Mr. Sibley’s course in Congress amply met the expectations of his most

ardent supporters. The prestige of his great victory, added to his

personal magnetism and rare geniality, at the very outset gave him a

measure of influence few members ever attain. During the extra-session

he expressed his views with characteristic vigor. A natural leader,

close student and keen observer, he did not wait for somebody to give

him the cue before putting his ideas on record. In the silver-discussion

he bore a prominent part, opposing resolutely the repeal of the Sherman

act. His wonderful speech “set the ball rolling” for those who declined

to follow the administration program. The House was electrified by

Sibley’s effort. Throughout his speech of three hours he was honored

with the largest Congressional audience of the decade. Aisles, halls,

galleries and corridors were densely packed. Senators came from the

other end of the Capitol to listen to the brave Pennsylvanian who dared

plead for the white metal. For many years Mr. Sibley has been a close

student of political and social economics and he so grouped his facts as

to command the undivided attention and the highest respect of those who

honestly differed from him in his conclusions. Satire, pathos, bright

wit and pungent repartee awoke in his hearers the strongest emotions,

entrancing the bimetalists and giving their enemies a cold chill, as the

stream of eloquence flowed from lips “untrained to flatter, to dissemble

or to play the hypocrite.” Thenceforth the position of the

representative of the Twenty-sixth district was assured, despite the

assaults of hireling journals and discomfited worshippers of the golden

calf.

He took advanced ground on the Chinese question, delivering a speech

replete with patriotism and common-sense. An American by birth, habit

and education, he prefers his own country to any other under the blue

vault of heaven. The American workman he would protect from pauper

immigration and refuse to put on the European or Asiatic level. He

stands up for American skill, American ingenuity, American labor and

American wages. Tariff for revenue he approves of, not a tariff to

diminish revenue or to enrich one class at the expense of all. The

tiller of the soil, the mechanic, the coal-miner, the coke-burner and

the day-laborer have found him an outspoken champion of their cause.

Small wonder is it that good men and women of all creeds and parties

have abiding faith in Joseph C. Sibley and would fain bestow on him the

highest office in the nation’s gift.

Human nature is a queer medley and sometimes manifests streaks of envy

and meanness in queer ways. Mr. Sibley’s motives have been impugned, his

efforts belittled, his methods assailed and his neckties criticised by

men who could not understand his lofty character and purposes. The

generous ex-Congressman must plead guilty to the charge of wearing

clothes that fit him, of smoking decent cigars, of driving fine horses

and of living comfortably. Of course it would be cheaper to buy

hand-me-down misfits, to indulge in loud-smelling tobies, to walk or

ride muleback, to curry his own horses and let his wife do the washing

instead of hiring competent helpers. But he goes right ahead increasing

his business, improving his farms, developing American trotters and

furnishing work at the highest wages to willing hands in his factories,

at his oil-wells, on his lands, in his barns and his hospitable home. He

dispenses large sums in charity. His benevolence and enterprise reach

far beyond Pennsylvania. He does not hoard up money to loan it at

exorbitant rates. As a matter of fact, from the hundreds of men he has

helped pecuniarily he never accepted one penny of interest. He has been

mayor of Franklin, president of the Pennsylvania State-Dairymen’s

Association, director of the American Jersey-Cattle Club and member of

the State Board of Agriculture. He is a brilliant talker, a profound

thinker, a capital story-teller and a loyal friend. “May he live long

and prosper!”

Miller & Sibley’s Prospect-Hill Stock-Farm is one of the largest, best

equipped and most favorably known in the world. Different farms

comprising the establishment include a thousand acres of land adjacent

to Franklin and a farm, with stabling for two-hundred horses and the

finest kite-track in the United States, at Meadville. On one of these

farms is the first silo built west of the Allegheny mountains. Trotting

stock, Jersey cattle, Shetland ponies and Angora goats of the highest

grades are bred. For Michael Angelo, when a calf six weeks old,

twelve-thousand-five-hundred dollars in cash were paid A. B. Darling,

proprietor of the Fifth-Avenue Hotel, New York City. Animals of the best

strain were purchased, regardless of cost. In 1886 Mr. Sibley bought

from Senator Leland Stanford, of California, for ten-thousand dollars,

the four-year-old trotting-stallion St. Bel. Seventy-five thousand were

offered for him a few weeks before the famous sire of numerous

prize-winners died. Cows that have broken all records for milk and

butter, and horses that have won the biggest purses on the leading

race-tracks of the country are the results of the liberal policy pursued

at Prospect-Hill. Charles Marvin, the prince of horsemen, superintends

the trotting department and E. H. Sibley is manager of all the Miller &

Sibley interests. Hundreds of the choicest animals are raised every

year. Prospect-Hill Farm is one of the sights of Franklin and the

enterprise represents an investment not far short of one-million

dollars. Wouldn’t men like Charles Miller and Joseph C. Sibley sweep

away the cobwebs, give business an impetus and infuse new life and new

ideas into any community?

Franklin had tallied one for heavy-oil, but its resources were not

exhausted. On October seventeenth, 1859, Colonel James P. Hoover, C. M.

Hoover and Vance Stewart began to drill on the Robert-Brandon—now the

Hoover—farm of three-hundred acres, in Sandycreek township, on the west

bank of the Allegheny river, three miles south of Franklin. They found

oil on December twenty-first, the well yielding one-hundred barrels a

day! This pretty Christmas gift was another surprise. Owing to its

distance from “springs” and the two wells—Drake and Evans—already

producing, the stay-in-the-rut element felt confident that the Hoover

Well would not “amount to a hill of beans.” It was “piling Ossa on

Pelion” for the well to produce, from the _second sand_, oil with

properties adapted to illumination and lubrication. The Drake was for

light, the Evans for grease and the Hoover combined the two in part.

Where and when was this variegated dissimilarity to cease? Perhaps its

latest phase is to come shortly. Henry F. James is beginning a well

south-west of town, on the N. B. Myers tract, between a sweet and a sour

spring. Savans, scientists, beer-drinkers, tee-totalers and

oil-operators are on the ragged edge of suspense, some hoping, some

fearing, some praying that James may tap a perennial fount of creamy

’alf-and-’alf.

Once at a drilling-well on the “Point” the tools dropped suddenly. The

driller relieved the tension on his rope and let the tools down slowly.

They descended six or eight feet! The bare thought of a crevice of such

dimensions paralyzed the knight of the temper-screw, all the more that

the hole was not to the first sand. What a lake of oil must underlie

that derrick! He drew up the tools. They were dripping amber fluid,

which had a flavor quite unlike petroleum. Did his nose deceive him? It

was the aroma of beer! A lick of the stuff confirmed the nasal

diagnosis—it had the taste of beer! The alarm was sounded and the

sand-pump run down. It came up brimming over with beer! Ten times the

trip was repeated with the same result. Think of an ocean of the

delicious, foamy, appetizing German beverage! Word was sent to the

owners of the well, who ordered the tubing to be put in. They tried to

figure how many breweries the production of their well would retire.

Pumping was about to begin, in presence of a party of impatient, thirsty

spectators, when an excited Teuton, blowing and puffing, was seen

approaching at a breakneck pace. Evidently he had something on his mind.

“Gott in Himmel!” he shrieked, “you vas proke mit Grossman’s vault!” The

mystery was quickly explained. Philip Grossman, the brewer, had cut a

tunnel a hundred feet into the hill-side to store his liquid-stock in a

cool place. The well chanced to be squarely over this tunnel, the roof

of which the tools pierced and stove in the head of a tun of beer!

Workmen who came for a load were astonished to discover one end of a

string of tubing dangling in the tun. It dawned upon them that the

drillers three-hundred feet above must have imagined they struck a

crevice and a messenger speeded to the well. The saddened crowd slinked

off, muttering words that would not look nice in print. The tubing was

withdrawn, the hogshead was shoved aside, the tools were again swung and

two weeks later the well was pumping thirty barrels a day of

unmistakable heavy-oil.

The Hoover strike fed the flame the Evans Well had kindled. Lands in the

neighborhood were in demand on any terms the owners might impose. From

Franklin to the new well, on both sides of the Allegheny, was the

favorite choice, on a theory that a pool connected the deposits. Leases

were snapped up at one-half royalty and a cash-bonus. Additional wells

on the Hoover rivaled No. 1, which produced gamely for four years. The

tools were stuck in cleaning it out and a new well beside it started at

sixty barrels. The “Big-Emma Vein” was really an artery to which for

years “whoa, Emma!” did not apply. Bissell & Co. and the Cameron

Petroleum-Company secured control of the property, on which fifteen

wells were producing two-hundred barrels ten years from the advent of

the Hoover & Vance. Harry Smith, a city-father, is operating on the

tract and drilling paying wells at reasonable intervals. Colonel James

P. Hoover died on February fourth, 1871, aged sixty-nine. Born in Centre

county, he settled in the southern part of Clarion, was appointed by

Governor Porter in 1839 Prothonotary of Venango county and removed to

Franklin. The people elected him to the same office for three years and

State-Senator in 1844. The Canal-Commissioners in 1851 appointed him

collector of the tolls at Hollidaysburg, Blair county, for five years.

He filled these positions efficiently, strict adherence to principle and

a high sense of duty marking his whole career. The esteem and confidence

he enjoyed all through his useful life were attested by universal regret

at his death and the largest funeral ever witnessed in Franklin. His

estimable widow survived Colonel Hoover twenty years, dying at the

residence of her son-in-law, Arnold Plumer, in Minnesota. Their son, C.

M. Hoover, ex-sheriff of the county, has been interested in the street

railway. Vance Stewart, who owned a farm near the lower river-bridge,

removed to Greenville and preceded his wife and several children, one of

them Rev. Orlando V. Stewart, to the tomb. Another son, James Stewart,

was a prominent member of the Erie bar.

[Illustration: B. E. SWAN.]

The opening months of 1860 were decidedly lively on the Cochran Farm, in

Cranberry township, opposite the Hoover. The first well, the Keystone,

on the flats above where the station now stands, was a second-sander of

the hundred-barrel class. The first oil sold for fourteen dollars a

barrel, at which rate land-owners and operators were not in danger of

bankruptcy or the poor-house. Fourteen-hundred dollars a day from a

three-inch hole would have seemed too preposterous for Munchausen before

the Pennsylvania oil-regions demonstrated that “truth is stranger than

fiction.” The Monitor, Raymond, Williams, McCutcheon and other wells

kept the production at a satisfactory figure. Dale & Morrow, Horton &

Son, Hoover & Co., George R. Hobby, Cornelius Fulkerson and George S.

McCartney were early operators. B. E. Swan located on the farm in May of

1865 and drilled numerous fair wells. He has operated there for

thirty-two years, sticking to the second-sand territory with a tenacity

equal to the “perseverance of the saints.” When thousands of producers,

imitating the dog that let go the bone to grasp the shadow in the water,

quit their enduring small wells to take their chance of larger ones in

costlier fields, he did not lose his head and add another to the

financial wrecks that strewed the greasian shore. Appreciating his moral

stamina, his steadfastness and ability, Mr. Swan’s friends insist that

he shall serve the public in some important office. Walter Pennell—his

father made the first car-wheels—and W. P. Smith drilled several snug

wells on the uplands, Sweet & Shaffer following with six or eight.

Eighteen wells are producing on the tract, which contains

one-hundred-and-forty acres and has had only two dry-holes in its

thirty-six years of active developments.

[Illustration: ALEXANDER COCHRAN.]

Alexander Cochran, for forty years owner of the well-known farm bearing

his name, is one of the oldest citizens of Franklin. Winning his way in

the world by sheer force of character, scrupulous integrity and a fixed

determination to succeed, he is in the highest and best sense a

self-made man. Working hard in boyhood to secure an education, he taught

school, clerked in general stores, studied law and was twice elected

Prothonotary without asking one voter for his support. In these days of

button-holing, log-rolling, wire-pulling, buying and soliciting votes

this is a record to recall with pride. Marrying Miss Mary Bole—her

father removed from Lewistown to Franklin seventy-five years ago—he

built the home at “Cochran Spring” that is one of the land-marks of the

town and established a large dry-goods store. As his means permitted he

bought city-lots, put up dwelling-houses and about 1852 paid

sixteen-hundred dollars for the farm in Cranberry township for which in

1863, after it had yielded a fortune, he refused seven-hundred-thousand!

The farm was in two blocks. A neighbor expostulated with him for buying

the second piece, saying it was “foolish to waste money that way.” In

1861, when the same neighbor wished to mortgage his land for a loan, he

naively remarked: “Well, Aleck, I guess I was the fool, not you, in

1852.” A man of broad views, Mr. Cochran freely grants to others the

liberality of thought he claims for himself. A hater of cant and sham

and hollow pretence, he believes less in musty creeds than kindly deeds,

more in giving loaves than tracts to the hungry, and takes no stock in

religion that thinks only of dodging punishment in the next world and

fails to help humanity in this. In the dark days of low-priced oil and

depressed trade, he would accept neither interest from his debtors nor

royalty from the operators who had little wells on his farm. He never

hounded the sheriff on a hapless borrower, foreclosed a mortgage to grab

a coveted property or seized the chattels of a struggling victim to

satisfy a shirt-tail note. There is no shred of the Pecksniff, the

Shylock or the Uriah-Heep in his anatomy. At fourscore he is hale and

hearty, rides on horseback, cultivates his garden, attends to business,

likes a good play and keeps up with the literature of the day. The

productive oil-farm is now owned by his daughters, Mrs. J. J. McLaurin,

of Harrisburg, and Mrs. George R. Sheasley, of Franklin. The proudest

eulogy he could desire is Alexander Cochran’s just desert: “The Poor

Man’s Friend.”

Down to Sandy Creek many wells were drilled from 1860 to 1865, producing

fairly at an average depth of four-hundred-and-fifty to five-hundred

feet. These operations included the Miller, Smith and Pope farms, on the

west side of the river, and the Rice, Nicklin, Martin and Harmon, on the

east side, all second-sand territory. North of the Cochran and the

Hoover work was pushed actively. George H. Bissell and Vance Stewart

bored twelve or fifteen medium wells on the Stewart farm of two-hundred

acres, which the Cameron Petroleum Company purchased in 1865 and Joseph

Dale operated for some years. It lies below the lower bridge, opposite

the Bleakley tract, from which a light production is still derived.

Above the Stewart are the Fuller and the Chambers farms, the latter

extending to the Allegheny-Valley depot. Scores of eager operators

thronged the streets of Franklin and drilled along the Allegheny. Joseph

Powley and Charles Cowgill entered the lists in the Cranberry district.

Henry M. Wilson and George Piagett veered into the township and sank a

bevy of dry-holes to vary the monotony. That was a horse on Wilson, but

he got ahead of the game by a deal that won him the nicest territory on

Horse Creek. Stirling Bonsall and Colonel Lewis—they’re dead now—were in

the thickest of the fray, with Captain Goddard, Philip Montgomery, Boyd,

Roberts, Foster, Brown, Murphy and many more whom old-timers remember

pleasantly. Thomas King, whole-souled, genial “Tom”—no squarer man e’er

owned a well or handled oil-certificates—and Captain Griffith were “a

good pair to draw to.” King has “crossed over,” as have most of the

kindred spirits that dispelled the gloom in the sixties.

Colonel W. T. Pelton, nephew of Samuel J. Tilden, participated in the

scenes of that exciting period. He lived at Franklin and drilled wells

on French Creek. He was a royal entertainer, shrewd in business, finely

educated and polished in manner and address. He and his wife—a lovely

and accomplished woman—were fond of society and gained hosts of friends.

They boarded at the United-States Hotel, where Mrs. Pelton died

suddenly. This affliction led Colonel Pelton to sell his oil-properties

and abandon the oil-regions. Returning to New York, when next he came

into view as the active agent of his uncle in the secret negotiations

that grew out of the election of 1876, it was with a national fame. His

death in 1880 closed a busy, promising career.

In the spring of 1864 a young man, black-haired, dark-eyed, an Apollo in

form and strikingly handsome, arrived at Franklin and engaged rooms at

Mrs. Webber’s, on Buffalo street. The stranger had money, wore good

clothes and presented a letter of introduction to Joseph H. Simonds,

dealer in real-estate, oil-wells and leases. He looked around a few days

and concluded to invest in sixty acres of the Fuller farm, Cranberry

township, fronting on the Allegheny river. The block was sliced off the

north end of the farm, a short distance below the upper bridge and the

Valley station. Mr. Simonds consented to be a partner in the

transaction. The transfer was effected, the deed recorded and a well

started. It was situated on the hill, had twenty feet of second-sand and

pumped twenty barrels a day. The owner drilled two others on the bluff,

the three yielding twenty barrels for months. The ranks of the

oil-producers had received an addition in the person of—John Wilkes

Booth.

The firm prospered, each of the members speculating and trading

individually. M. J. Colman, a capital fellow, was interested with one or

both in various deals. Men generally liked Booth and women admired him

immensely. His lustrous orbs, “twin-windows of the soul,” could look so

sad and pensive as to awaken the tenderest pity, or fascinate like “the

glittering eye” of the Ancient Mariner or the gaze of the basilisk.

“Trilby” had not come to light, or he might have enacted the hypnotic

role of Svengali. His moods were variable and uncertain. At times he

seemed morose and petulant, tired of everybody and “unsocial as a clam.”

Again he would court society, attend parties, dance, recite and be “the

life of the company.” He belonged to a select circle that exchanged

visits with a coterie of young folks in Oil City. A Confederate

sympathizer and an enemy of the government, his closest intimates were

staunch Republicans and loyal citizens. William J. Wallis, the veteran

actor who died in December of 1895, in a Philadelphia theater slapped

him on the mouth for calling President Lincoln a foul name. Booth’s

acting, while inferior to his brother Edwin’s, evinced much dramatic

power. He controlled his voice admirably, his movements were graceful

and he spoke distinctly, as Franklinites whom he sometimes favored with

a reading can testify.

[Illustration: JOSEPH H. SIMONDS.]

[Illustration: J. WILKES BOOTH.]

[Illustration: MOSES J. COLMAN.]

One morning in April, 1865, he left Franklin, telling Mr. Simonds he was

going east for a few days. He carried a satchel, which indicated that he

did not expect his stay to be prolonged indefinitely. His wardrobe,

books and papers remained in his room. Nothing was heard of him until

the crime of the century stilled all hearts and the wires flashed the

horrible news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. The excitement in

Franklin, the murderer’s latest home, was intense. Crowds gathered to

learn the dread particulars and discuss Booth’s conduct and utterances.

Not a word or act previous to his departure pointed to deliberate

preparation for the frightful deed that plunged the nation in grief.

That he contemplated it before leaving Franklin the weight of evidence

tended to disprove. He made no attempt to sell any of his property, to

convert his lands and wells into cash, to settle his partnership

accounts or to pack his effects. He had money in the bank, wells

bringing a good income and important business pending. All these things

went to show that, if not a sudden impulse, the killing of Lincoln was

prompted by some occurrence in Washington that fired the passionate

nature John Wilkes Booth inherited from his father. The world is

familiar with the closing chapters of the dark tragedy—the assassin’s

flight, the pursuit into Virginia, the burning barn, Sergeant Corbett’s

fatal bullet, the pathetic death-scene on the Garrett porch and the last

message, just as the dawn was breaking on the glassy eyes that opened

feebly for a moment: “Tell my mother I died for my country. I did what I

thought was best.”

The wells and the land on the river were held by Booth’s heirs until

1869, when the tract changed hands. The farm is producing no oil and the

Simonds-Booth wells have disappeared. Had he not intended to return to

Franklin, Booth would certainly have disposed of these interests and

given the proceeds to his mother. “Joe” Simonds removed to Bradford to

keep books for Whitney & Wheeler, bankers and oil-operators, and died

there years ago. He was an expert accountant, quick, accurate and neat

in his work and most fastidious in his attire. A blot on his paper, a

figure not exactly formed, a line one hair-breath crooked, a spot on his

linen or a speck of dust on his coat was simply intolerable. He was

correct in language and deportment and honorable in his dealings. Colman

continued his oil-operations, in company with W. R. Crawford, a

real-estate agency, until the eighties. He married Miss Ella Hull, the

finest vocalist Franklin ever boasted, daughter of Captain S. A. Hull,

and removed to Boston. For years paralytic trouble has confined him to

his home. He is “one of nature’s nobleman.”

“French Kate,” the woman who aided Ben Hogan at Pithole and followed him

to Babylon and Parker, was a Confederate spy and supposed to be very

friendly with J. Wilkes Booth. Besides his oil-interests at Franklin,

the slayer of Abraham Lincoln owned a share in the Homestead well at

Pithole. A favorite legend tells how, by a singular coincidence, which

produced a sensation, the well was burned on the evening of the

President’s assassination. It caught fire about the same instant the

fatal bullet was fired in Ford’s Theater and tanks of burning oil

enveloped Pithole in a dense smoke when the news of the tragedy flashed

over the trembling wires. The Homestead well was not down until Lincoln

had been dead seven weeks, Pithole had no existence and there were no

blazing tanks; otherwise the legend is correct. Two weeks before his

appalling crime Booth was one of a number of passengers on the scow

doing duty as a ferry-boat across the Allegheny, after the Franklin

bridge had burned. The day was damp and the water very cold. Some

inhuman whelp threw a fine setter into the river. The poor beast swam to

the rear of the scow and Booth pulled him on board. He caressed the dog

and bitterly denounced the fellow who could treat a dumb animal so

cruelly. At another time he knocked down a cowardly ruffian for beating

a horse that was unable to pull a heavy load out of a mud-hole. He has

been known to shelter stray kittens, to buy them milk and induce his

landlady to care for them until they could be provided with a home.

Truly his was a contradictory nature. He sympathized with horses, dogs

and cats, yet robbed the nation of its illustrious chief and plunged

mankind into mourning. To newsboys Booth was always liberal, not

infrequently handing a dollar for a paper and saying: “No change; buy

something useful with the money.” The first time he went to the

Methodist Sunday-school, with “Joe” Simonds, he asked and answered

questions and put a ten-dollar bill in the collection-box.

Over the hills to the interior of the townships developments spread.

Bredinsburg, Milton and Tarkiln loomed up in Cranberry, where Taylor &

Torrey, S. P. McCalmont, Jacob Sheasley, B. W. Bredin and E. W. Echols

have sugar-plums. In Sandycreek, between Franklin and Foster, Angell &

Prentice brought Bully Hill and Mount Hope to the front. The biggest

well in the package was a two-hundred barreler on Mount Hope, which

created a mount of hopes that were not fully realized. George V. Forman

counted out one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars for the Mount Hope

corner. The territory lasted well and averaged fairly. Bully Hill

merited its somewhat slangy title. Dr. C. D. Galbraith, George R.

Sheasley and Mattern & Son are among its present operators. Angell and

Prentice parted company, each to engage in opening up the Butler region.

Prentice, Crawford, Barbour & Co. did not let the grass grow under their

feet. They “knew a good thing at sight” and pumped tens-of-thousands of

barrels of oil from the country south of Franklin. The firm was notable

in the seventies. Considerable drilling was done at Polk, where the

state is providing a half-million-dollar Home for Feeble-Minded

Children, and in the latitude of Utica, with about enough oil to be an

aggravation. The Shippen wells, a mile north of the county poor-house,

have produced for thirty years. West of them, on the Russell farm, the

Twin wells, joined as tightly as the derricks could be placed, pumped

for years. This was the verge of productive territory, test wells on the

lands of William Sanders, William Bean, A. Reynolds, John McKenzie,

Alexander Frazier and W. Booth, clear to Cooperstown, finding a trifle

of sand and scarcely a vestige of oil. The Raymonds, S. Ramage, John J.

Doyle and Daniel Grimm had a very tidy offshoot at Raymilton. On this

wise lubricating and second-sand oils were revealed for the benefit of

mankind generally. The fly in the ointment was the clerical crank who

wrote to President Lincoln to demand that the producing of heavy-oil be

stopped peremptorily, as it had been stored in the ground to grease the

axletree of the earth in its diurnal revolution! This communication

reminded Lincoln of a “little story,” which he fired at the fellow with

such effect that the candidate for a strait-jacket was perpetually

squelched.

[Illustration: ANGELL & PRENTICE’S WELLS BELOW FRANKLIN IN 1873.]

[Illustration: JOHN P. CRAWFORD.]

Hon. William Reid Crawford, a member of the firm of Prentice, Crawford,

Barbour & Co., lives in Franklin. His parents were early settlers in

north-western Pennsylvania. Alexander Grant, his maternal grandfather,

built the first stone-house in Lancaster county, removed to Butler

county and located finally in Armstrong county, where he died sixty-five

years ago. In 1854 William R. and four of his brothers went to

California and spent some time mining gold. Upon his return he settled

on a farm in Scrubgrass township, Venango county, of which section the

Crawfords had been prominent citizens from the beginning of its history.

Removing to Franklin in 1865, Mr. Crawford engaged actively in the

production of petroleum, operating extensively in various portions of

the oil-regions for twenty years. He acquired a high reputation for

enterprise and integrity, was twice a city-councillor, served three

terms as mayor, was long president of the school-board, was elected

sheriff in 1887 and State-Senator in 1890. Untiring fidelity to the

interests of the people and uncompromising hostility to whatever he

believed detrimental to the general welfare distinguished his public

career. Genial and kindly to all, the friend of humanity and benefactor

of the poor, no man stands better in popular estimation or is more

deserving of confidence and respect. His friends could not be crowded

into the Coliseum without bulging out the walls. Ebenezer Crawford,

brother of William R., died at Emlenton in August of 1897, on his

seventy-sixth birthday. John P. Crawford, another brother, who made the

California trip in 1849, still resides in the southern end of the county

and is engaged in oil-operations. E. G. Crawford, a nephew, twice

prothonotary of Venango and universally liked, passed away last June.

His cousin, C. J. Crawford, a first-class man anywhere and everywhere,

served as register and recorder with credit and ability. The Crawfords

“are all right.”

For money may come and money may go,

But a good name stays to the end of the show.

Captain John K. Barbour, a man of imposing presence and admirable

qualities, removed to Philadelphia after the dissolution of the firm.

The Standard Oil-Company gave him charge of the right-of-way department

of its pipe-line service and he returned to Franklin. Two years ago,

during a business visit to Ohio, he died unexpectedly, to the deep

regret of the entire community. S. A. Wheeler operated largely in the

Bradford field and organized the Tuna-Valley Bank of Whitney & Wheeler.

For a dozen years he has resided at Toledo, his early home. Like Captain

Barbour, “Fred,” as he was commonly called, had an exhaustless mine of

bright stories and a liberal share of the elements of popularity. One

afternoon in 1875, three days before the fire that wiped out the town, a

party of us chanced to meet at St. Joe, Butler county, then the centre

of oil-developments. An itinerating artist had his car moored opposite

the drug-store. Somebody proposed to have a group-picture. The motion

carried unanimously and a toss-up decided that L. H. Smith was to foot

the bill. The photographer brought out his camera, positions were taken

on the store-platform and the pictures were mailed an hour ahead of the

blaze that destroyed most of the buildings and compelled the artist to

hustle off his car on the double-quick. Samuel R. Reed, at the extreme

right, operated in the Clarion field. He had a hardware-store in company

with the late Dr. Durrant and his home is in Franklin. James Orr,

between whom and Reed a telegraph-pole is seen, was connected with the

Central Hotel at Petrolia and later was a broker in the Producers’

Exchange at Bradford. On the step is Thomas McLaughlin, now oil-buyer at

Lima, once captain of a talented base-ball club at Oil City and an

active oil-broker. Back of him is “Fred” Wheeler, with Captain Barbour

on his right and L. H. Smith sitting comfortably in front. Mr. Smith

figured largely at Pithole, operated satisfactorily around Petrolia and

removed years ago to New York. Cast in a giant mould, he weighs

three-hundred pounds and does credit to the illustrious legions of

Smiths. He is a millionaire and has an office over the Seaboard Bank, at

the lower end of Broadway. Joseph Seep, the king-bee of good fellows,

sits besides Smith. Pratt S. Crosby, formerly a jolly broker at Parker

and Oil City, stands behind Seep. Next him is “Tom” King, who has “gone

to the land of the leal,” J. J. McLaurin ending the row. James Amm, who

went from an Oil-city clerkship to coin a fortune at Bradford—a street

bears his name—sits on the platform. Every man, woman, child and baby

near Oil City knew and admired “Jamie” Amm, who is now enjoying his

wealth in Buffalo. Two out of the eleven in the group have “passed

beyond the last scene” and the other nine are scattered widely.

“Friend after friend departs,

Who hath not lost a friend?”

[Illustration: GROUP AT ST. JOE, BUTLER COUNTY, IN 1874.]

Frederic Prentice, one of the pluckiest operators ever known in

petroleum-annals, was the first white child born on the site of Toledo,

when Indians were the neighbors of the pioneers of Northern Ohio. His

father left a fine estate, which the son increased greatly by extensive

lumbering, in which he employed three-thousand men. Losses in the panic

of 1857 retired him from the business. He retrieved his fortune and paid

his creditors their claims in full, with ten per cent. interest, an act

indicative of his sterling character. Reading in a newspaper about the

Drake well, he decided to see for himself whether the story was fast

colors. Journeying to Venango county by way of Pittsburg, he met and

engaged William Reed to accompany him. Reed had worked at the Tarentum

salt-wells and knew a thing or two about artesian-boring. The two

arrived at Franklin on the afternoon of the day Evans’s well turned the

settlement topsy-turvy. Next morning Prentice offered Evans

forty-thousand dollars for a controlling interest in the well,

one-fourth down and the balance in thirty, sixty and ninety days. Evans

declining to sell, the Toledo visitor bought from Martin & Epley an acre

of ground on the north bank of French Creek, at the base of the hill,

and contracted with Reed to “kick down” a well, the third in the

district. Prentice and Reed tramped over the country for days, locating

oil-deposits by means of the witch-hazel, which the Tarentumite handled

skillfully. This was a forked stick, which it was claimed turned in the

hands of the holder at spots where oil existed. Various causes delayed

the completion of the well, which at last proved disappointingly small.

Meanwhile Mr. Prentice leased the Neeley farm, two miles up the

Allegheny, in Cranberry township, and bored several paying wells. A

railroad station on the tract is named after him and R. G. Lamberton has

converted the property into a first-class stock-farm. Favorable reports

from Little Kanawha River took him to West Virginia, where he leased and

purchased immense blocks of land. Among them was the Oil-Springs tract,

on the Hughes River, from which oil had been skimmed for generations.

Two of his wells on the Kanawha yielded six-hundred barrels a day, which

had to be stored in ponds or lakes for want of tankage. Confederate

raiders burned the wells, oil and machinery and drove off the workmen,

putting an extinguisher on operations until the Grant-Lee episode

beneath the apple-tree at Appomattox.

Assuming that the general direction of profitable developments would be

north-east and south-west, Mr. Prentice surveyed a line from Venango

county through West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. This idea, really

the foundation of “the belt theory,” he spent thousands of dollars to

establish. Personal investigation and careful surveys confirmed his

opinion, which was based upon observations in the Pennsylvania fields.

The line run thirty years ago touched numerous “springs” and “surface

shows” and recent tests prove its remarkable accuracy. On this theory he

drilled at Mount Hope and Foster, opening a section that has produced

several-million barrels of oil. C. D. Angell applied the principle in

Clarion and Butler counties, mapping out the probable course of the

“belt” and leasing much prolific territory. His success led others to

adopt the same plan, developing a number of pools in four states,

although nature’s lines are seldom straight and the oil-bearing strata

are deposited in curves and beds at irregular intervals.

[Illustration: FREDERIC PRENTICE.]

In company with W. W. Clark of New York, to whom he had traded a portion

of his West-Virginia lands, Mr. Prentice secured a quarter-interest in

the Tarr farm, on Oil Creek, shortly before the sinking of the Phillips

well, and began shipping oil to New York. They paid three dollars apiece

for barrels, four dollars a barrel for hauling to the railroad and

enormous freights to the east. The price dropping below the cost of

freights and barrels, the firm dug acres of pits to put tanks under

ground, covering them with planks and earth to prevent evaporation.

Traces of these storage-vats remain on the east bank of Oil Creek. Crude

fell to twenty-five cents a barrel at the wells and the outlook was

discouraging. Clark & Prentice stopped drilling and turned their

attention to finding a market. They constructed neat wooden packages

that would hold two cans of refined-oil, two oil-lamps and a dozen

chimneys and sent one to each United-States Consul in Europe. Orders

soon rushed in from foreign countries, especially Germany, France and

England, stimulating the erection of refineries and creating a large

export-trade. Clark & Summer, who also owned an interest in the Tarr

farm, built the Standard Refinery at Pittsburg and agreed to take from

Clark & Prentice one-hundred-thousand barrels of crude at a dollar a

barrel, to be delivered as required during the year. Before the delivery

of the first twenty-five-thousand barrels the price climbed to one-fifty

and to six dollars before the completion of the contract, which was

carried out to the letter. The advance continued to fourteen dollars a

barrel, lasting only one day at this figure. These were vivifying days

in oleaginous circles, never to be repeated while Chronos wields his

trusty blade.

When crude reached two dollars Mr. Prentice bought the

Washington-McClintock farm, on which Petroleum Centre was afterwards

located, for three-hundred-thousand dollars. Five New-Yorkers, one of

them the president of the Shoe and Leather Bank and another the

proprietor of the Brevoort House, advanced fifty-thousand dollars for

the first payment. Within sixty days Prentice sold three-quarters of his

interest for nine-hundred-thousand dollars and organized the Central

Petroleum Oil-Company, with a capital of five-millions! Wishing to repay

the New-York loan, the Brevoort landlord desired him to retain his share

of the money and invest it as he pleased. For his ten-thousand dollars

mine host received eighty-thousand in six months, a return that leaves

government-bond syndicates and Cripple-Creek speculations out in the

latitude of Nansen’s north-pole. The company netted fifty-thousand

dollars a month in dividends for years and lessees cleared three or four

millions from their operations on the farm. Greenbacks circulated like

waste-paper, Jules Verne’s fancies were surpassed constantly by actual

occurrences and everybody had money to burn.

Prentice and his associates purchased many tracts along Oil Creek,

including the lands where Oil City stands and the Blood farm of

five-hundred acres. In the Butler district he drilled hundreds of wells

and built the Relief Pipe-Line. Organizing The Producers’ Consolidated

Land-and-Petroleum-Company, with a capital of two-and-a-half millions,

he managed it efficiently and had a prominent part in the Bradford

development. Boston capitalists paid in twelve-hundred-thousand dollars,

Prentice keeping a share in his oil-properties representing

thirteen-hundred-thousand more. The company is now controlled by the

Standard, with L. B. Lockhart as superintendent. Its indefatigable

founder also organized the Boston Oil Company to operate in Kentucky and

Tennessee, put down oil-wells in Peru and gas-wells in West Virginia,

produced and piped thousands of barrels of crude daily and was a vital

force in petroleum-affairs for eighteen years. The confidence and esteem

of his compatriots were attested by his unanimous election to the

presidency of the Oilmen’s League, a secret-society formed to resist the

proposed encroachments of the South-Improvement Company. The League

accomplished its mission and then quietly melted out of existence.

Since 1877 Mr. Prentice has devoted his attention chiefly to lumbering

in West Virginia and to his brown-stone quarries at Ashland, Wisconsin.

The death of his son, Frederick A., by accidental shooting, was a sad

bereavement to the aged father. His suits to get possession of the site

of Duluth, the city of Proctor Knott’s impassioned eulogy, included in a

huge grant of land deeded to him by the Indians, were scarcely less

famous than Mrs. Gaines’s protracted litigation to recover a slice of

New Orleans. The claim involved the title to property valued at

twelve-millions of dollars. From his Ashland quarries the owner took out

a monolith, designed for the Columbian Exposition in 1893, forty yards

long and ten feet square at the base. Beside this monster stone

Cleopatra’s Needle, disintegrating in Central Park, Pompey’s Pillar and

the biggest blocks in the pyramids are Tom-Thumb pigmies. At

seventy-four Mr. Prentice, foremost in energy and enterprise, retains

much of his youthful vigor. Earnest and sincere, a master of business,

his word as good as gold, Frederic Prentice holds an honored place in

the ranks of representative oil-producers, “nobles of nature’s own

creating.”

[Illustration: CYRUS D. ANGELL.]

A native of Chautauqua county, N. Y., where he was born in 1826, Cyrus

D. Angell received a liberal education, served as School-Commissioner

and engaged in mercantile pursuits at Forestville. Forced through

treachery and the monetary stringency of the times to compromise with

his creditors, he recovered his financial standing and paid every cent

of his indebtedness, principal and interest. In 1867 he came to the

oil-regions with a loan of one-thousand dollars and purchased an

interest in property at Petroleum Centre that paid handsomely. Prior to

this, in connection with Buffalo capitalists, he had bought Belle

Island, in the Allegheny River at Scrubgrass, upon which soon after his

arrival he drilled three wells that averaged one-hundred barrels each

for two years, netting the owners over two-hundred-thousand dollars.

Operations below Franklin, in company with Frederic Prentice, also

proved highly profitable. His observations of the course of developments

along Oil Creek and the Allegheny led Mr. Angell to the conclusion that

petroleum would be found in “belts” or regular lines. He adopted the

theory that two “belts” existed, one running from Petroleum Centre to

Scrubgrass and the other from St. Petersburg through Butler county.

Satisfied of the correctness of this view, he leased or purchased all

the lands within the probable boundaries of the “belt” from Foster to

Belle Island, a distance of six miles. The result justified his

expectations, ninety per cent. of the wells yielding abundantly. With

“the belt theory,” which he followed up with equal success farther

south, Mr. Angell’s name is linked indissolubly. His researches enriched

him and were of vast benefit to the producers generally. He did much to

extend the Butler region, drilling far ahead of tested territory. The

town of Angelica owed its creation to his fortunate operations in the

neighborhood, conducted on a comprehensive scale. Reverses could not

crush his manly spirit. He did a large real-estate business at Bradford

for some years, opening an office at Pittsburg when the Washington field

began to loom up. Failing health compelling him to seek relief in

foreign travel, last year he went to Mexico and Europe to recuperate.

Mr. Angell is endowed with boundless energy, fine intellectual powers

and rare social acquirements. During his career in Oildom he was an

excellent sample of the courageous, unconquerable men who have made

petroleum the commercial wonder of the world.

An old couple in Cranberry township, who eked out a scanty living on a

rocky farm near the river, sold their land for sixty-thousand dollars at

the highest pitch of the oil-excitement around Foster. This was more

money than the pair had ever before seen, much less expected to handle

and own. It was paid in bank-notes at noon and the log-house was to be

vacated next day. Towards evening the poor old woman burst into tears

and insisted that her husband should give back the money to the man that

“wanted to rob them of their home.” She was inconsolable, declaring they

would be “turned out to starve, without a roof to cover them.” The idea

that sixty-thousand dollars would buy an ideal home brought no comfort

to the simple-minded creature, whose hopes and ambitions were confined

to the lowly abode that had sheltered her for a half-century. A promise

to settle near her brother in Ohio reconciled her somewhat, but it

almost broke her faithful heart to leave a spot endeared by many tender

associations. John Howard Payne, himself a homeless wanderer, whose song

has been sung in every tongue and echoed in every soul, jingled by

innumerable hand-organs and played by the masters of music, was right:

“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”

The refusal of his wife to sign the deed conveying the property enabled

a wealthy Franklinite to gather a heap of money. The tract was rough and

unproductive and the owner proposed to accept for it the small sum

offered by a neighboring farmer, who wanted more pasture for his cattle.

For the first time in her life the wife declined to sign a paper at her

husband’s request, saying she had a notion the farm would be valuable

some day. The purchaser refused to take it subject to a dower and the

land lay idle. At length oil-developments indicated that the “belt” ran

through the farm. Scores of wells yielded freely, netting the land-owner

a fortune and convincing him that womanly intuition is a sure winner.

A citizen of Franklin, noted for his conscientiousness and liberality,

was interested in a test-well at the beginning of the Scrubgrass

development. He vowed to set aside one-fourth of his portion of the

output of the well “for the Lord,” as he expressed it. To the delight of

the owners, who thought the venture hazardous, the well showed for a

hundred barrels when the tubing was put in. On his way back from the

scene the Franklin gentleman did a little figuring, which proved that

the Lord’s percentage of the oil might foot up fifty dollars a day. This

was a good deal of money for religious purposes. The maker of the vow

reflected that the Lord could get along without so much cash and he

decided to clip the one-fourth down to one-tenth, arguing that the

latter was the scripture limit. Talking it over with his wife, she

advised him to stick to his original determination and not trifle with

the Lord. The husband took his own way, as husbands are prone to do, and

revisited the well next day. Something had gone wrong with the

working-valve, the tubing had to be drawn out and the well never pumped

a barrel of oil! The disappointed operator concluded, as he charged two

thousand dollars to his profit-and-loss account, that it was not the

Lord who came out at the small end of the horn in the transaction.

[Illustration: REV. C. A. ADAMS, D.D.]

[Illustration: REV. EZRA F. CRANE, D.D.]

Rev. Clarence A. Adams, the eloquent ex-pastor of the First Baptist

Church at Franklin, is the lucky owner of a patch of paying territory at

Raymilton. Recently he finished a well which pumped considerable

salt-water with the oil. Contrary to Cavendish and the ordinary custom,

another operator drilled very close to the boundary of the Adams lease

and torpedoed the well heavily. Instead of sucking the oil from the

preacher’s nice pumper, the new well took away most of the salt-water

and doubled the production of petroleum! Commonly it would seem rather

mean to rob a Baptist minister of water, but in this case Dr. Adams is

perfectly resigned to the loss of aqueous fluid and gain of dollar-fifty

crude. A profound student of Shakespeare, Browning and the Bible, a

brilliant lecturer and master of pulpit-oratory, may he also stand on a

lofty rung of the greasian ladder and attain the goodly age of

Franklin’s “grand old man,” Rev. Dr. Crane. This “father in Israel,”

whose death in February of 1896 the whole community mourned, left a

record of devoted service as a physician and clergyman for over sixty

years that has seldom been equaled. He healed the sick, smoothed the

pillow of the dying, relieved the distressed, reclaimed the erring,

comforted the bereaved, turned the faces of the straying Zionward and

found the passage to the tomb “a gentle wafting to immortal life.” Let

his memory be kept green.

“Though old, he still retained

His manly sense and energy of mind.

Virtuous and wise he was, but not severe,

For he remembered that he once was young;

His kindly presence checked no decent joy.

Him e’en the dissolute admired. Can he be dead

Whose spiritual influence is upon his kind?”

The late Thomas McDonough, a loyal-hearted son of the Emerald Isle, was

also an energetic operator in the lubricating region. He had an

abundance of rollicking wit, “the pupil of the soul’s clear eye,” and an

unfailing supply of the drollest stories. Desiring to lease a farm in

Sandy-Creek township, supposed to be squarely “on the belt,” he started

at daybreak to interview the owner, feeling sure his mission would

succeed. An unexpected sight presented itself through the open door, as

the visitor stepped upon the porch of the dwelling. The farmer’s wife

was setting the table for breakfast and Frederic Prentice was folding a

paper carefully. McDonough realized in a twinkling that Prentice had

secured the lease and his trip was fruitless. “I am looking for John

Smith” he stammered, as the farmer invited him to enter, and beat a

hasty retreat. For years his friends rallied the Colonel on his search

and would ask with becoming solemnity whether he had discovered John

Smith. The last time we met in Philadelphia this incident was revived

and the query repeated jocularly. The jovial McDonough died in 1894. It

is safe to assume that he will easily find numerous John Smiths in the

land of perpetual reunion. One day he told a story in an office on

Thirteenth street, Franklin, which tickled the hearers immensely. A

full-fledged African, who had been sweeping the back-room, broke into a

tumultuous laugh. At that moment a small boy was riding a donkey

directly in front of the premises. The jackass heard the peculiar laugh

and elevated his capacious ears more fully to take in the complete

volume of sound. He must have thought the melody familiar and believed

he had stumbled upon a relative. Despite the frantic exertions of the

boy, the donkey rushed towards the building whence the boisterous guffaw

proceeded, shoved his head inside the door and launched a terrific bray.

The bystanders were convulsed at this evidence of mistaken identity,

which the jolly story-teller frequently rehearsed for the delectation of

his hosts of friends.

[Illustration: THOMAS M’DONOUGH.]

Looking over the Milton diggings one July day, Col. McDonough met an

amateur-operator who was superintending the removal of a wooden-tank

from a position beside his first and only well. A discussion started

regarding the combustibility of the thick sediment collected on the

bottom of the tank. The amateur maintained the stuff would not burn and

McDonough laughingly replied, “Well, just try it and see!” The fellow

lighted a match and applied it to the viscid mass before McDonough could

interfere, saying with a grin that he proposed to wait patiently for the

result. He didn’t have to wait “until Orcus would freeze over and the

boys play shinny on the ice.” In the ninetieth fraction of a second the

deposit blazed with intense enthusiasm, quickly enveloping the well-rig

and the surroundings in flames. Clouds of smoke filled the air,

suggesting fancies of Pittsburg or Sheol. Charred fragments of the

derrick, engine-house and tank, with an acre of blackened territory over

which the burning sediment had spread, demonstrated that the amateur’s

idea had been decidedly at fault. The experiment convinced him as

searchingly as a Roentgen ray that McDonough had the right side of the

argument. “If the ‘b. s.’ had been as green as the blamed fool, it

wouldn’t have burned,” was the Colonel’s appropriate comment.

Miss Lizzie Raymond, daughter of the pioneer who founded Raymilton and

erected the first grist-mill at Utica, has long taught the infant-class

of the Presbyterian Sunday-school at Franklin. Once the lesson was about

the wise and the foolish virgins, the good teacher explaining the

subject in a style adapted to the juvenile mind. A cute little tot,

impressed by the sad plight of the virgins who had no oil in their

lamps, innocently inquired: “Miss ’Aymond, tan’t oo tell ’em dirls to

turn to our house an’ my papa ’ll div’ ’em oil f’um his wells?” Heaven

bless the children that come as sunbeams to lighten our pathway, to

teach us lessons of unselfishness and prevent the rough world from

turning our hearts as hard as the mill-stone.

Judge Trunkey, who presided over the Venango court a dozen years and was

then elected to the Supreme Bench, was hearing a case of desertion. An

Oil-City lawyer, proud of his glossy black beard, represented the

forsaken wife, a comely young woman from Petroleum Centre, who dandled a

bright baby of twenty months on her knee. Mother and baby formed a

pretty picture and the lawyer took full advantage of it in his closing

appeal to the jury. At a brilliant climax he turned to his client and

said: “Let me have the child!” He was raising it to his arms, to hold

before the men in the box and describe the heinous meanness of the

wretch who could leave such beauty and innocence to starve. The baby

spoiled the fun by springing up, clutching the attorney’s beard and

screaming: “Oh, papa!” The audience fairly shrieked. Judge Trunkey

laughed until the tears flowed and it was five minutes before order

could be restored. That ended the oratory and the jury salted the

defendant handsomely. Hon. James S. Connelly, an Associate Judge, who

now resides in Philadelphia and enjoys his well-earned fortune, was also

on the bench at the moment. Judge Trunkey, one of the purest, noblest

men and greatest jurists that ever shed lustre upon Pennsylvania, passed

to his reward six years ago.

In your wide peregrinations from the poles to the equator,

Should you hear some ignoramus—let out of his incubator—

Say the heavy-oil of Franklin is not earth’s best lubricator,

Do as did renown’d Tom Corwin, the great Buckeye legislator,

When a jabberwock in Congress sought to brand him as a traitor,

Just “deny the allegation and defy the allegator!”

[Illustration: MILLER & SIBLEY’S PROSPECT-HILL STOCK FARM FRANKLIN, PA.]

KEEPING STEP.

The Shasta was Karns City’s first well.

Missouri has two wells producing oil.

North Dakota has traces of natural-gas.

Ninety wells in Japan pump four-hundred barrels.

Elk City, in the Clarion field, once had two-thousand population.

The Rob Roy well, at Karns City, has produced a quarter-million barrels

of oil.

Alaska-oil is cousin of asphalt-pitch, very heavy, and thick as

New-Orleans molasses in midwinter.

Wade Hampton, postmaster of Pittsburg, and cousin of Governor Wade

Hampton, organized one of the first petroleum companies in the United

States.

General Herman Haupt, of Philadelphia, now eighty-one years old,

surveyed the route and constructed the first pipe-line across

Pennsylvania.

Robert Nevin, founder of the Pittsburg _Times_, drilled a dry-hole

four-hundred feet, ten miles west of Greensburg, in 1858, a year before

Drake’s successful experiment in Oil Creek.

The Powell Oil-Company, superintended by Col. A. C. Ferris, still a

resident of New York, paid fifty-thousand dollars in cash for the Shirk

farm, half way between Franklin and Oil City, drilled a dry-hole and

abandoned the property.

The gentle wife who seeks your faults to cover

You don’t deserve; prize naught on earth above her;

Keep step and be through life her faithful lover.

The new town of Guffey, the liveliest in Colorado, thirty miles from

Cripple Creek, is fitly named in honor of James M. Guffey, the

successful Pennsylvania oil-producer and political leader, who has big

mining interests in that section.

The Fonner pool, Greene county, was the oil-sensation of 1897 in

Pennsylvania. The Fonner well, struck in March, and territory around it

sold for two-hundred-thousand dollars. Elk Fork wore the West-Virginia

belt, Peru took the Hoosier biscuit and Lucas county the Buckeye

premium.

Say, boys, seein’ how fast th’ ranks iz thinnin’—

Th’ way thar droppin’ out sets my head spinnin’—

An’ knownin’ ez how death may take an innin’

An’ clean knock out our underpinnin’,

I kalkilate we oughter swar off sinnin’,

Jes’ quit fer keeps our dog-gon’ chinnin’,

Start in th’ narrer road fer a beginning’,

An’ so strike oil in Heav’n fer a sure winnin’

When up the golden-stairs we goes a-shinnin’.

When the biggest well in Indiana flowed oil fifty feet above the

derrick, at Van Buren, a local paper noted the effect thus: “The strike

has given the town a tremendous boom. Several real-estate offices have

opened and the town-council has raised the license for faro-banks from

five dollars a year to twelve dollars.” At this rate Van Buren ought

soon to be in the van.

[Illustration:

JOHN VANAUSDALL. WM. PHILLIPS.

GEO. K. ANDERSON.

F. S. TARBELL. F. W. ANDREWS.

ORIGINAL D. W. KENNEY’S ALLEMAGOOZELUM-CITY WELL No 2.

CAPT. WM. HASSON. JOHN P. ZANE.

HENRY R. ROUSE.

]

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.

----------

“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._

----------

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!

[Illustration: “POMEROY’S EXPRESS” BETWEEN SHAFFER AND OIL CITY.]

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.

[Illustration: SAMUEL S. FERTIG.]

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.

[Illustration: GEORGE W. DELAMATER.]

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.”

[Illustration: STUCK IN A MUDHOLE NEAR THE SHERMAN WELL IN 1862.]

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!

[Illustration: JOHN FERTIG. \CAPT. A. B. FUNK.]

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.”

[Illustration: PIONEER AS IT LOOKED IN 1864-5.]

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!

[Illustration]

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.

[Illustration: DR. M. C. EGBERT.]

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.”

[Illustration:

ISAAC N. PHILLIPS CHARLES M. PHILLIPS JOHN T. PHILLIPS

THOS. M. PHILLIPS

]

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.