Robert Criswell. Reed was not over-stocked with cash and Criswell joined forces with him to sink the second well. I. N. Frazer took one-third interest. At the proper depth the outlook was gloomy. The sand appeared good, but days of pumping failed to bring oil. On July eighteenth, 1864, the well commenced flowing three-hundred barrels a day, holding out at this rate for months. Criswell realized thirty-thousand dollars from his share of the oil and then sold his one-fourth interest in the land and well for two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand to the Mingo Oil-Company. He operated in the Butler field, lived at Monterey, removed to Ohio and died near Cincinnati. One son, David S., a well-known producer, resides at Oil City; another, Robert W., is on the editorial staff of a New-York daily. Frazer sold for one-hundred-thousand dollars and next loomed up as “the discoverer of Pithole.” Reed sold to Bishop & Bissell for two-hundred-thousand dollars, after pocketing seventy-five-thousand from oil. Coming to Venango county with Frederic Prentice in 1859, he drilled wells by contract, sometimes “a solid Muldoon” and sometimes “a broken Reed.” He returned east—his birthplace—with the proceeds of the world-famed well bearing his name. An idea haunted him that Captain Kidd’s treasure was buried at a certain part of the Atlantic coast. He boarded at a house on the shore and hunted land and sea for the hidden deposit. He would dig in the sand, sail out some distance and peer into the water. One day he went off in his skiff, a storm arose, the boat drifted away and that was the last ever seen of William Reed. He was a liberal supporter of the United-Presbyterian church and his nearest relatives live in the vicinity of Pittsburg.

The Reed well put Cherry Run at the head of the procession. Within sixty days it enriched Reed, Criswell and Frazer nearly seven-hundred-thousand dollars. The new owners drilled three more on the same acre, getting back every cent of their purchase-money and fifty per cent. extra for good measure. In other words, the five-acre collection of rocks and stumps, with eleven producing wells and one duster, harvested two-million dollars! The Mountain well mounted high, the Phillips & Egbert was a fillip and the Wadsworth & Wynkoop rolled out oil in wads worth a wine-coop of gold-eagles. The fever to lease or buy a spot to plant a derrick burned fiercely. The race to gorge the ravine with rigs and drilling appliances would shut out Edgar Saltus in his “Pace that Kills.” Soon three-hundred wells lined the flats and lofty banks guarding the purling streamlet. Clanking tools, wheezy engines and creaking pumps assailed the ears. Smoke from a myriad soft-coal fires attacked the eyes. An endless cavalcade of wagons churned the soil into vicious batter. The activities of the Foster, McElhenny, Farrell, Davison and Tarr farms were condensed into one surging, foaming caldron, quickening the pulse-beats and sending the brain see-sawing.

Across the run the Curtin Oil-Company farmed out forty acres. The Baker well, an October biscuit, flowed one-hundred barrels a day all the winter of 1864-5 and pumped six years. Water, bane of flannel-suits and uncased oil-wells, deluged it and its neighbors. Hugh Cropsey, a New-York lawyer and last owner of the well nearest the Baker, “ran engine,” saved a trifle, pulled up stakes in 1869 and tried his luck at Pleasantville. Returning to Cherry Run, he resuscitated a well on the hill and was suffocated by gas in a tank containing a few inches of fresh crude. His heirs sold me the old well, which pumped nine months without varying ten gallons in any week and repaid twice its cost. Unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, its production was the steadiest in the chronicles of grease. One Saturday evening N. P. Stone, superintendent of the St. Nicholas Oil-Company, bought it from me at the original price. His men took charge of it at noon on Tuesday. At five o’clock the well quit forever, “too dead to skin!” Cleaning out, drilling deeper, casing, torpedoing and weeks of pumping could not persuade it to shed another drop of oil or water. This close shave was a small by-play in a realistic drama teeming with incidents far stranger than “The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown.” B. H. Hulseman, president of the St. Nicholas Oil-Company, was a wealthy leather-merchant in Philadelphia. He spent much of his time on Cherry Run, lost heavily in speculations, entered the oil-exchange and died at Oil City. Kind-hearted, sincere and unpretending, his good remembrance is a legacy to cherish lovingly.

“Nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it; he died As one who had been studied in his death, To throw away the dearest thing he owned, As ’twere a careless trifle.”

Two-hundred yards above the Baker a half-dozen wells crowded upon a half-acre. True to its title, the Vampire sucked the life-blood from its pal and produced bounteously. The Munson, owned by the first sacrifice to nitro-glycerine, sustained the credit of its environment. The Wade was the star-performer of the group. James Wade, an Ohio teamster, earned money hauling oil. Concluding to wade in, he secured a bantam lease and engaged Thomas Donnelly to drill a well. It surpassed the Reed, flowing four-hundred barrels a day at the start. Frank Allen, agent of a gilt-edged New-York company, rode from Oil City to see a well described to him as “livelier than chasing a greased pig at a county-fair.” His exalted conceptions of petroleum befitted the representative of a company capitalized at three-millions, in which August Belmont, Russell Sage and William B. Astor were said to be stockholders. The fuming, gassing stream of oil suited him to a t. “I’ll give you three-hundred-thousand dollars for it,” he said to Wade, whom the offer well-nigh paralyzed. The two men went into the grocery close by, Wade signed a transfer of the well and Allen handed him a New-York draft. The happiest being in the pack, Wade packed his carpet-bag, hitched his horses to the wagon, bade the boys good-bye and drove to Oil City to get the paper cashed. He wore greasy clothes and did not wear the air of a millionaire. “Is Mr. Bennett in?” he asked a clerk at the bank. “Naw; what do you want?” was the reply. “I want a draft cashed.” “Oh, you do, eh? I guess I can cash it!” The clerk’s haughty demeanor fell below zero upon beholding the draft. He invited Wade to be seated. Mr. Bennett, the urbane cashier, returned in a few moments. The bank hadn’t half the currency to meet the demand on the instant. Wade left directions to forward the money to his home in Ohio, where he and his faithful steeds landed two days later. He bought fine farms for his brothers and himself, invested two-hundred-thousand dollars in government-bonds and wisely enjoyed, amid the peaceful scenes of agricultural life, the fruits of his first and last oil-venture. Few have been as sensible, for the petroleum-coast is encrusted with financial wrecks—vast fortunes amassed only to be lost on the perilous sea of speculation. The world has heard of the prizes in the lottery of oil, while the blanks—tenfold more numerous—are glossed over by the glamour of the Sherman, Empire, Noble, Phillips, Reed and other wells, “familiar as household words.”

Thomas Johnson, of Oil City, held one-eighth of the Curtin interest and Patrick Johnson had a bevy of patrician wells at the summit of the tallest hill in the valley. The curtain has been rung down, the lights are out, the players have dispersed and none can hint of “Too Much Johnson.” The farm of sixty acres adjacent to the Curtin and the Criswell nook Hamilton McClintock traded to Daniel Smith in 1858 for a yoke of oxen. Smith sold it in 1860 for five-hundred dollars and sank the cash in a dry-hole on Oil Creek. P. P. Cornen and Henry I. Beers bought the farm in 1863 for twenty-five-hundred dollars, clearing two-millions from the investment. Cornen served as State-Senator in Connecticut and died in 1893. His sons operate in Warren county and down the Allegheny. Mr. Beers, who settled at McClintockville, for thirty years has been prominent in business and politics. He was a California argonaut, spent three years in San Francisco, built the first house in that city after the first great fire and revisited the East to marry “the girl he left behind him” in 1849. The Yankee well, erratic as George Francis Train, was the first glory of the Smith tract. The Reed caused a rush for one-acre leases at four-thousand-dollars bonus and half the oil. Picking up gold-dollars at every step would have been less lucrative. The wells were stayers and Daniel Smith was not “a Daniel come to judgment” in his estimate of the farm he implored J. W. Sherman to buy for two-hundred-and-fifty dollars.

Cornen & Beers first leased a half-dozen plots six rods square at one-half royalty. Two New-Englanders and Cyrus A. Cornen, son of Peter P. Cornen and nephew of Mr. Beers, drilled the first well, the queer Yankee. Some gas and no oil looked promising for a dry-hole, but the owners put in small tubing and pumped a plump day. They decided to draw the tubing, seed-bag higher and try it once more for luck. The tubing had been raised only a foot when the well flowed “like Mount Vesuvius spilling lava.” The flow lasted five minutes, stopped twenty, flowed five more, stopped twenty and kept up this program regularly twenty-one months. Sixty barrels a day was the average yield month after month, until one day the Yankee concluded to retire from active duty. Much of its product sold at ten to thirteen dollars a barrel, enriching all concerned. The Yankee boomed the crush for leases and was altogether a tempting plum. The Auburn, the second well on the Smith farm, was a good second to the Yankee, the Gromiger and Cattaraugus traveled in the one-hundred-and-fifty-barrel class, while the Watkins toed the two-hundred mark, with the Aazin and Fry chasing it closely.

S. S. Watkins, who died at St. Paul in the fall of 1896, was given a lot for a grocery, with the privilege of sinking one well for half the oil. He opened the store and sold the oil-right to Wade Brothers for twenty-five-hundred dollars. The Wades sold one-eighth of the working-interest to the Pittsburg Petroleum-Company, used the proceeds to drill the hole and stuck the tools in the third sand. The lookout for a paying strike was exceedingly poor, but James Wade held on and tubed the well above the tools. It flowed three-hundred barrels a day and Wade sold his seven-eighths to Frank Allen, who offered the Pittsburg Petroleum-Company seventy-five-thousand dollars for its eighth. When the Wade declined to fifty barrels the company pulled the tubing, moved the derrick three feet and drilled another, with no better result. Thereupon the Wade was abandoned, after having netted the Great-Republic Oil-Company a quarter-million dead loss. In 1864 Cornen & Beers organized the Cherry-Valley Oil-Company, sold twelve or fifteen leases and put down all the other wells themselves. The partnership dissolved in 1876, Mr. Beers maintaining the farm and Mr. Cornen dying at his Connecticut home in 1893. The Smith rated among the best properties in the region and it still rewards its fortunate owner with a moderate production, although merely a shadow of its former greatness.

Blacklegs, thieves and murderers ran little risk of punishment in the early days of oil-developments, unless they became unusually obstreperous and were brought to a period with a shot-gun. Scoundrels lay in wait for victims at every turn and stories of their misdeeds could be told by the hundred. The McFate farm was one of the first on Cherry Run to be sold at a fancy price. S. J. McFate, one of the brothers owning the property, two weeks after the sale in 1862, walked down to Oil City to draw several-thousand dollars from the bank. He displayed the money freely and left for home late at night. The road was dark and lonely and next morning, in a clump of bushes a mile above Oil City, his lifeless body was discovered. A ghastly wound in the head and the absence of the money explained the tragedy and the motive. No clue to the murderer was ever found, although squads of detectives “worked on the case” and queer fictions regarding the mysterious assassin were printed in many newspapers.

Queerly enough, the farms above the Smith were failures. Hundreds of wells clear up to Plumer never paid the expense of recording the leases. The territory was a roast for scores of stock-companies. Below Plumer a mile Bruns & Ludovici, of New York, built the Humboldt Refinery in 1862. Money was lavished on palatial quarters for the managers, enclosed grounds, cut-stone walls, a pipe-line to Tarr Farm and the largest refining capacity in America. Inconvenient location and improved methods of competitors forced the Humboldt to retire. Part of the machinery was removed, the structures crumbled and some of the dressed stone forms the foundations of the National Transit Building at Oil City. Plumer, which had a grist-mill, store, blacksmith-shop and tavern in 1840 and four-thousand population in 1866, is quiet as its briar-grown graveyard. The Brevoort Oil-Company, Murray & Fawcett and John P. Zane raked in shekels on Moody Run, which emptied into Cherry Run a half-mile south-west of the Reed well. Zane, whole-souled, resolute and manly, operated in the northern district and died at Bradford in 1894. A “forty-niner,” he supported John W. Geary for Mayor of San Francisco, built street-railways and worked gold-mines in California. He wrote on finance and petroleum, hated selfishness and stood firmly on the platform laid down in the beatitudes by the Man of Galilee.

“The good die first, And they whose hearts are dry as summer-dust Burn to the socket.”

In the winter of 1859-60 Robert Phipps, of Clinton township, sold a horse to D. Knapp, who owned a farm, “between Plumer and the mouth of Oil Creek,” that extended across Cherry Run some distance above the Smith patch. Phipps followed up the horse-sale by paying Knapp twenty-five dollars and one-eighth the oil for one acre of his land. He took A. Lowry for a partner, and sent his son, Porter Phipps, and John Haas, a German blacksmith, to “kick down” a well. Haas constructed a set of light tools—the augur stem was one-inch iron—lumber for a shanty and the rig was drawn from Hood’s Mill on Pithole Creek and a forty-foot hemlock served as a spring-pole. Drilling began in April of 1860 at the first well on the bank of Cherry Run. Young Phipps would carry the bit or the reamer daily on his shoulder to be dressed at a blacksmith-shop on Hamilton McClintock’s farm. The work had continued three months, when one day the tools struck a crevice at a hundred feet, a gurgling sound greeted the ears of the expectant drillers and they awaited the flow. Sulphur-water, not oil, was the outcome and the well was abandoned. Robert Phipps “exchanged mortality for life” at a ripe old age. His parents settled in Venango county a century ago and the Phipps family has always been noted for intelligence and progressiveness. Porter Phipps, known everywhere as ’Squire, was reared on the farm, had his initial tussle with oil-wells in 1860 and operated at Bullion and in Butler county. He is Vice-president of the Monroe Oil-Company and makes Pittsburg his headquarters.

Two miles east of Miller-Farm station, on the eighty-acre tract of Oliver Stowell, the Cherry-Run Petroleum-Company finished a well in February of 1866. It was eight-hundred feet deep, drilled through the sixth sand and pumped one-hundred barrels a day. The company operated systematically, using heavy tools, tall derricks and large casing. It was managed by Dr. G. Shamburg, a man of character and ability, who studied the strata carefully and gathered much valuable data. The second well equalled No. 1 in productiveness and longevity, both lasting for years. J. B. Fink’s, a July posy of two-hundred barrels, was the third. The grand rush began in December, 1867, the Fee and Jack-Brown wells, on the Atkinson farm, flowing four-hundred barrels apiece. A lively town, eligibly located in a depression of the table-lands, was properly named Shamburg, as a compliment to the genial doctor. The Tallman, Goss, Atkinson and Stowell farms whooped up the production to three-thousand barrels. Frank W. and W. C. Andrews, Lyman and Milton Stewart, John W. Irvin and F. L. Backus had bought John R. Tallman’s one-hundred acres in 1865. Their first well began producing in September, 1867, and in 1868 they sold two-hundred-thousand barrels of oil for nearly eight-hundred-thousand dollars! A. H. Bronson—bright, alert, keen in business and popular in society—paid twenty-five-thousand for the Charles Clark farm, a mile north-east. His first well—three-hundred barrels—paid for the property and itself in sixty days. Operations in the Shamburg pool were almost invariably profitable and handsome fortunes were realized. A peculiarity was the presence of green and black oils, a line on the eastern part of the Cherry-Run Company’s land defining them sharply. Their gravity and general properties were identical and the black color was attributed to oxide of iron in the rock. Dr. Shamburg died at Titusville and the town he founded is taking a perpetual vacation.

Carl Wageforth, a genius well known in early days as one of the owners of the Story farm, started a “town” in the woods two miles above Shamburg. The “town” collapsed, Wageforth clung to his store a season and next turned up in Texas as the founder of a German colony. He secured a claim in the Lone-Star State about thrice the size of Rhode Island, settled it with thrifty immigrants from the “Faderland” and bagged a bushel of ducats. He made and lost fortunes in oil and could no more be kept from breaking out occasionally than measles or small-pox.

East of Petroleum Centre three miles, on the bank of a pellucid stream, John E. McLaughlin drilled a well in 1868 that flowed fourteen-hundred barrels. The sand was coarse, the oil dark and the magnitude of the strike a surprise equal to the answer of the dying sinner who, asked by the minister if he wasn’t afraid to meet an angry God, unexpectedly replied: “Not a bit; it’s the other chap I’m afraid of!” Excepting the half-dozen mastodons on Oil Creek, the McLaughlin was the biggest well in the business up to that date. Wide-awake operators struck a bee-line for leases. A town was floated in two weeks, a Pithole grocer erecting the first building and labeling the place “Cash-Up” as a gentle hint to patrons not to let their accounts get musty with age. The name fitted the town, which a twelvemonth sufficed to sponge off the slate. Small wells and dry-holes ruled the roost, even those nudging “the big ’un” missing the pay-streak. The McLaughlin—a decided freak—declined gradually and pumped seven years, having the reservoir all to itself. Located ten rods away in any direction, it would have been a duster and Cash-Up would not have existed! A hundred surrounding it did not cash-up the outlay for drilling.

Attracted by the quality of the soil and the beauty of the location—six-hundred feet above the level of Oil Creek and abundantly watered—in 1820 Abraham Lovell forsook his New York farm to settle in Allegheny township, six miles east by south of Titusville. Aaron Benedict and Austin Merrick came in 1821. John Brown, the first merchant, opened a store in 1833. A pottery, tannery, ashery, store and shops formed the nucleus of a village, organized in 1850 as the borough of Pleasantville. Three wells on the outskirts of town, bored in 1865-6, produced a trifling amount of oil. Late in the fall of 1867 Abram James, an ardent spiritualist, was driving from Pithole to Titusville with three friends. A mile south of Pleasantville his “spirit-guide” assumed control of Mr. James and humped him over the fence into a field on the William Porter farm. Powerless to resist, the subject was hurried to the northern end of the field, contorted violently, jerked through a species of “couchee-couchee dance” and pitched to the ground! He marked the spot with his finger, thrust a penny into the dirt and fell back pale and rigid. Restored to consciousness, he told his astonished companions it had been revealed to him that streams of oil lay beneath and extended several miles in a certain direction. Putting no faith in “spirits” not amenable to flasks, they listened incredulously and resumed their journey. James negotiated a lease, borrowed money—the “spirit-guide” neglected to furnish cash—and planted a derrick where he had planted the penny. On February twelfth, 1868, at eight-hundred-and-fifty feet, the Harmonial Well No. 1 pumped one-hundred-and-thirty barrels!

The usual hurly-burly followed. People who voted the James adventure a fish-story writhed and twisted to drill near the spirited Harmonial. New strikes increased the hubbub and established the sure quality of the territory. Scores of wells were sunk on the Porter, Brown, Tyrell, Beebe, Dunham and other farms for miles. Prices of supplies advanced and machine-shops in the oil-regions ran night and day to meet orders. Land sold at five-hundred to five-thousand dollars an acre, often changing hands three or four times a day. Interests in wells going down found willing purchasers. Strangers crowded Pleasantville, which trebled its population and buildings during the year. It was a second edition of Pithole, mildly subdued and divested of frothy sensationalism. If gigantic gushers did not dazzle, dry-holes did not discourage. If nobody cleared a million dollars at a clip, nobody cleared out to avoid creditors. Nobody had to loaf and trust to Providence for daily bread. Providence wasn’t running a bakery for the benefit of idlers and work was plentiful at Pleasantville. The production reached three-thousand barrels in the summer of 1868, dropping to fifteen-hundred in 1870. Three banks prospered and imposing brick-blocks succeeded unsubstantial frames. Fresh pastures invited the floating mass to Clarion, Armstrong and Butler. Small wells were abandoned, machinery was shipped southward and the pretty village moved backward gracefully. Pleasantville had “marched up the hill and then marched down again.”

Abram James, a man of fine intellect, nervous temperament and lofty principle, lived at Pleasantville a year. He located a dozen paying wells in other sections, under the influence of his “spirit-guide.” The Harmonial was his greatest hit, bringing him wealth and distinction. His worst break—a dry-hole on the Clarion river eighteen-hundred feet deep—cost him six-thousand dollars in 1874. None questioned his absolute sincerity, although many rejected his theories of the supernatural. Whether he is still in the flesh or has become a spirit has not been manifested to his old friends in Oildom.

Samuel Stewart, an old resident and prosperous land-owner, is a leading citizen of Cherrytree township. He operated successfully in his own neighborhood and around Pleasantville. His acquaintance with men and affairs is not surpassed in Venango county. He is half-brother of Mrs. William R. Crawford, Franklin. Lyman and Milton Stewart, of Titusville, have not stayed in the rear. They drilled hundreds of wells in Pennsylvania and invested liberally in California territory. Good men and true are the Stewarts from beginning to end.

Red-Hot, in the palmy era of the Shamburg excitement a place of much sultriness, is cold enough to chill any stray visitor who knew the mushroom at its warmest stage. Windsor Brothers, of Oil City—they built the Windsor Block—drilled a well in 1869 that flowed three-hundred-and-fifty barrels. Others followed rapidly, people flocked to the newest centre of attraction and a typical oil-town strutted to the front. The territory lacked the staying quality, the Butler region was about to dawn and 1871 saw Red-Hot reduced to three houses, a half-dozen light wells and a muddy road. Lightning-rod pedlars, book-agents and medical fakirs no longer disturb its calm serenity. Not a scrap of the tropical town has been visible for two decades.

Tip-Top filled a short engagement. Operations around Shamburg and Pleasantville directed attention to the Captain Lyle and neighboring farms, midway between these points. “Ned” Pitcher’s well, drilled in 1866 on the Snedaker farm, east of Lyle, had started at eighty barrels and pumped twenty for two years. Pithole was booming and nobody thought of Ned’s pitcher until 1868. Many of the wells produced fairly, but the territory soon depreciated and the elevated town—aptly named by a poet with an eye to the eternal fitness of things—lost its hold and glided down to nothingness. The hundred-eyed Argus could not find a sliver that would prick a thumb or tip a top.

Picking cherries was sometimes a mixed operation in the land of grease.

OILY OOZINGS.

Kerosene is often the last scene.

The ladies—God bless them!—are nothing if not consistent—at times. It used to be a fad with Bradford wives to keep a stuffed owl in the parlor for ornament and a stuffed club in the hall for the night-owl’s benefit.

The Oil-Creek girls are the dandy girls, For their kiss is most intense; They’ve got a grip like a rotary-pump That will lift you over the fence.

The steel of a rimmer was lost in a drilling well on Cherry Run. After fishing for it for a longtime the well-owner, becoming discouraged, offered a man one-thousand dollars to take it out. He broomed the end of a tough block, ran it down the well attached to the tools and in ten minutes had the steel out.

The woman who eagerly seized the oil-can And to pour kerosene in the cook-stove began, So that people for miles to quench the fire ran, While she soar’d aloft like a flash in the pan, Didn’t know it was loaded.

At a drilling well near Rouseville the tools were lowered on Monday morning and, after running a full screw, were drawn minus the bit, with the stem-box greatly enlarged. After fishing several days for it the drillers were greatly surprised to find the lost bit standing in the slack-tub. The tools had been lowered in the darkness with no bit on.

An Oil-City tramp on the pavement drear Saw something that seem’d to shine; He pick’d it up and gave a big cheer— ’Twas a nickel bright, the price of a beer— And shouted “The world is mine!”

William McClain, grandfather of Senator S. J. M. McCarrell, Harrisburg, once owned and occupied the Tarr farm, on Oil Creek. Fifty or more years ago he sold the tract to James Tarr for a rifle and an old gray horse named Diamond. McClain removed to Washington county and settled on a farm which his son inherited and sold before oil was found in the neighborhood. Like the Tarr farm on Oil Creek, the McClain farm in Washington county proved a petroleum-bonanza to the purchasers.

Said a Shamburg young maiden: “Alas, Will, You come every night, And talk such a sight, And burn so much light, My papa declares you’re a Gas Bill!”

All kinds of engines, from one to fifty horse-power, were used on Oil Creek in the sixties. The old “Fabers,” with direct attachment, will recall many a broad grin. The boys called them “Long Johns.” The Wallace-engine had hemp-packing on the piston, and the inside of the cylinder, rough as a rasp, soon used it up and leaked steam like a sieve. The Washington-engine was the first to come into general use. C. M. Farrar, of Farrar & Trefts, whose boilers and engines have stood every test demanded by improvements in drilling, made the drawing for the first locomotive-pattern boiler on a drilling well—a wonderful stride in advance of the old-time boiler. Trefts made the castings for the engine that pumped the Drake well and was the first man, in company with J. Willard, to use ropes on Oil Creek in drilling. This was on the Foster farm, near the world-famed Empire well, in 1860. Willard made the second set of jars on the creek. Senator W. S. McMullan was a stalwart blacksmith, who made drilling-tools noted for their enduring quality.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IX. A GOURD IN THE NIGHT

THE METEORIC CITY THAT DAZZLED MANKIND—FROM NOTHING TO SIXTEEN-THOUSAND POPULATION IN THREE MONTHS—FIRST WELLS AND FABULOUS PRICES—NOTED ORGANIZATIONS AT PITHOLE—A FORETASTE OF HADES—EXCITEMENT AND COLLAPSE—SPECULATION RUN WILD—DUPLICITY AND DISAPPOINTMENT—THE WILD SCRAMBLE FOR THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR.

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“The gourd came up in a night and perished in a night.”—Jonah, iv:10.

“The earth hath bubbles, as the water has.”—Shakespeare.

“All things rise to fall and flourish to decay.”—Sallust.

“A lively place in days of yore, but something ails it now.”—Wordsworth.

“Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power?”—Longfellow.

“Wealth flowed from wood and stream and soil, The rock poured forth its amber oil, And, lo! a magic city rose.”—Marjorie Meade.

“It went up like a rocket and came down like a stick.”—Thomas Paine.

“Yet golde all is not that doth golden seeme.”—Spenser.

“Can it be that this is all remains of life.”—Bryon.

“What it is to eat forbidden fruit and find it a turnip!”—Flora Annie Steel.

“Old Rhinestein’s walls are crumbled now.”—Birch Arnold.

“For this will never hold water again.”—J. Fenimore Cooper.

“Of the vanished drama no image was there left.”—William Morris.

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Pithole, “the magic city,” had little in its antecedents to betoken the meteoric rise and fall of the most remarkable oil-town that ever “went up like a rocket and came down like a stick.” The unpoetic name of Pithole Creek was applied to the stream which flows through Allegheny township and bounds Cornplanter for several miles on the east. It empties into the Allegheny River eight miles above Oil City and was first mentioned by Rev. Alfred Brunson, an itinerant Methodist minister, in his “Western Pioneer” in 1819. Upheavals of rock left a series of deep pits or chasms on the hills near the mouth of the stream. From the largest of these holes a current of warm air repels leaves or pieces of paper. Snow melts around the cavity, which is of unknown depth, and the air is a mephitic vapor or gas. A story is told of three hunters who, finding the snow melted on a midwinter day, determined to investigate. One of them swore it was an entrance to the infernal regions and that he intended to warm himself. He sat on the edge of the hole, dangled his feet over the side, thanked the devil for the opportune heat, inhaled the gas and tumbled back insensible. His companions dragged him away and the investigation ended summarily. Seven miles up the creek, in the northeast corner of Cornplanter, Rev. Walter Holmden was a pioneer-settler. Choosing a tract of two-hundred acres, he built a log-house on the west bank of the creek, cleared a few acres, struggled with poverty and died in 1840. Mr. Holmden was a fervent Baptist preacher. Thomas Holmden occupied the farm after the good old man’s decease, with the Copelands and Blackmers and James Rooker as neighbors. Developments had covered the farms from the Drake well to Oil City. Operators ventured up the ravines, ascended the hills and began to take chances miles from either side of Oil Creek. Successful wells on the Allegheny River broadened opinions regarding the possibilities of petroleum. Nervy men invaded the eastern portion of Cornplanter, picking up lands along Pithole Creek and its tributaries. I. N. Frazer, fresh from his triumph on Cherry Run as joint-owner of the Reed well, desired fresh laurels. He organized the United-States Oil-Company, leased part of the Holmden farm for twenty years and started a well in the fall of 1864. The primitive derrick was reared in the woods below the Holmden home. At six-hundred feet the “sixth sand”—generally called that at Pithole—was punctured. Ten feet farther the tools proceeded, the drillers watching intently for signs of oil. On January seventh, 1865, the torrent broke loose, the well flowing six-hundred-and-fifty barrels a day and ceasing finally on November tenth. A picture of the well, showing Frazer with his back to the tree beside his horse and a group of visitors standing around, was secured in May. Kilgore & Keenan’s Twin wells, good for eight-hundred barrels, were finished on January seventeenth and nineteenth. The unfathomable mud and disastrous floods of that memorable season retarded the hegira from other sections, only to intensify the excitement when it found vent. Duncan & Prather bought Holmden’s land for twenty-five-thousand dollars and divided the flats and slopes into half-acre leases. The first of May witnessed a small clearing in the forest, with three oil-wells, one drilling-well and three houses as its sole evidences of human handiwork.

Ninety days later the world heard with unfeigned surprise of a “city” of sixteen-thousand inhabitants, possessing most of the conveniences and luxuries of the largest and oldest communities! Capitalists eager to invest their greenbacks thronged to the scene. Labor and produce commanded extravagant figures, every farm for miles was leased or bought at fabulous rates, money circulated like the measles and for weeks the furore surpassed the frantic ebullitions of Wall Street on Black Friday! New strikes perpetually inflated the mania. Speculators wandered far and wide in quest of the subterranean wealth that promised to outrival the golden measures of California or the silver-lodes of Nevada. The value of oil-lands was reckoned by millions. Small interests in single wells brought hundreds-of-thousands of dollars. New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago measured purses in the insane strife for territory. Hosts of adventurers sought the new Oil-Dorado and the stocks of countless “petroleum-companies” were scattered broadcast over Europe and America. An ambitious operator sold seventeen-sixteenths in one well and shares in leases were purchased ravenously. A half-acre lease on the Holmden farm realized bonuses of twenty-four-thousand dollars before a well was drilled on the property and the swarm of dealers resembled the plague of locusts in Egypt in number and persistence!

Everything favored the growth of Pithole. The close of the war had left the country flooded with paper currency and multitudes of men thrown upon their own resources. Hundreds of these flocked to the inviting “city,” which presented manifold inducements to venturesome spirits, keen shysters, unscrupulous stock-jobbers, needy laborers and dishonest tricksters. The post-office speedily ranked third in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Pittsburg alone excelling it. Seven chain-lightning clerks assisted Postmaster S. S. Hill to handle the mail. Lines of men extending a block would await their turns for letters at the general-delivery. It was a roystering time! Hotels, theaters, saloons, drinking-dens, gambling-hells and questionable resorts were counted by the score. A fire-department was organized, a daily paper established and a mayor elected. Railways to Reno and Oleopolis were nearly completed before “the beginning of the end” came with terrible swiftness. In November and December the wells declined materially. The laying of pipe-lines to Miller Farm and Oleopolis, through which the oil was forced to points of shipment by steam-pumps, in one week drove fifteen-hundred teams to seek work elsewhere. Destructive fires accelerated the final catastrophe. The graphic pen of Dickens would fail to give an adequate idea of this phenomenal creation, whose career was a magnified type of dozens of towns that suddenly arose and as suddenly collapsed in the oil-regions of Pennsylvania.

Pithole had many wells that yielded freely for some time. The Homestead, on the Hyner farm, finished in June of 1865, proved a gusher. On August first the Deshler started at one-hundred barrels; on August second the Grant, at four-hundred-and-fifty barrels; on August twenty-eighth the Pool, at eight-hundred barrels; on September fifth the Ogden, at one-hundred barrels, and on September fifteenth Pool & Perry’s No. 47, at four-hundred barrels. The Frazer improved during the spring to eight-hundred barrels, while the Grant reached seven-hundred in September. On November twenty-second the Eureka joined the chorus at five-hundred barrels. The daily production of the Holmden farm exceeded five-thousand barrels for a limited period, with a proportionate yield of seven-dollar crude from adjacent tracts. John A. Mather, the veteran Titusville photographer, discarded his camera to become a full-fledged oilman. He bored a well that tinctured the suburban slope of Balltown a glowing madder. The frenzy spread. J. W. Bonta and James A. Bates paid James Rooker two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand dollars for his hundred-acre farm, south of the Holmden. Rooker, a hard-working tiller of the soil, lived in a kind of rookery and earned a poor subsistence by constant toil. He stuck to the money derived from the sale of his farm, and he is still living at a goodly age. The Grand Dutch S well would have given Lillian Russell new wrinkles in her delineation of the “Grand Duchess of Gerolstein.” A neighbor refused eight-hundred-thousand dollars for his barren acres. “I don’t keer ter hev my buckwheat tramped over,” he explained, “but you kin hev this farm next winter fur a million!” He kept the farm, reaped his crop and was not disturbed until death compelled him to lodge in a plot six by two.

Bonta & Bates did not linger for “two blades of grass to grow where one grew before.” Within two months they disposed of ninety leases for four-hundred-thousand dollars and half the oil! They spent eighty-thousand on the Bonta House, a sumptuous hostlery. Duncan & Prather leased building-lots at a yearly rental of one-hundred to one-thousand dollars. First, Second and Holmden streets bristled with activity. The Danforth House stood on a lot subleased for fourteen-thousand dollars bonus. Sixty hotels could not accommodate the influx of guests. Beds, sofas and chairs were luxuries for the few. “First come, first served,” was the rule. The many had to seek the shaving-pile, the hay-cock or the tender side of a plank. Some mingled promiscuously in “field-beds”—rows of “shake-downs” on attic floors. Besides the Bonta and Danforth, the United States, Chase, Tremont, Buckley, Lincoln, Sherman, St. James, American, Northeast, Seneca, Metropolitan, Pomeroy and fifty hotels of minor note flourished. If palaces of sin, gorgeous bar-rooms, business-houses and places of amusement abounded, churches and schools marked the moral sentiment. Fire wiped out the Tremont and adjoining houses in February of 1866. Eighty buildings went up in smoke on May first and June thirteenth. Thirty wells and twenty-thousand barrels of oil went the same road in August. The best buildings were torn down, to bloom at Pleasantville or Oil City. The disappearance of Pithole astonished the world no less than its marvelous growth. The Danforth House sold for sixteen dollars, to make firewood! The railroads were abandoned and in 1876 only six voters remained. A ruined tenement, a deserted church and traces of streets alone survive. Troy or Nineveh is not more desolate.

In July of 1865 Duncan & Prather granted Henry E. Picket, George J. Sherman and Brian Philpot, of Titusville, a thirty-day option on the Holmden farm for one-million-three-hundred-thousand dollars. Mr. Sherman arranged to sell the property in New York at sixteen-hundred-thousand! The wells already down produced largely, seventy more were drilling and the annual ground-rents footed up sixty-thousand dollars. The Ketcham forgeries tangled the funds of the New-Yorkers and negotiations were opened with H. H. Honore, of Chicago. After dark on the last day of the option Honore tendered the first payment—four-hundred-thousand dollars. It was declined, on the ground that the business day expired at sundown, and litigation ensued. A compromise resulted in the transfer of the property to Honore. The deal involved the largest sum ever paid in the oil regions for a single tract of land. The bubble burst so quickly that the Chicago purchaser, like Benjamin Franklin, “paid too much for the whistle.” Col. A. P. Duncan commanded the Fourth Cavalry Company, the first mustered in Venango county, every member of which carried to the war a small Bible presented by Mrs. A. G. Egbert, of Franklin. Tall, erect, of military bearing and undoubted integrity, he lived at Oil City and died years ago. Duncan & Prather owned one of the two banks that handled car-loads of money in the dizziest town that ever blasted radiant hopes and shriveled portly pocket-books.

The Pithole bubble was blown at an opportune moment to catch suckers. Hundreds of oil-companies had come into existence in 1864, hungry for territory and grasping at anything within rifle-shot of an actual or prospective “spouter.” The speculative tide flowed and ebbed as never before in any age or nation. Volumes could be written of amazing transitions of fortune. Scores landed at Pithole penniless and departed in a few months “well heeled.” Others came with “hatfuls of money” and went away empty-handed. Thousands of stockholders were bitten as badly as the sailor, whom the shark nipped off by the waist-band. It was rather refreshing in its way for “country Reubens” to do up Wall-street sharpers at their own game. Shrewd Bostonians, New-Yorkers and Philadelphians, magnates in business and finance, were snared as readily as hayseeds who buy green-goods and gold-bricks. There are no flies on the smooth, glib Oily Gammon whose mouth yielded more lubricating oil than the biggest well on French Creek. His favorite prey was a pilgrim with a bursting wallet or the agent of an eastern petroleum-company. A well pouring forth three, six, eight, ten, twelve or fifteen-hundred barrels of five-dollar crude every twenty-four hours was a spectacle to fire the blood and turn the brain of the most sluggish beholder. “Such a well,” he might calculate, “would make me a millionaire in one year and a Crœsus in ten.” The wariest trout would nibble at bait so tempting. The schemer with property to sell had “the very thing he wanted” and would “let him in on the ground-floor.” He met men who, driving mules or jigging tools six months ago, were “oil-princes” now. Here lay a tract, “the softest snap on top of the earth,” only a mile from the Great Geyser, with a well “just in the sand and a splendid show.” He could have it at a bargain-counter sacrifice—one-hundred-thousand dollars and half the oil. The engine had given out and the owner was about to order a new one when called home by the sudden death of his mother-in-law. Settling the old lady’s estate required his entire attention, therefore he would consent to sell his oil-interests “dirt-cheap” to a responsible buyer who would push developments. The price ought to be two or three times the sum asked, but the royalty from the big wells sure to be struck would ultimately even up matters. The tale was plausible and the visitor would “look at the property.” He saw real sand on the derrick-floor and everything besmeared with grease. The presence of oil was unmistakable. Drilling ten feet into the rich rock would certainly tap the jugular and—glorious thought!—perhaps outdo the Great Geyser itself. He closed the deal, telegraphed for an engine—he was dying to see that stream of oil climbing skywards—and chuckled gleefully. The keen edge of his delight might have been dulled had he known that the well was through, not merely to, the sand and absolutely guiltless of the taint of oil! He did not suspect that barrels of crude and buckets of sand from other wells had been dumped into the hole at night, that the engine had been disabled purposely and that another innocent was soon to cut his wisdom-teeth! He found out when the well “came in dry” that Justice Dogberry was not a greater ass and that the fool-killer’s snickersnee was yearning for him. Possibly he might by persistent drilling find paying wells and get back part of his money, but nine times out of ten the investment was a total loss and the disgusted victim quit the scene with a new interpretation of the scriptural declaration: “I was a stranger and ye took me in.” Butler anticipated Pithole when he wrote in Hudibras:

“Make fools believe in their foreseeing Of things before they are in being; To swallow gudgeons ere they’re catched, And count their chickens ere they’re hatched.”

The methods of “turning an honest penny” varied to fit the case. To “doctor” a well by dosing it with a load of oil was tame and commonplace. In three instances wells sold at fancy prices were connected by underground pipes with tanks of oil at a distance. When the parties arrived to “time the well” the secret pipe was opened. The oil ran into the tubing and pumped as though coming direct from the sand! The deception was as perfect as the oleomargarine the Pennsylvania State Board of Agriculture pronounced “dairy butter of superior quality!” “Seeing is believing” and there was the oil. They had seen it pumping a steady stream into the tank, timed it, gauged it, smelled it. The demonstration was complete and the cash would be forked over, a twenty-barrel well bringing a hundred-barrel price! A smart widow near Pithole sold her farm at treble its value because of “surface indications” she created by emptying a barrel of oil into a spring. The farm proved good territory, much to the chagrin of the widow, who roundly abused the purchasers for “cheatin’ a poor lone woman!” Selling stock in companies that held lands, or interests in wells to be drilled “near big gushers”—they might be eight or ten miles off—was not infrequent. On the other hand, a very slight risk often brought an immense return. Parties would pay five-hundred dollars for the refusal of a tract of land and arrange with other parties to sink a well for a small lease on the property. If the well succeeded, one acre would pay the cost of the entire farm; if it failed, the holders of the option forfeited the trifle that secured it and threw up the contract. It was risking five-hundred dollars on the chance, not always very remote, of gaining a half-million.

Sometimes the craze to invest bordered upon the ludicrous. Sixteenths and fractions of sixteenths in producing, non-producing, drilling, undrilled and never-to-be-drilled wells “went like hot cakes” at two to twenty-thousand dollars. A newcomer, in his haste to “tie onto something,” shelled out one-thousand dollars for a share in a gusher that netted him two quarts of oil a day! Another cheerfully paid fifteen-thousand for the sixteenth of a flowing well which discounted the Irishman’s flea—“you put your finger on the varmint and he wasn’t there”—by balking that night and declining ever to start again! At a fire in 1866 water from a spring, dashed on the blaze, added fuel to the flames. An examination showed that oil was filling the spring and water-wells in the neighborhood. From the well in Mrs. Reichart’s yard the wooden pump brought fifty barrels of pure oil. L. L. Hill’s well and holes dug eight or ten feet had the same complaint. Excitement blew off at the top gauge. The Record devoted columns to the new departure. Was the oil so impatient to enrich Pitholians that, refusing to wait for the drill to provide an outlet, it burst through the rocks in its eagerness to boom the district? Patches of ground the size of a quilt sold for two, three or four-hundred dollars and rows of pits resembling open graves decorated the slope. In a week a digger discovered that a break in the pipe-line supplied the oil. The leak was repaired, the pits dried up, the water-wells resumed their normal condition and the fiasco ended ignominiously. It was a modern version of the mountain that set the country by the ears to bring forth a mouse.

Joseph Wood, proprietor of the St. James Hotel at Paterson, N.J., died on May thirteenth, 1896. He was a wit and story-teller of the best kind, a gallant fighter for the Union and for a year lived at Pithole. A fortune made by operating and speculation he lost by fire in a year. He conducted hotels at Hot Springs, Washington, Chicago and Milwaukee and was one of the famous Bonifaces of the United States. On his business-cards he printed these “religious beliefs:”

“Do not keep the alabaster-boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier by them. The kind things you mean to say when they are gone say before they go. The flowers you mean to send to their coffins send to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them. If my friends have alabaster-boxes laid away, full of fragrant perfumes of sympathy and affection, which they intend to break over my dead body, I would rather they would bring them out in my weary and troubled hours and open them, that I may be refreshed and cheered by them while I need them. I would rather have a plain coffin without a flower, a funeral without a eulogy, than a life without the sweetness of love and sympathy. Let us learn to anoint our friends beforehand for their burial. Post-mortem kindness does not cheer the burdened spirit. Flowers on the coffin cast no fragrance backward over the weary way.”

Let down the bars and enter the field that was once the seething, boiling caldron called Pithole. A poplar-tree thirty feet high grows in the cellar of the National Hotel. Stones and underbrush cover the site of the Metropolitan Theater and Murphy’s Varieties. This bit of sunken ground, clogged with weeds and brambles, marks the Chase House. Here was Main street, where millions of dollars changed hands daily. For years the Presbyterian church stood forsaken, the bell in the tower silent, the pews untouched and the pulpit-Bible lying on the preacher’s desk. John McPherson’s store and Dr. Christie’s house were about the last buildings in the place. Not a human-being now lives on the spot. All the old-timers moved away. All? No, a score or two quietly sleep among the bushes and briars that run riot over the little graveyard in which they were laid when the dead city was in the throes of a tremendous excitement.

The rate at which towns rose was surely most terrific Nothing to rival it from Maine to the Pacific; The rate at which they fell has never had an equal— Woods, city, ruin’d waste—the story and the sequel.

Pithole was the Mecca of a legion of operators whose history is part and parcel of the oil-development. Phillips Brothers, giants on Oil Creek, bought farms and drilled extensively. Frederic Prentice and W. W. Clark, who figured in two-thirds of the largest transactions from Petroleum Centre to Franklin, held a full hand. Frank W. Andrews, John Satterfield, J. R. Johnson, J. B. Fink, A. J. Keenan—the first burgess—D. H. Burtis, Heman Janes, “Pap” Sheakley, L. H. Smith and hundreds of similar caliber were on deck. John Galloway, known in every oil-district of Pennsylvania and West Virginia as a tireless hustler, did not let Pithole slip past unnoticed. He has been an operator in all the fields since his first appearance on Oil Creek in the fall of 1861. Sharing in the prosperity and adversity of the oil-regions, he has never been hoodooed or bankrupted. His word is his bond and his promise to pay has always meant one-hundred cents on the dollar. More largely interested in producing than ever, he attends to business at Pittsburg and lives at Jamestown, happy in his deserved success, in the love of his family and the esteem of countless friends. Mr. Galloway’s pedestrian feats would have crowned him with olive-wreaths at the Olympic games. Deerfoot could hardly have kept up with him on a twenty-mile tramp to see an important well or hit a farmer for a lease before breakfast. He’s a good one!

The Swordsman’s Club attained the highest reputation as a social organization. One night in 1866, when Pithole was at the zenith of its fame, John Satterfield, Seth Crittenden, Alfred W. Smiley, John McDonald, George Burchill, George Gilmore, Pard B. Smith, L. H. Smith, W. H. Longwell and other congenial gentlemen met for an evening’s enjoyment. The conversation turned upon clubs. Smiley jumped to his feet and moved that “we organize a club.” All assented heartily and the Swordman’s Club was organized there and then, with Pard B. Smith as president and George Burchill as secretary. Elegant rooms were fitted up, the famous motto of “R. C. T.” was adopted and the club gave a series of most elaborate “promenade-concerts and balls” in 1866-7. Invitations to these brilliant affairs were courted by the best people of Oildom. The club dissolved in 1868. Its membership included four congressmen, two ex-governors wore its badge and scores of men conspicuous in the state and nation had the honor of belonging to the Swordman’s. At regular meetings “the feast of reason and the flow of soul” blended merrily with the flowing bowl. Sallies of bright wit, spontaneous and never hanging fire, were promptly on schedule time. Good fellowship prevailed and C. C. Leonard immortalized the club in his side-splitting “History of Pithole.” Verily the years slip by. Long ago the ephemeral town went back to its original pasture, long ago the facetious historian went back to dust, long ago many a good clubman’s sword turned into rust. Pard B. Smith runs a livery in Cleveland, Longwell is in Oil City, Smiley—he represented Clarion county twice in the Legislature—manages the pipe-line at Foxburg, L. H. Smith is in New York and others are scattered or dead. On November twenty-first, 1890, the “Pioneers of Pithole”—among them a number of Swordsmen—had a reunion and banquet at the Hotel Brunswick, Titusville. These stanzas, composed and sung by President Smith and “Alf” Smiley, were vociferously cheered:

“’Twas side by side, as Swordsmen true, In Pithole long ago, We met the boys on common ground And gave them all a show. In social as in business ways Our honor was our law, And when a brother lost his grip He on the boys could draw.

CHORUS: “We’re the boys, the same old boys, Who were there in sixty-five; If any Swordsman comes our way He’ll find us still alive.

“What if grim age creeps on apace, Our souls will ne’er grow old; We will, as in the Pithole days, Stand true as Swordsmen bold. In those old days we had our fun, But stood for honor true; Here, warmly clasping hand-to-hand, Our friendship we renew.”

“Spirits” inspired four good wells at Pithole. One dry hole, a mile south-east of town, seriously depressed stock in their skill as “oil-smellers.” An enthusiastic disciple of the Fox sisters, assured of “a big well,” drilled two-hundred feet below the sixth sand in search of oil-bearing rock. He drilled himself into debt and Sheriff C. S. Mark—six feet high and correspondingly broad—whom nobody could mistake for an ethereal being, sold the outfit at junk-prices.

In the swish and swirl of Pithole teamsters—a man with two stout horses could earn twenty dollars a day clear—drillers and pumpers played no mean part. They received high wages and spent money freely. Variety-shows, music-halls—with “pretty waiter-girls”—dance-houses, saloons, gambling-hells and dens of vice afforded unlimited opportunities to squander cash and decency and self-respect. Many a clever youth, flushed with the idea of “sowing his wild oats,” sacrificed health and character on the altars of Bacchus and Venus. Many a comely maiden, yielding to the wiles of the betrayer, rounded up in the brothel and the potter’s field. Many a pious mother, weeping for the wayward prodigal who was draining her life-blood, had reason to inquire: “Oh, where is my boy to-night?” Many a husband, forgetting the trusting wife and children at home, wandered from the straight path and tasted the forbidden fruit. Many a promising life was blighted, many a hopeful career blasted, many a reputation smirched and many a fond heart broken by the pitfalls and temptations of Pithole. Dollars were not the only stakes in the exciting game of life—good names, family ties, bright prospects, domestic happiness and human souls were often risked and often lost. “The half has never been told.”

Scarcely less noted was the organization heralded far and wide as “Pithole’s Forty Thieves.” Well-superintendents, controlling the interests of outside companies, were important personages. Distant stockholders, unable to understand the difficulties and uncertainties attending developments, blamed the superintendents for the lack of dividends. No class of men in the country discharged their duties more faithfully, yet cranky investors in wildcat stocks termed them “slick rascals,” “plunderers” and “robbers.” Some joker suggested that once a band of Arabian Knights—fellows who stole everything—associated as “The Forty Thieves” and that the libeled superintendents ought to organize a club. The idea captured the town and “Pithole’s Forty Thieves” became at once a tangible reality. Merchants, producers, capitalists and business-men hastened to enroll themselves as members. Hon. James Sheakley, of Mercer, was elected president. Social meetings were held regularly and guying greenhorns, who supposed stealing to be the object of the organization, was a favorite pastime. The practical pranks of the “Forty” were laughed at and relished in the whole region. Nine-tenths of the members were young men, honorable in every relation of life, to whom the organization was a genuine joke. They enjoyed its notoriety and delighted to gull innocents who imagined they would purloin engines, derricks, drilling-tools, saw-mills and oil-tanks. Ten years after the band disbanded its president served in Congress and was a leading debater on the Hayes-Tilden muddle. “Pap” Sheakley—as the boys affectionately called him—was the embodiment of integrity, kindliness and hospitality. He operated in the Butler field and lived at Greenville. Bereft of his devoted wife and lovely daughters by “the fell sergeant, Death,” he sold his, desolated home and accepted from President Cleveland the governorship of Uncle Sam’s remotest Territory. His administration was so satisfactory that President Harrison reappointed him. There was no squarer, truer, nobler man in the public service than James Sheakley, Ex-Governor of Alaska.

Rev. S. D. Steadman, the first pastor at Pithole, a zealous Methodist—was universally respected for earnestness and piety. The “forty thieves” sent him one-hundred-and-fifty dollars at Christmas of 1866, with a letter commending his moral teachings, his courtesy and charity. Another minister inquired of a Swordsman what the letters of the club’s motto—“R. C. T.”—signified, “Religious Councils Treasured” was the ready response. This raised the club immensely in the divine’s estimation and led to a sermon in which he extolled the jolly organization! He “took a tumble” when a deacon smilingly informed him that the letters—a fake proposed in sport—symbolized “Rum, Cards, Tobacco.”

Mud was responsible for the funniest—to the spectators—mishap that ever convulsed a Pithole audience. A group of us stood in front of the Danforth House at the height of the miry season. Thin mud overflowed the plank-crossing and a grocer laid short pieces of scantling two or three feet apart for pedestrians to step on. A flashy sport, attired in a swell suit and a shiny beaver, was the first to take advantage of the improvised passage. Half-way across the scantling to which he was stepping moved ahead of his foot. In trying to recover his balance the sport careened to one side, his hat flew off and he landed plump on his back, in mud and water three feet deep! He disappeared beneath the surface as completely as though dropped into the sea, his head emerging a moment later. Blinded, sputtering and gasping for breath, he was a sight for the gods and little fishes! Mouth, eyes, nose and ears were choked with the dreadful ooze. Two men went to his assistance, led him to the rear of the hotel and turned the hose on him. His clothes were ruined, his gold watch was never recovered and for weeks small boys would howl: “His name is Mud!”

John Galloway, on one of his rambles for territory, ate dinner at the humble cabin of a poor settler. A fowl, tough, aged and peculiar, was the principal dish. In two weeks the tourist was that way again. A boy of four summers played at the door, close to which the visitor sat down. A brood of small chickens approached the entrance. “Poo’, ittey sings,” lisped the child, “oo mus’ yun away; here’s ’e yasty man ’at eated up oos mammy.” The good woman of the shanty had stewed the clucking-hen to feed the unexpected guest.

A maiden of uncertain age owned a farm which various operators vainly tried to lease. Hoping to steal a march on the others, one smooth talker called the second time. “I have come, Miss Blank,” he began, “to make you an offer.” He didn’t get a chance to add “for your land.” The old girl, not a gosling who would let a prize slip, jumped from her chair, clasped him about the neck and exclaimed: “Oh! Mr. Blank, this is so sudden, but I’m yours!” The astounded oilman shook her off at last and explained that he already had a wife and five children and wanted the Farm only. The clinging vine wept and stormed, threatened a breach-of-promise suit and loaded her dead father’s blunderbuss to be prepared for the next intruder.

W. J. Bostford, who died at Jamestown in November of 1895, operated at Pithole in its palmy days. Business was done on a cash basis and oil-property was paid for in money up to hundreds-of-thousands of dollars. Bostford made a big sale and started from Pithole to deposit his money. A cross-country trip was necessary to reach Titusville. Shortly after leaving Pithole he was attacked by robbers, who took all the money and left him for dead upon the highway. He was picked up alive, with a broken head and many other injuries, which he survived thirty years.

The first “hotel” at Pithole—a balloon-frame rushed up in a day—bore the pretentious title of Astor House. Before its erection pilgrims to the coming city took their chance of meals at the Holmden farm-house. As a guest wittily remarked: “It was table d’hote for men and also table d’oat for horses.” The viands were all heaped upon large dishes and everybody helped himself. The Morey-Farm Hotel, just above Pithole, charged twenty-one dollars a week for board, had gas-light, steam-heat, telegraph-office, barber-shop, colored waiters and “spring-mattresses.” Its cooking rivalled the best in the large cities. At Wiggins’s Hotel, a three-story boarding-house in the Tidioute field, two-hundred men would often wait their turn to get dinner. This was a common experience in the frontier towns, to which big throngs hurried before houses could be erected for their accommodation. E. H. Crittenden’s hotel at Titusville was the finest Oildom boasted in the sixties. Book & Frisbee’s was notable at the height of the Parker development. A dollar for a meal or a bed, four dollars a day or twenty-eight dollars a week, be the stay long or short, was the invariable rate. Peter Christie’s Central Hotel, at Petrolia, was immensely popular and a regular gold-mine for the owner. Oil City’s Petroleum House was a model hostelry, under “Charley” Staats and “Jim” White. The Jones House cleared Jones forty-thousand dollars in nine months. Its first guest was a Mr. Seymour, who spent one year collecting data for a statistical work on petroleum. His manuscripts perished in the flood of 1865. The last glimpse my eyes beheld of Jones was at Tarport, where he was driving a dray. Bradford’s Riddell House and St. James Hotel both sized up to the most exacting requirements. Good hotels and good restaurants were seldom far behind the triumphant march of the pioneers whose successes established oil-towns.

Col. Gardner, “a big man any way you take him,” was Chief-of-Police at Pithole. He has operated at Bradford and Warren, toyed with politics and military affairs and won the regard of troops of friends. Charles H. Duncan, of Oil City—his youthful appearance suggests Ponce de Leon’s spring—served in the borough-council, of which James M. Guffey, the astute Democratic leader and successful producer, was clerk. Col. Morton arrived in August of 1865 with a carpet-bag of job-type. His first work—tickets for passage over Little Pithole Creek—the first printing ever done at Pithole, was never paid for. The town had shoals of trusty, generous fellows—“God’s own white boys,“ Fred Wheeler dubbed them—whose manliness and enterprise and liberality were always above par.

When men went crazy at Pithole and outsiders thought the oil-country was “flowing with milk and honey” and greenbacks, a party of wags thought to put up a little joke at the expense of a new-comer from Boston. They arranged with the landlord for some coupon-bonds to use in the dining-room of the hotel and to seat the youth at their table. The New-Englander was seated in due course. The guests talked of oil-lands, fabulous strikes and big fortunes as ordinary affairs. Each chucked under his chin a five-twenty government-bond as a napkin. One lay in front of the Bostonian’s plate, folded and creased like a genuine linen-wiper. Calmly taking the “paper” from its receptacle, the chap from The Hub wiped his brow and adjusted the valuable napkin over his shirt-bosom. A moment later he beckoned to a servant and said: “See here, waiter, this napkin is too small; bring me a dish of soup and a ‘ten-forty.’” The jokers could not stand this. A laugh went around the festive board that could have been heard at the Twin Wells and the matter was explained to the bean-eater. He was put on the trail of “a soft snap” and went home in a month with ten-thousand dollars. “Bring me a ten-forty” circulated for a twelve-month in cigar-shops and bar-rooms.

Ben Hogan was one of the motley crew that swarmed to Pithole “broke.” He taught sparring and gave exhibitions of strength at Diefenbach’s variety-hall. He fought Jack Holliday for a purse of six-hundred dollars and defeated him in seven rounds. Four-hundred tough men and tougher women were present, many of them armed. Hogan was assured before the fight he would be killed if he whipped his opponent. He was shot at by Marsh Elliott during the mill, but escaped unhurt. Ben met Elliott soon thereafter and knocked him out in four brief rounds, breaking his nose and using him up generally. Next he opened a palatial sporting-house, the receipts of which often reached a thousand dollars a day. An adventure of importance was with “Stonehouse Jack.” This desperado and his gang had a grudge against Hogan and concocted a scheme to kill him. Jack was to arrange a fight with Ben, during which Hogan was to be killed by the crowd. Ben saw his enemy coming out of a dance-house and blazed away at him, but without effect. The fusillade scared “Stonehouse” away from Pithole and on January twenty-second, 1866, a vigilance committee at Titusville drove the villain out of the oil-region, threatening to hang him or any of his gang who dared return. This committee was organized to clear out a nest of incendiaries and thugs. The vigilants erected a gallows near the smoking embers of E. B. Chase & Co.’s general store, fired the preceding night, and decreed the banishment of hordes of toughs. “Stonehouse Jack” and one-hundred other men, with a number of vile women came under this sentence. The whole party was formed in line in front of the gallows, the “Rogue’s March” was played and the procession, followed by a great crowd of people, proceeded to the Oil-Creek Railroad station. The prisoners were ordered on board a special train, with a warning that if they ever again set foot upon the soil of Titusville they would be summarily executed. This salutary action ended organized crime in the oil-region.

North of Pithole the tide crossed into Allegheny township. Balltown, a meadow on C. M. Ball’s farm in July, 1865, at the end of the year paraded stores, hotels, a hundred dwellings and a thousand people. Fires in 1866 scorched it and waning production did the rest. Dawson Centre, on the Sawyer tract, budded, frosted and perished. The Morey House, on the Copeland farm, was the oasis in the desert, serving meals that tickled the midriff and might cope with Delmonico’s. Farms on Little Pithole Creek were riddled without swelling the yield of crude immoderately. Where are those oil-wells now? Echo murmurs “where?” In all that section of Cornplanter and Allegheny townships a derrick, an engine-house or a tank would be a novelty of the rarest breed.

Eight miles north-east of Titusville, where Godfrey Hill drilled a dry-hole in 1860 and two companies drilled six later, the Colorado district finally rewarded gritty operators. Enterprise was benefited by small wells in the vicinity. Down Pithole Creek to its junction with the Allegheny the country was punctured. Oleopolis straggled over the slope on the river’s bank, a pipe-line, a railroad to Pithole and minor wells contributing to its support. The first well tackled a vein of natural gas, which caught fire and consumed the rig. The driller was alone, the owner of the well having gone into the shanty. In a twinkling flames enveloped the astonished knight of the temper-screw, who leaped from the derrick, clothes blazing and hair singed off, and headed for the water. “Boss,” he roared in his flight, “jump into the river and say your prayers quick! I’ve bu’sted the bung and hell’s running out.”

“Breathe through the nostrils” is good advice. People should breathe through the nose and not use it so much for talking and singing through. Yet every rule has exceptions. A pair of mules hauled oil from Dawson Centre in the flush times of the excitement. The mud was practically bottomless. A visitor was overheard telling a friend that the bodies of the mules sank out of sight and that they were breathing through their ears, which alone projected above the ooze. Dawson and many more departed oil-towns suggest the jingle:

“There was an old woman lived under a hill; If she hadn’t moved she’d be there still: But she moved!”

About St. Valentine’s Day in 1866, when the burning of the Tremont House led to the discovery of oil in springs and wells, was a hilarious time at Pithole. Every cellar was fairly flooded with grease. People pumped it from common pumps, dipped it from streams, tasted it in tea, inhaled it from coffee-pots and were afraid to carry lights at night lest the very air should cause explosion and other unhappiness. It became a serious question what to drink. The whiskey could not be watered—there was no water. Dirty shirts could not be washed—the very rain was crude oil. Dirt fastened upon the damask cheeks of Pithole damsels and found an abiding-place in the whiskers of every bronzed fortune-hunter. Water commanded an enormous price and intoxicating beverages were cheap, since they could scarcely be taken in the raw. The editor of the Record, a strict temperance man, was obliged to travel fourteen miles every morning by stone-boat to get his glass of water. Stocks of oil-companies were the only thing in the community thoroughly watered. Tramps, hobos, wandering vagrants and unwashed disbelievers that “cleanliness is next to Godliness” pronounced Pithole a terrestrial paradise. They were willing to reverse Muhlenburg’s sentiment and “live alway” in that kind of dry territory.

“You’re not fit to sit with decent people; come up here and sit along with me!” thundered a Dawson teacher who sat at his desk hearing a recitation, as he discovered at a glance the worst boy in school annoying his seatmate.

Charles Highberger, who had lost a leg, was elected a justice of the peace at Pithole in 1866. Attorney Ruth, who came from Westmoreland county, was urging the conviction of a miserable whelp when he noticed Highberger had fallen asleep, as was his custom during long arguments. Mr. Ruth aroused him and remarked: “I wish your honor would pay attention to the points which I am about to make, as they have an important bearing on the case.” Highberger opened his eyes, glared around the room and rose on his crutches in great wrath, exclaiming: “There has been too much blamed chin-whacking in this case; you have been talking two hours and I haven’t seen a cent of costs. The prisoner may consider himself discharged. The court will adjourn to Andy Christy’s drug-store.” This was the way justice was dispensed with in those good old days when “go as you please” was the rule at Pithole.

John G. Saxe once lectured at Pithole and was so pleased with the people and place that he donated twenty-five dollars to the charity-fund and wrote columns of descriptive matter to a Boston newspaper. “If I were not Alexander I would be Diogenes,” said the Macedonian conqueror. Similarly Henry Ward Beecher remarked, when he visited Oil City to lecture, “If I were not pastor of Plymouth church I would be pastor of an Oil-City church.” The train conveying Dom Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, through the oil-region stopped at Foxburg to afford the imperial guest an opportunity to see an oil-well torpedoed. He watched the filling of the shell with manifest interest, dropped the weight after the torpedo had been lowered and clapped his hands when a column of oil rose in the air. An irreverent spectator whispered: “This beats playing pedro.”

J. P. Albee, laborer, painter, carpenter, rig-builder, pumper, pipe-liner, merchant and insurance-agent, was born in Warren county, reared on a farm in the Wisconsin lead-mining regions, enlisted in 1861, served three years gallantly and was discharged because of a wound in the breast by a rifle-ball. He struck Pithole in September of 1865, shared in the ups and downs of the transitory excitement and was one of the founders, if not the full-fledged father, of Cash-Up. The brave veteran was a pioneer in shoving ahead and demonstrating where oil was not to be expected. He owned fourteen dry-holes in whole or part, a number sufficient to establish quite a record. Drifting to Butler with the tide of developments, he engaged in various pursuits with varying success. Hosts of friends relish his tales of army-life and of ventures in Oildom, a knapsack of which he has constantly on hand. The years speed quickly, bringing many changes in their wake, and thousands who once waded through the muddy streets of Pithole are now treading the golden pavements of the Celestial City. Those who linger here a while longer love to recall the times that can never be repeated under the blue canopy.

Mud-veins in the third sand on Oil Creek and at Pithole would often stick the tools effectually. On Bull Run three wells in one derrick were abandoned with tools stuck in the third sand. The theory was that the mud vein was a stratum of slate in the sand, which became softened and ran into the well when water came in contact with it. Casing has robbed it of its terrors.

Before casing was introduced it was often difficult to tell if oil was found. Oilmen would examine the sand, look for “soot” on the sand-pumpings and place a lighted match to the sand-pump immediately after it was drawn from the well, as a test for gas. If the driller was sure the drill dropped two or three feet, with “soot” on the sand-pumpings, the show was considered worth testing. A seed-bag was put on the tubing and the well was allowed to stand a day or two to let the seed swell. To exhaust the water sometimes required weeks, but when all hope of a producer was lost and the last shovel of coal was in the boiler the oil might come. There seemed to be a virtue in that last shovel of coal. The shoemaker who could make a good seed-bag was a big man. The man who tied on the seed-bag for a well that proved a good producer was in demand. If, after oil showed itself, flax-seed was seen coming from the pipe the well-owner’s heart could be found in his boots. The bag was burst, the water let in and the operator’s hopes let out.

A young divine preached a sermon at Pithole, on the duty of self-consecration, so effectively that a hearer presented him with a bundle of stock in a company operating on the Hyner farm. The preacher sold his shares for ten-thousand dollars and promptly retired from the pulpit to study law! Rev. S. D. Steadman, while a master of sarcasm that would skewer a hypocrite on the point of irony, was particularly at home in the realm of the affections and of the ideal. In matters of the heart and soul few could with surer touch set aflow the founts of tender pathos. He met his match occasionally. Rallying a friend on his Calvinism, he said, “I believe Christians may fall from grace.” “Brother Steadman,” was the quick rejoinder, “you need not argue that; the flock you’re tending is convincing proof that the doctrine is true of your membership.”

A good deal of fun has been poked at the Georgia railroad which had cow-catchers at the rear, to keep cattle from walking into the cars, and stopped in the woods while the conductor went a mile for milk to replenish a crying baby’s nursing-bottle. On my last trip to Pithole by rail there were no other passengers. The conductor sat beside me to chat of former days and the decadence of the town at the northern end of the line. Four miles from Oleopolis fields of wild strawberries “wasted their sweetness on the desert air.” In reply to my hint that the berries looked very tempting, the conductor pulled the bell-rope and stopped the train. All hands feasted on the luscious fruit until satisfied. Coleridge, who observed that “Doubtless the Almighty could make a finer fruit than the wild strawberry, but doubtless He never did,” would have enjoyed the scene. “Don’t hurry too much,” the conductor called after me at Pithole “we can start forty minutes behind time and I’ll wait for you!” The rails were taken up and the road abandoned in the fall, but the strawberry-picking is as fresh as though it happened yesterday.

Long ago teamsters would start from the mines with twenty bushels of fifteen-cent coal. By the time they reached Pithole it would swell to thirty-five bushels of sixty-cent coal. With oil for back-loading the teamsters made more money then than a bond-juggler with a cinch on the United-States treasury.

A farmer’s wife near Dawson Centre, who had washed dishes for forty years, became so tired of the monotony that, the day her husband leased the farm for oil-purposes, she smashed every piece of crockery in the house and went out on the woodpile and laughed a full hour. It was the first vacation of her married life and dish-washing women will know how to sympathize with the poor soul in her drudgery and her emancipation.

Pithole, Shamburg, Red-Hot, Tip-Top, Cash-Up, Balltown and Oleopolis have passed into history and many of their people have gone beyond the vale of this checkered pilgrimage, yet memories of these old times come back freighted with thoughts of joyous days that will return no more forever.

“Better be a young June-bug than an old bird of Paradise.”

PITHOLE REVISITED.

The following lines, first contributed by me to the Oil-City Times in 1870, went the rounds twenty-five years ago:

Not a sound was heard, not a shrill whistle’s scream, As our footsteps through Pithole we hurried; Not a well was discharging an unctuous stream Where the hopes of the oilmen lay buried!

We walk’d the dead city till far in the night— Weeds growing where wheels once were turning— While seeking to find by the struggling moonlight Some symptom of gas dimly burning.

No useless regret should encumber man’s breast, Though dry-holes and Pitholes may bound him; So we lay like a warrior taking his rest, Each with his big overcoat ’round him.

Few and short were the prayers we said, We spoke not a sentence of sorrow, But steadfastly gazed on the place that was dead And bitterly long’d for the morrow!

We thought, as we lay on our primitive bed, An old sand-pump reel for a pillow, How friends, foes and strangers were heartily bled And ruin swept on like a billow!

Lightly we slept, for we dreamt of the scamp, And in fancy began to upbraid him, Who swindled us out of our very last stamp— In the grave we could gladly have laid him!

We rose half an hour in advance of the sun, But little refreshed for retiring! And, feeling as stiff as a son of a gun, Set off on a hunt for some firing.

Slowly and sadly our hard-tack went down, Then we wrote a brief sketch of our story And struck a bee-line for Oil City’s fair town, Leaving Pithole alone in its glory!

TOP ROW— J. D. Emery Warren Gray. —— Harris. E. Seldon. C. Seldon. Nelson Cochran. Col. Sellers. Unknown. Milo Marsden. W. A. Pullman. L. W. Waters. Lemuel Young. Chas. Archbold. Unknown. Unknown. Harry Parker. Hugh McKelvy. James Green. James McCutcheon. J. M’Donald. Dr. Thorn. Unknown. Unknown.

MIDDLE ROW— O J. Greer. Fullerton Parker. Full. Parker, Jr. James Goldsborough. W. C. Henry. Thos. McLaughlin. Col. Brady. Sam. Morrow. Joseph Seep. Charles Hatch. John Barton. R. Moorhead. H. W. Batchelor. —— Gephardt. Shep. Morehead.

LOWER ROW— Capt. J. T. Chalfant. Thos. McConnell. Weston Howland. James Lowe. Chas. Riddell. Richard Conn. Rem Offley. Ren. Kerr. Harry Marlin. H. Beers. Jas. Garrett. Chas. W. Ball. Walter Fleming. Chas. J. Frazer.

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