George K. Anderson figured conspicuously in this latitude, his receipts

for two years exceeding five-thousand dollars a day! He built a

sumptuous residence at Titusville, sought political preferment and

served a term in the State Senate. Holding a vast block of

Pacific-Railroad stock, he was the bosom friend of the directors and

trusted lieutenant of William H. Kemble, the Philadelphia magnate whose

“addition, division and silence” gave him notoriety. He bought thousands

of acres of land, plunged deeply into stocks and insured his life for

three-hundred-and-fifteen-thousand dollars, at that time the largest

risk in the country. If he sneezed or coughed the agents of the

insurance-companies grew nervous and summoned a posse of doctors to

consult about the case. Outside speculations swamped him at last. The

stately mansion, piles of bonds and scores of farms passed under the

sheriff’s hammer in 1880. Plucky and unconquerable, Anderson tried his

hand in the Bradford field, operating on Harrisburg Run. The result was

discouraging and he entered an insurance-office in New York. Five years

ago he accepted a government-berth in New Mexico. Meeting him on

Broadway the week before he left New York, his buoyant spirits seemed

depressed. He spoke regretfully of his approaching departure, yet hoped

it might turn out advantageously. He arrived at his post, sickened and

died in a few days, “a stranger in a strange land.” Relatives and loved

ones were far away when he went down into the starless night of the

grave. No gentle wife or child or valued friend was there to smooth the

pillow of the dying man, to cool the fevered brow, to catch the last

whisper, to close the glassy eyes and fold the rigid hands above the

lifeless breast. The oil-regions abound with pathetic experiences, but

none surpassing George K. Anderson’s. Wealthy beyond the dreams of

avarice, the courted politician, the confidant of presidents and

statesmen, a social favorite in Washington and Harrisburg, the owner of

a home beautiful as Claude Melnotte pictured to Pauline, he drained the

cup of sorrow and misfortune. Reverses beset him, his riches took wings,

bereavements bore heavily upon him, he was glad to secure a humble

clerkship, and death ended the sad scene in a distant territory. Does

not human life contain more tears than smiles, more pain than pleasure,

more cloud than sunshine in the passage from the cradle to the tomb?

Frank W. Andrews, born in Vermont and reared in Ohio, taught school in

Missouri, hunted for gold at Pike’s Peak and landed on Oil Creek in the

winter of 1863-4. Hauling oil nine months supplied funds to operate on

Cherrytree Run. He drilled four dry holes. One on the McClintock farm

and three more on Pithole Creek followed. This was not a flattering

start, but Andrews had lots of sand and persistence. Emerging from the

Pithole excitement with limited cash and unlimited machinery, he

returned to Oil Creek and operated extensively. His first well at

Pioneer flowed three-hundred barrels a day. Fifty others at Shamburg, on

the Benninghoff farm and Cherrytree Run brought him hundreds of

thousands of dollars. He was rated at three-millions in 1870. Keeping up

with the tidal wave southward, he put down two-hundred wells in the

Franklin, Clarion and Butler districts. Failures of banks and

manufactories in which he had a large stake shattered his fortune. With

the loss of money he did not lose his manliness and self-reliance. In

the Bradford region he pressed forward vigorously. Again he “plucked the

flower of success” and was fast recuperating when thrown from his horse

and fatally injured. Upright, unassuming and refined, Andrews merited

the confidence and esteem of all.

The bluff overlooking Petroleum Centre from the east formed the western

side of the McCray farm. At its base, on the Hyde & Egbert plot, were

several of the finest wells in Pennsylvania, the Coquette almost

touching McCray’s line. Dr. M. C. Egbert leased part of the slope and

drilled three wells. Other parties drilled five and the eight behaved so

handsomely that the owner of the land declined an offer, in 1865, of a

half-million dollars for his eighty acres. A well on top of the hill,

not deep enough to hit the sand and supposed to be dry, postponed

further operations five years. His friends distanced Jeremiah in their

lamentations that McCray had spurned the five-hundred-thousand dollars.

He may have thought of Shakespeare’s “tide in the affairs of men,” but

he sawed wood and said nothing. Jonathan Watson, advised by a

clairvoyant, in the spring of 1870 drilled a three-hundred-barrel well

on the uplands of the Dalzell farm, close to the southern boundary of

the McCray. The clairvoyant’s astonishing guess revived interest in

Petroleum Centre, which for a year or two had been on the down grade.

Besieged for leases, McCray could not meet a tithe of the demand at

one-thousand dollars an acre and half the oil. Derricks clustered

thickly. Every well tapped the pool underlying fifteen acres, pumping as

if drawing from a lake of petroleum. Within four months the daily

production was three-thousand barrels. This meant nineteen-hundred

barrels for the land-owner—fifteen-hundred from royalty and four-hundred

from wells he had drilled—a regular income of nine-thousand dollars a

day! Cipher it out—nineteen-hundred barrels at four-fifty to five

dollars, with eleven-hundred barrels for the lessees—and what do you

find? Fourteen-thousand dollars a day for the last quarter of 1870 and

nine months of 1871, from one-sixth of a farm sold in 1850 for

seventeen-hundred dollars! Say, how was that for high?

James S. McCray, a farmer’s son, born in 1824 on the flats below

Titusville, at twenty-two set out for himself with two dollars in his

pocket. Working three years in a saw-mill on the Allegheny, he saved his

earnings and in 1850 was able to buy a team and take up the farm decreed

to enrich him beyond his wildest fancies. He married Miss Martha G.

Crooks, a willing helpmeet in adversity and wise counsellor in

prosperity. His first venture in oil, a share in a two-acre lease at

Rouseville, he sold to drill a well on the Blood farm, elbowing his own.

From this he realized seventy-thousand dollars. For his own farm he

refused a million dollars in 1871. Sharpers dogged his footsteps and

endeavored to rope him into all sorts of preposterous schemes. He told

me one project, which was expected to control the coal-trade of the

region, bled him two-hundred-and-sixty-thousand dollars! Instead of

selling his oil right along, at an average figure of nearly five

dollars, he stored two-hundred-thousand barrels in iron-tanks, to await

higher prices. In my presence H. I. Beers, of McClintockville, bid him

five-thirty-five a barrel for the lot. McCray stuck out for five-fifty.

He kept the oil for years, losing thousands of barrels by leakage and

evaporation, and sold the bulk of it at one to two dollars. Had he dealt

with Beers he would have been six-hundred-thousand dollars richer! Mr.

McCray removed to Franklin in 1872 and died some years ago. He rests in

the cemetery beside his faithful wife and only daughter. The wells on

his farm drooped and withered and the famous fifteen-acre field has long

been a pasture. A robust character, strong-willed and kindly, sometimes

queerly contradictory and often misjudged, James S. McCray could adopt

the words of King Lear: “I am a man more sinned against than sinning.”

[Illustration:

HYDE & EGBERT TRACT AND McCRAY FARM IN 1870.

JAS. S. McCRAY FARM. JAS. S. McCRAY.

]

The Dalzell or Hayes farm, on which the first well—fifty barrels—was

drilled in 1861, boasted the Porcupine, Rhinoceros, Ramcat, Wildcat, and

a menagerie of thirty others ranging from ten barrels to three-hundred.

At the north end of the farm, in the rear of the Maple-Shade and Jersey

wells, the Petroleum Shaft-and-Mining-Company attempted to sink a hole

seven feet by seventeen to the third sand. The shaft was dug and blasted

one-hundred feet, at immense cost. The funds ran out, gas threatened to

asphyxiate the workmen, the big pumps could not exhaust the water and

the absurd undertaking was abandoned.

The story of the Story farm does not lack romantic ingredients. William

Story owned five-hundred acres south of the G. W. McClintock farm, Oil

Creek, the Dalzell and Tarr farms bounding his land on the east. He sold

in 1859 to Ritchie, Hartje & Co., of Pittsburg, for thirty-thousand

dollars. George H. Bissell had negotiated for the property, but Mrs.

Story objected to signing the deed. Next day Bissell returned to offer

the wife a sufficient inducement, but the Pittsburg agent had been there

the previous evening and secured her signature to the Ritchie-Hartje

deed by the promise of a silk dress! Thus a twenty-dollar gown changed

the ultimate ownership of millions of dollars! The long-haired novelist,

who soars into the infinite and dives into the unfathomable, may try to

imagine what the addition of a new bonnet would have accomplished.

The seven Pittsburgers organized a stock company in 1860 to

develop the farm. By act of Legislature this was incorporated on

May first, 1861, as the Columbia Oil-Company, with a nominal

capital of two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars—ten-thousand

shares of twenty-five dollars each. Twenty-one-thousand barrels of

oil were produced in 1861 and ninety-thousand in 1862, shares

selling at two to ten dollars. Foreign demand for oil improved

matters. On July eighth, 1863, the first dividend of thirty per

cent. was declared, followed in August and September by two of

twenty-five per cent. and in October by one of fifty per cent.

Four dividends, aggregating one-hundred-and-sixty per cent., were

declared the first six months of 1864. The capital was increased

to two-and-a-half-millions, by calling in the old stock and giving

each holder of a twenty-five-dollar share five new ones of fifty

dollars apiece. Four-hundred per cent. were paid on this capital

in six years. The original stockholders received their money back

_forty-three_ times and had ten times their first stock to keep on

drawing fat dividends! Suppose a person had bought one-hundred

shares in 1862 at two dollars, in eight years he would have been

paid one-hundred-and-seven-thousand dollars for his two hundred

and have five-hundred fifty-dollar shares on hand! From a mere

speck of the Story farm the Columbia Oil-Company in ten years

produced oil that sold for ten-millions of dollars! Wonder not

that men, dazzled by such returns, blind to the failures that

littered the oily domain, clutched at the veriest phantoms in the

mad craze for boundless wealth.

Splendidly managed throughout, the policy of the Columbia Company was to

operate its lands systematically. Wells were not drilled at random over

the farm, nor were leases granted to speculators. There was no effort to

make a big showing of production and exhaust the territory in the

shortest time possible. For twenty-five years the Story farm yielded

profitably. The wells, never amazingly large, held on tenaciously. The

Ladies’ well produced sixty-five-thousand barrels, the Floral

sixty-thousand, the Big Tank fifty-thousand, the Story Centre

forty-five-thousand, the Breedtown forty-thousand, the Cherry Run

fifty-five-thousand, the Titus pair one-hundred-thousand and the Perry

thirty-five-thousand. The company erected machine-shops, built houses

for employés, and the village of Columbia prospered. The Columbia Cornet

Band, superbly appointed, its thirty members in rich uniforms, its

instruments the finest and its drum-major an acrobatic revelation, could

have given Gilmore’s or Sousa’s points in ravishing music. G. S.

Bancroft superintended the wells and D. H. Boulton, now of Franklin,

assisted President D. B. Stewart, of Pittsburg, in conducting affairs

generally. The village has vanished, the cornet band is hushed forever,

the fields are the prey of weeds and underbrush and brakemen no more

call out “Columby!” A few small wells, hidden amid the hills, produce a

morsel of oil, but the farm, despoiled of sixteen-million dollars of

greasy treasure, would not bring one-fourth the price paid William Story

for it in the fall of 1859. “So passes away earthly glory” is as true

to-day as when Horace evolved the classic phrase two-thousand years ago.

“Man wants but little, nor that little long;

How soon must he resign his very dust,

Which frugal nature lent him for an hour!”

On the east side of Oil Creek, opposite the southern half of the Story

farm, James Tarr owned and occupied a triangular tract of two-hundred

acres. He was a strong-limbed, loud-voiced, stout-hearted son of toil,

farming in summer and hauling lumber in winter to support his family.

Although uneducated, he had plenty of “horse sense” and native wit. His

quaint speech coined words and terms that are entrenched firmly in the

nomenclature of Oildom. Funny stories have been told at his expense. One

of these, relating to his daughter, whom he had taken to a seminary, has

appeared in hundreds of newspapers. According to the revised version,

the principal of the school expressing a fear that the girl had not

“capacity,” the fond father, profoundly ignorant of what was meant, drew

a roll of greenbacks from his pocket and exclaimed: “Damn it, that’s

nothing! Buy her one and here’s the stuff to pay for it!” The fact that

it is pure fiction may detract somewhat from the piquancy of this

incident. Tarr realized his own deficiencies from lack of schooling and

spared no pains, when the golden stream flowed his way, to educate the

children dwelling in the old home on the south end of the farm. His

daughters were bright, good-looking, intelligent girls. Scratching the

barren hills for a meager corn-crop, hunting rabbits on Sundays, rafting

in the spring and fall and teaming while snow lasted barely sufficed to

keep the gaunt wolf of hunger from the door of many a hardy Oil-Creek

settler. To their credit be it said, most of the land-owners whom

petroleum enriched took care of their money. Rough diamonds, uncut and

unpolished, they possessed intrinsic worth. James Tarr was of the number

who did not lose their heads and squander their substance. The richest

of them all, he bought a delightful home near Meadville, provided every

comfort and convenience, spent his closing years enjoyably and died in

1871. “Put yourself in his place” and, candidly, would you have done

better?

For himself, George B. Delamater and L. L. Lamb, in the summer of 1860

Orange Noble leased seven acres of the Tarr farm, at the bend in Oil

Creek. Dry holes the partners “kicked down” on the Stackpole and Jones

farms dampening their ardor, they let the Tarr lease lie dormant some

months. Contracting with a Townville neighbor—N. S. Woodford—to juggle

the “spring-pole,” he cracked the first sand in June, 1861. The Crescent

well—so called because the faith of the owners was increasing—tipped the

beam at five-hundred barrels. The first well on the Tarr farm, it flowed

an average of three-hundred barrels a day for thirteen months, quitting

without notice. Cleaning it out, drilling it deeper and pumping it for

weeks were of no avail. Not a drop of oil could be extracted and the

Crescent was abandoned. Crude was so low during most of its

existence—ten to twenty-five cents—that the well, although it produced

one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand barrels, did not pay the owners a dollar

of profit! Drilling, royalty and tankage absorbed every nickel. Like the

victories of Pyrrhus, the more such strikes a fellow achieved the sooner

he would be undone!

On the evening of August first, 1861, as James Tarr sat eating his

supper of fried pork and johnny-cake, Heman Janes, of Erie, entered the

room. “Tarr,” he said, “I’ll give you sixty-thousand dollars in spot

cash for your farm!” Tarr almost fell off his chair. A year before

one-thousand dollars would have been big money for the whole plantation.

“I mean it,” continued the visitor; “if you take me up I’ll close the

deal right here!” Tarr “took him up” and the deal, which included a

transfer of several leases, was closed quickly. Janes planked down the

sixty-thousand and Tarr, within an hour, had stepped from poverty to

affluence. This was the first large _cash_ transaction in oil-lands on

the creek and people promptly pronounced Janes a fool of the

thirty-third degree. An Irishman, on trial for stealing a sheep, asked

by the judge whether he was guilty or not guilty, replied: “How can I

tell till I hear the ividence?” Don’t endorse the Janes verdict “till

you hear the ividence.”

A short distance below the Crescent well William Phillips, who had

leased a narrow strip the entire length of the farm, was also urging a

“spring-pole” actively. Born in Westmoreland county in 1824, he passed

his boyhood on a farm and earned his first money mining coal. Saving his

hard-won wages, he bought the keel-boat Orphan Boy and started

freighting on the Ohio and Allegheny rivers. The business proving

remunerative, he drilled salt-wells at Bull Creek and Wildcat Hollow. On

his last trip from Warren to Pittsburg, in September of 1859, he noticed

a scum of oil in front of Thomas Downing’s farm, where South Oil City

now stands. The story of the Drake well was in everybody’s mouth and it

occurred to Phillips that he could increase his growing fortune by

drilling on the Downing land. At Pittsburg he consulted Charles

Lockhart, William Frew, Captain Kipp and John Vanausdall and with them

formed the partnership of Phillips, Frew & Co. Returning at once, he

leased from Downing, erected a pole-derrick and proceeded to bore a well

on the water’s edge. With no machine-shops, tools or appliances nearer

than Pittsburg, a hundred-and-thirty miles off, difficulties of all

kinds retarded the work nine months. Finally the job was completed and

the Albion well, pumping forty barrels a day, raised a commotion.

The Albion brought Phillips to the front as an oil-operator. James Tarr

readily leased him part of his farm and he began Phillips No. 1 well in

the spring of 1861. The Crescent’s unexpected success spurred him to

greater efforts. Hurrying an engine and boiler from Pittsburg, he

started his second well on the flat hugging the stream twenty rods north

of the Crescent. Steam-power rushed the tools at a boom-de-ay gait. The

first sand, from which meanwhile No. 1 was rivaling the Crescent’s

yield, had not a pinch of oil. The solid-silver lining of the

petroleum-cloud assumed a plated look, but Phillips heeded it not. An

expert driller, he hustled the tools and on October nineteenth, at

four-hundred-and-eighty feet, pierced the shell above the third sand. At

dusk he shut down for the night. The weather was clear and the moon

shone brightly. Suddenly a vivid flame illumined the sky. Reuben

Painter’s well on the Blood farm, a mile southward, had caught fire and

blazed furiously. The rare spectacle of a burning well attracted

everybody for miles. Phillips and Janes were among those who hastened to

the fire, returning about midnight. An hour later they were summoned

from bed by a man yelling at the Ella-Yaw pitch: “The Phillips is

bu’sted and runnin’ down the creek!” People ran to the spot on the

double-quick, past the Crescent and down the bank. Gas was settling

densely upon the flats and into the creek oil was pouring lavishly.

Dreading a fire, lights were extinguished on the adjoining tracts and

needful precautions taken. For three or four days the flow raged

unhindered, then a lull occurred and tubing was inserted. After the

seed-bag swelled, a stop-cock was placed on the tubing and thenceforth

it was easy to regulate the flow. When oil was wanted the stop-cock was

opened and wooden troughs conveyed the stuff to boats drawn up the creek

by horses, the chief mode of transportation for years. The oil was

forty-four gravity and four-thousand barrels a day gushed out! In June

of 1862, when Phillips and Major Frew, with their wives and a party of

friends, inspected the well, a careful gauge showed it was doing

thirty-six-hundred-and-sixty barrels! The Phillips well held the

champion-belt twenty-seven years. It produced until 1871, getting down

to ten or twelve barrels and ceasing altogether the night James Tarr

expired, having yielded nearly _one-million_ barrels! Cargoes of the oil

were sold to boatmen at five cents a barrel, thousands of barrels were

wasted, tens of thousands were stored in underground tanks and much was

sold at three to thirteen dollars.

[Illustration: WOODFORD WELL. TARR FARM IN 1862. PHILLIPS WELL.]

N. S. Woodford, Noble & Delamater’s contractor, had the foresight to

lease the ground between the Crescent and the Phillips No. 2. His

three-thousand barreler, finished in December, 1861, drew its grist from

the Phillips crevice and interfered with the mammoth gusher. When the

two became pumpers neither would give out oil unless both were worked.

If one was stopped the other pumped water. Ultimately the Phillips crowd

paid Woodford a half-million for his well and lease, a wad for which a

man would ford even the atrocious Tarr-farm mud and complacently whistle

“Ta-ra-ra.” He retired to his pleasant home, with six-hundred-thousand

dollars to show for eighteen months’ operations on Oil Creek, and never

bothered any more about oil. The Woodford well repaid its enormous cost.

Lockhart and Frew bought out their partners at a high price and put the

Phillips-Woodford interests into a stock-company capitalized at

two-million dollars. The Phillips well—one result of a keen-eyed

boatman’s observing an oily scum on the Allegheny River—enriched all

concerned. Had Phillips failed to see the speck of grease that September

day, who can tell how different oil-region history might have been?

Happily for a good many persons, the Orphan Boy was not one of the

“Ships that Pass in the Night.” What a field Oil Creek presents for the

fervid fancy of a Dumas, a Dickens, a Wilkie Collins or a Charles Reade!

Comrades in business and good-fellowship, William Phillips and John

Vanausdall removed to South Oil-City, lived neighbors and died twenty

years ago. They resembled each other in appearance and temper, in

charitable impulse and kindness to the poor. Phillips drilled dozens of

wells—none of them dry—aided Oil-City enterprises and was a member of

the shipping firm of Munhall & Co. until its dissolution in 1876. He was

the first man to ship oil by steamer, the Venango taking the first load

to Pittsburg, and the first to run crude in bulk down the creek. One

son, John C. Phillips, and a married daughter live at Oil City and two

sons at Freeport.

[Illustration: HEMAN JANES.]

Heman Janes, of Erie, the first purchaser of the Tarr farm, from 1850 to

1861 shipped large quantities of lumber to the eastern market. Passing

through Canada in 1858, he heard oil was obtained from gum-beds in

Lambton county, south of Lake Huron, and visited the place. John

Williams was dipping five barrels a day from a hole ten feet square and

twenty feet deep. The best gum-beds spread over two-hundred acres of

timbered land, which Mr. Janes bought at nine dollars an acre, the owner

selling because “the stinking oil smelled five miles off.” Leasing

four-hundred acres more, in 1860 he sold a half-interest in both tracts

for fifteen-thousand dollars and retired from lumbering to devote his

attention to oil. Large wells on his Canadian lands enabled him to sell

the second half of the property in 1865 for fifty-five-thousand dollars.

In February, 1861, he secured a thirty-day option on the J. Buchanan

farm, the site of Rouseville, and tendered the price at the stipulated

time, but the transaction fell through. In March of that year he went to

West Virginia and leased one-thousand acres on the Kanawha River,

including the famous “Burning Spring.” U. E. Everett & Co. agreed to pay

fifty-thousand dollars for one-half interest in the property, at

Parkersburg, on April twelfth. All parties met, a certified check was

laid on the table and Attorney J. B. Blair started to draw the papers.

At that moment a boy ran past, shouting: “Fort Sumpter’s fired on!” The

gentlemen hurried out to learn the particulars. “The cat came back,” but

Everett didn’t. A message told him to “hold off,” and he is holding off

still. Janes stayed as long as a Northerner dared and was thankful to

sell the batch of leases for seventy-five-hundred dollars. In 1862 he

sued the owners of the Phillips well for his royalty _in barrels_. They

refused to furnish the barrels, which were scarce and expensive, and the

well was shut down for months pending the litigation. The suit was for

one-hundred-and-twelve-thousand dollars, up to that time the largest

amount ever involved in a case before the Venango court. Edwin M.

Stanton, soon to be known as the illustrious War-Secretary, was one

of the attorneys engaged by the plaintiff, for a fee of

twenty-five-thousand dollars. A compromise was arranged for half the

oil. The first oil sold after this agreement was at three dollars a

barrel, taken from the first twelve-hundred-barrel tank ever seen in the

region. A wooden tank of that size excited more curiosity in those days

than a hundred iron-ones of forty-thousand barrels in this year of

grace. Janes sold back half the farm to Tarr for forty-thousand dollars

and two-thirds of the remaining half to Clark & Sumner for

twenty-thousand, leaving him one-sixth clear of cost, the same month he

bought the tract. He first suggested casing wells to exclude the water,

built the first bulk-boat decked over—six-hundred barrels—to transport

oil and was identified with the first practicable pipe-line. Paying

seventy-five-thousand dollars for the Blackmar farm, at Pithole, he

drilled three dry holes and then got rid of the land at a snug advance.

Since 1878 Mr. Janes has been interested in the Bradford field and

living at Erie. A man of forceful character and executive ability,

hearty, vigorous and companionable, he deserves the large measure of

success that rewarded him as an important factor in petroleum-affairs.

In the words of the good Scottish mother to her son: “May your lot be

wi’ the rich in this warld and wi’ the puir in the warld to come.”

The amazing output of the Phillips and Woodford wells stimulated the

demand for territory to the boiling point. Men were infinitely less

eager to “read their title clear to mansions in the skies” than to

secure a title to a fragment of the Tarr farm. Rigs huddled on the bank

and in the water, for nobody thought oil existed back in the hilly

sections. Sixty yards below the Phillips spouter J. F. Crane sank a well

that responded as pleasantly as “the swinging of the crane.” Densmore

Brothers, at the lower end of the farm, drilled a seven-hundred-barreler

late in 1861. A zoological freak introduced the animal-fad, which named

the Elephant, Young Elephant, Tigress, Tiger, Lioness, Scared Cat,

Anaconda and Weasel wells. Reckless speculation held the fort unchecked.

The third sand was sixty feet thick, the territory was durable and

three-hundred walking-beams exhibited “the poetry of motion” to the

music of three-four-five-six-eight-ten-dollar oil. Mr. Janes built a

commodious hotel and a town of two-thousand population flourished. James

Tarr sold his entire interest in 1865, for gold equivalent to

two-millions in currency, and removed to Crawford county. Another

million would hardly cover his royalties. Three-million dollars ahead of

the game in four years, he could afford to smile at the jibes of

small-souled retailers of witless ridicule. If “money talks,”

three-millions ought to be pretty eloquent. The churches, stores,

houses, offices, wells and tanks have “gone glimmering.” Tarr-Farm

station appears no more on railroad time-tables. Modern maps do not

reveal it. Few know and fewer care who owns the place once the apple of

the oilman’s eye, now a shadowy relic not worth carting off in a

wheelbarrow!

Producers have enjoyed quite a reputation for “resolving,” and the first

meeting ever held to regulate the price of crude was at Tarr farm in

1861. The moving spirits were Mr. Janes, General James Wadsworth and

Josiah Oakes, the latter a New-York capitalist. The idea was to raise

five-hundred-thousand dollars and buy up the territory for ten miles

along Oil Creek. Wadsworth and Oakes raised over three-hundred-thousand

dollars for this purpose, when the panic arising from the war ended the

scheme. A contract was also made with Erie parties to lay a four-inch

wooden pipe-line from Tarr farm to Oil City. On the advice of Col.

Clark, of Clark & Sumner, and Sir John Hope, the eminent London banker,

it was decided to abandon the project and apply for a charter for a

pipe-line. This was done in the winter of 1861-2, Hon. Morrow B. Lowry,

who represented the district in the State Senate, favoring the

application. Hon. M. C. Beebe, the local member of the Legislature,

opposed it resolutely, because, to quote his own words: “There are

four-thousand teams hauling oil and my constituents won’t stand this

interference.” The measure failing to carry, Clark & Hope built the

Standard refinery at Pittsburg.

Resistance to the South-Improvement-Company welded the producers solidly

in 1872. The refiners organized to force a larger margin between crude

and refined. To offset this and govern the production and sale of crude,

the producers established a “union,” “agencies” and “councils.” In

October of 1872 every well in the region was shut down for thirty days.

The “spirit of seventy-six” was abroad and individual losses were borne

cheerfully for the general good. This was the heroic period, which

demonstrated the manly fiber of the great body of oil-operators. E. E.

Clapp, of President, and Captain William Harson, of Oil City, were the

chief officers of these remarkable organizations. Suspensions of

drilling in 1873-4-5 supplemented the memorable “thirty-day shut-down.”

At length the “union,” the “councils” and the “agencies” wilted and

dissolved. The area of productive territory widened and strong companies

became a necessity to develop it. The big fish swallowed the little

ones, hence the _personal_ feature so pronounced in earlier years has

been almost eliminated. Many of the operators are members of the

Producers’ Association, in which Congressman Phillips, Lewis Emery,

David Kirk and T. J. Vandergrift are prime factors. Its president, Hon.

J. W. Lee, practiced law at Franklin, served twice as State-Senator and

located at Pittsburg last year. He is a cogent speaker, not averse to

legal tilts and not backward flying his colors in the face of the enemy.

South of the Story and Tarr farms, on both sides of Oil Creek, were John

Blood’s four-hundred-and-forty acres. The owner lived in an unpainted,

weatherbeaten frame house. On five acres of the flats the Ocean

Petroleum-Company had twelve flowing wells in 1861. The Maple-Tree

Company’s burning well spouted twenty-five-hundred barrels for several

months, declined to three-hundred in a year and was destroyed by fire in

October of 1862. The flames devastated twenty acres, consuming ten wells

and a hundred tanks of oil, the loss aggregating a million dollars. A

sheet of fire, terribly grand and up to that date the most extensive and

destructive in Oildom, wrapped the flats and the stream. Blood Well No.

1, flowing a thousand barrels, Blood No. 2, flowing six hundred, and

five other gushers never yielded after the conflagration, prior to which

the farm was producing more oil than the balance of the region. Brewer &

Watson, Ballard & Trax, Edward Filkins, Henry Collins, Reuben Painter,

James Burrows and J. H. Duncan were pioneer operators on the tract.

Blood sold in 1863 for five-hundred-and-sixty-thousand dollars and

removed to New York. Buying a brownstone residence on Fifth avenue, he

splurged around Gotham two or three years, quit the city for the country

and died long since. The Blood farm was notably prolific, but its glory

has departed. Stripped bare of derricks, houses, wells and tanks, naught

is left save the rugged hills and sandy banks. “It is no matter, the cat

will mew, the dog will have his day.”

Neighbors of John Blood, a raw-boned native and his wife, enjoyed an

experience not yet forgotten in New York. Selling their farm for big

money, the couple concluded to see Manhattanville and set off in high

glee, arrayed in homespun-clothes of most agonizing country-fashion.

Wags on the farm advised them to go to the Astor House and insist upon

having the finest room in the caravansary. Arriving in New York, they

were driven to the hotel, each carrying a bundle done up in a colored

handkerchief. Their rustic appearance attracted great attention, which

was increased when the man marched to the office-counter and demanded

“the best in the shebang, b’gosh.” The astounded clerk tried to get the

unwelcome guest to go elsewhere, assuring him he must have made a

mistake. The rural delegate did not propose to be bluffed by coaxing or

threats. At length the representative of petroleum wanted to know “how

much it would cost to buy the gol-darned ranche.” In despair the clerk

summoned the proprietor, who soon took in the situation. To humor the

stranger he replied that one-hundred-thousand dollars would buy the

place. The chap produced a pile of bills and tendered him the money on

the spot! Explanations followed, a parlor and bedroom were assigned the

pair and for days they were the lions of the metropolis. Hundreds of

citizens and ladies called to see the innocents who had come on their

“first tower” as green and unsophisticated as did Josiah Allen’s Wife

twenty years later.

Ambrose Rynd, an Irish woolen-factor, bought five-hundred acres from the

Holland Land-Company in 1800 and built a log-cabin at the mouth of

Cherrytree Run. He attained the Nestorian age of ninety-nine. His

grandson, John Rynd, born in the log-cabin in 1815, owned three-hundred

acres of the tract when the petroleum-wave swept Oil Creek. The Blood

farm was north and the Smith east. Cherrytree and Wykle Runs rippled

through the western half of the property, which Oil Creek divided

nicely. Developments in 1861 were on the eastern half. Starting at

five-hundred barrels, the Rynd well flowed until 1863. The Crawford

“saw” the Rynd and “went it one better,” lasting until June of 1864. Six

fair wells were drilled on Rynd Island, a dot at the upper part of the

farm. The Rynd-Farm Oil-Company of New York purchased the tract in 1864.

John Rynd moved to Fayette county and died in the seventies. Hume &

Crawford, Porter & Milroy, B. F. Wren, the Ozark, Favorite, Frost,

Northern and a score of companies operated vigorously. The third sand

thickened and improved with the elevation of the hills. Five refineries

handled a thousand barrels of crude per week. A snug village bloomed on

the west side, the broad flat affording an eligible site. The late John

Wallace and Theodore Ladd were prominent in the later stage of

operations. Cyrus D. Rynd returned in 1881 to take charge of the farm

and served as postmaster six years. Rynd, once plump and juicy, now lean

and desiccated, resembles an orange which a boy has sucked and thrown

away the rind.

Two museum-curio wells on the Rynd farm illustrated practically Chaplain

McCabe’s “Drinking From the Same Canteen.” A dozen strokes of the pump

every hour caused the Agitator to flow ten or fifteen minutes. The pious

Sunday well, its companion, loafed six days in the week while the other

worked, flowing on the Sabbath when the Agitator pump rested from its

labors. This sort of affinity, which cost William Phillips and Noble &

Delamater a mint of money, was evinced most forcibly on the McClintock

farm, west side of Oil Creek, south of Rynd. William McClintock,

original owner of the two-hundred acres, dying in 1859, the widow

remained on the farm with her grandson, John W. Steele, whom the couple

had adopted at a tender age, upon the decease of his mother. Nearly half

the farm was bottom-land, fronting the creek, on the bank of which the

first wells were sunk in 1861. The Vanslyke flowed twelve-hundred

barrels a day, declined slowly and in its third year pumped

fourteen-thousand. The Lloyd, Eastman, Little Giant, Morrison, Hayes &

Merrick, Christy, Ocean, Painter, Sterrett, Chase and sixty more each

put up fifty to four-hundred barrels daily. Directly between the

Vanslyke and Christy, a few rods from either, New-York parties finished

the Hammond well in May, 1864. Starting to flow three-hundred barrels a

day, the Hammond killed the Lloyd and Christy and reduced the Vanslyke

to a ten-barrel pumper. Its triumph was short-lived. Early in June the

New Yorkers, elated over its performance, bought the royalty of the well

and one-third acre of ground for two-hundred thousand dollars. The end

of June the tubing was drawn from the Excelsior well, on the John

McClintock farm, five-hundred yards east, flooding the Hammond and all

the wells in the vicinity. The damage was attributed to Vandergrift &

Titus’s new well a short distance down the flat, nobody imagining it

came from a hole a quarter-mile off. Retubing the Excelsior quickly

restored one-half the Hammond’s yield, which increased as the

Excelsior’s lessened. An adjustment followed, but the final pulling of

the tubing from the Excelsior drowned the affected wells permanently.

Geologists and scientists reveled in the ethics suggested by such

interference, which casing wells has obviated. The Widow-McClintock farm

produced hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil and changed hands

repeatedly. For years it was owned by a man who as a boy blacked

Steele’s boots. In 1892 John Waites renovated a number of the old wells.

Pumping some and plugging others, to shut out water, surprised and

rewarded him with a yield that is bringing him a tidy fortune. The

action of the stream has washed away the ground on which the Vanslyke,

the Sterrett and several of the largest wells were located. “Out, out,

brief candle!”

Mrs. McClintock, like thousands of women since, attempted one day in

March of 1863 to hurry up the kitchen-fire with kerosene. The result was

her fatal burning, death in an hour and the first funeral to the account

of the treacherous oil-can. The poor woman wore coarse clothing, worked

hard and secreted her wealth about the house. Her will, written soon

after McClintock’s exit, bequeathed everything to the adopted heir, John

W. Steele, twenty years old when his grandmother met her tragic fate. At

eighteen he had married Miss M. Moffett, daughter of a farmer in

Sugarcreek township. He hauled oil in 1861 with hired plugs until he

could buy a span of stout horses. Oil-Creek teamsters, proficient in

lurid profanity, coveted his varied stock of pointed expletives. The

blonde driver, of average height and slender build, pleasing in

appearance and address, by no means the unlicked cub and ignorant boor

he has been represented, neither smoke nor drank nor gambled, but “he

could say ‘damn’!” Climbing a hill with a load of oil, the end-board

dropped out and five barrels of crude wabbled over the steep bank. It

was exasperating and the spectators expected a special outburst. Steele

“winked the other eye” and remarked placidly: “Boys, it’s no use trying

to do justice to this occasion.” The shy youth, living frugally and not

the type people would associate with unprecedented antics, was to figure

in song and story and be advertised more widely than the sea-serpent or

Barnum’s woolly-horse. Millions who never heard of John Smith, Dr. Mary

Walker or Baby McKee have heard and read and talked about the

one-and-only “Coal-Oil Johnnie.”

The future candidate for minstrel-gags and newspaper-space was hauling

oil when a neighbor ran to tell him of Mrs. McClintock’s death. He

hastened home. A search of the premises disclosed two-hundred-thousand

dollars the old lady had hoarded. Wm. Blackstone, appointed his

guardian, restricted the minor to a reasonable allowance. The young

man’s conduct was irreproachable until he attained his majority. His

income was enormous. Mr. Blackstone paid him three-hundred-thousand

dollars in a lump and he resolved to “see some of the world.” He saw it,

not through smoked glass either. His escapades supplied no end of

material for gossip. Many tales concerning him were exaggerations and

many pure inventions. Demure, slow-going Philadelphia he colored a

flaming vermilion. He gave away carriages after a single drive, kept

open-house in a big hotel and squandered thousands of dollars a day.

Seth Slocum was “showing him the sights” and he fell an easy victim to

blacklegs and swindlers. He ordered champagne by the dozen baskets and

treated theatrical companies to the costliest wine-suppers. Gay ballet

girls at Fox’s old play-house told spicy stories of these midnight

frolics. To a negro-comedian, who sang a song that pleased him, he

handed a thousand-dollar pin. He would walk the streets with bank-bills

stuck in the buttonholes of his coat for Young America to grab. He

courted club-men and spent cash like the Count of Monte Cristo. John

Morrissey sat a night with him at cards in his Saratoga gambling-house,

cleaning him out of many thousands. Leeches bled him and sharpers

fleeced him mercilessly. He was a spendthrift, but he didn’t light

cigars with hundred-dollar bills, buy a Philadelphia hotel to give a

chum nor destroy money “for fun.” Usually somebody benefited by his

extravagances.

Occasionally his prodigality assumed a sensible phase.

Twenty-eight-hundred dollars, one day’s receipts from his wells and

royalty, went toward the erection of the soldiers’ monument—a

magnificent shaft of white marble—in the Franklin park. Except Dan

Rice’s five-thousand memorial at Girard, Erie county, this was the first

monument in the Union to the fallen heroes of the civil war. Ten, twenty

or fifty dollars frequently gladdened the poor who asked for relief. He

lavished fine clothes and diamonds on a minstrel-troupe, touring the

country and entertaining crowds in the oil-regions. John W. Gaylord, an

artist in burnt-cork and member of the troupe, has furnished these

details:

“Yes. ‘Coal-Oil Johnnie’ was my particular friend in his palmiest days.

I was his room-mate when he cut the shines that celebrated him as the

most eccentric millionaire on earth. I was with the Skiff & Gaylord

minstrels. Johnnie saw us perform in Philadelphia, got stuck on the

business and bought one-third interest in the show. His first move was

to get five-thousand dollars’ worth of woodcuts at his own expense. They

were all the way from a one-sheet to a twenty-four-sheet in size and the

largest amount any concern had ever owned. The cartoon, which attracted

so much attention, of ‘Bring That Skiff Over Here,’ was in the lot. We

went on the road, did a monstrous business everywhere, turned people

away and were prosperous.

“Reaching Utica, N. Y., Johnnie treated to a supper for the company,

which cost one-thousand dollars. He then conceived the idea of traveling

by his own train and purchased an engine, a sleeper and a baggage-car.

Dates for two weeks were cancelled and we went junketing, Johnnie

footing the bills. At Erie we had a five-hundred-dollar supper; and so

it went. It was here that Johnnie bought his first hack. After a short

ride he presented it to the driver. Our dates being cancelled, Johnnie

insisted upon indemnifying us for the loss of time. He paid all

salaries, estimated the probable business receipts upon the basis of

packed houses and paid that also to our treasurer.

“In Chicago he gave another exhibition of his eccentric traits. He

leased the Academy of Music for the season and we did a big business.

Finally he proposed a benefit for Skiff & Gaylord and sent over to rent

the Crosby Opera-House, then the finest in the country. The manager sent

back the insolent reply: ‘We won’t rent our house for an infernal

nigger-show.’ Johnnie got warm in the collar. He went down to their

office in Root & Cady’s music-store.

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

Root.

“‘I don’t want to sell.’

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

“Then Johnnie pulled out a roll from his valise, counted out

two-hundred-thousand dollars and asked Root if that was an object. Mr.

Root was thunderstruck. ‘If you are that kind of a man you can have the

house for the benefit free of charge.’ The benefit was the biggest

success ever known in minstrelsy. The receipts were forty-five-hundred

dollars and more were turned away than could be given admission. Next

day Johnnie hunted up one of the finest carriage-horses in the city and

presented it to Mr. Root for the courtesy extended.

“Oh, Johnnie was a prince with his money. I have seen him spend as high

as one hundred-thousand dollars in one day. That was the time he hired

the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia and wanted to buy the Girard

House. He went to the Continental and politely said to the clerk: ‘Will

you please tell the proprietor that J. W. Steele wishes to see him?’

‘No, sir,’ said the clerk; ‘the landlord is busy.’ Johnnie suggested he

could make it pay the clerk to accommodate the whim. The clerk became

disdainful and Johnnie tossed a bell-boy a twenty-dollar gold-piece with

the request. The result was an interview with the landlord. Johnnie

claimed he had been ill-treated and requested the summary dismissal of

the clerk. The proprietor refused and Johnnie offered to buy the hotel.

The man said he could not sell, because he was not the entire owner. A

bargain was made to lease it one day for eight-thousand dollars. The

cash was paid over and Johnnie installed as landlord. He made me

bell-boy, while Slocum officiated as clerk. The doors were thrown open

and every guest in the house had his fill of wine and edibles free of

cost. A huge placard was posted in front of the hotel: ‘Open house

to-day; everything free; all are welcome!’ It was a merry lark. The

whole city seemed to catch on and the house was full. When Johnnie

thought he had had fun enough he turned the hostelry over to the

landlord, who reinstated the odious clerk. Here was a howdedo. Johnnie

was frantic with rage. He went over to the Girard and tried to buy it.

He arranged with the proprietor to ‘buck’ the Continental by making the

prices so low that everybody would come there. The Continental did

mighty little business so long as the arrangement lasted.

“The day of the hotel-transaction we were up on Arch street. A rain

setting in, Johnnie approached a hack in front of a fashionable store

and tried to engage it to carry us up to the Girard. The driver said it

was impossible, as he had a party in the store. Johnnie tossed him a

five-hundred-dollar bill and the hackman said he would risk it. When we

arrived at the hotel Johnnie said: ‘See here, Cabby, you’re a likely

fellow. How would you like to own that rig?’ The driver thought he was

joking, but Johnnie handed him two-thousand dollars. A half-hour later

the delighted driver returned with the statement that the purchase had

been effected. Johnnie gave him a thousand more to buy a stable and that

man to-day is the wealthiest hack-owner in Philadelphia.”

Steele reached the end of his string and the farm was sold in 1866. When

he was flying the highest Captain J. J. Vandergrift and T. H. Williams

kindly urged him to save some of his money. He thanked them for the

friendly advice, said he had made a living by hauling oil and could do

so again if necessary, but he couldn’t rest until he had spent that

fortune. He spent a million and got the “rest.” Returning to Oildom

“dead broke,” he secured the position of baggage-master at Rouseville

station. He attended to his duties punctually, was a model of domestic

virtue and a most popular, obliging official. Happily his wife had saved

something and the reunited couple got along swimmingly. Next he opened a

meat-market at Franklin, built up a nice business, sold the shop and

moved to Ashland, Nebraska. He farmed, laid up money and entered the

service of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad some years ago as

baggage-master. His manly son, whom he educated splendidly, is

telegraph-operator at Ashland station. The father, “steady as a clock,”

is industrious, reliable and deservedly esteemed. Recently a fresh crop

of stories regarding him has been circulated, but he minds his own

affairs and is not one whit puffed up that the latest rival of Pears and

Babbitt has just brought out a brand of “Coal-Oil Johnnie Soap.”

John McClintock’s farm of two-hundred acres, east of Steele and south of

Rynd, Chase & Alden leased in September of 1859, for one-half the oil.

B. R. Alden was a naval officer, disabled from wounds received in

California, and an oil-seeker at Cuba, New York. A hundred wells

rendered the farm extremely productive. The Anderson, sunk in 1861 near

the southeast corner, on Cherry Run, flowed constantly three years,

waning gradually from two-hundred barrels to twenty. Efforts to stop the

flow in 1862, when oil dropped to ten or fifteen cents, merely imbued it

with fresh vigor. Anderson thought the oil-business had gone to the

bow-wows and deemed himself lucky to get seven-thousand dollars in the

fall for the well. It earned one-hundred-thousand dollars subsequently

and then sold for sixty-thousand. The Excelsior produced fifty-thousand

barrels before the interference with the Hammond destroyed both. The

Wheeler, Wright & Hall, Alice Lee, Jew, Deming, Haines and Taft wells

were choice specimens. William and Robert Orr’s Auburn Oil-Works and the

Pennechuck Refinery chucked six-hundred barrels a week into the stills.

The McClintocks have migrated from Venango. Some are in heaven, some in

Crawford county and some in the west. If Joseph Cooke’s conundrum—“Does

Death End All?”—be negatived, there ought to be a grand reunion when

they meet in the New Jerusalem and talk over their experiences on Oil

Creek.

[Illustration: SAMUEL Q. BROWN, FOSTER W. MITCHELL, JOHN L. MITCHELL]

SAMUEL Q. BROWN

FOSTER W. MITCHELL

JOHN L. MITCHELL

Eight miles east of Titusville, at Enterprise, John L. and Foster W.

Mitchell, sons of a pioneer settler of Allegheny township, were

lumbering and merchandising in 1859. They had worked on the farm and

learned blacksmithing from their father. The report of Col. Drake’s

well stirred the little hamlet. John L. Mitchell mounted a horse and

rode at a John-Gilpin gallop to lease Archibald Buchanan’s big farm,

on both sides of Oil Creek and Cherry Run. The old man agreed to his

terms, a lease was executed, the rosy-cheeked mistress and all the

pupils in the log school-house who could write witnessed the

signatures and Mitchell rode back with the document in his pocket. He

also leased John Buchanan’s two hundred acres, south of Archibald

Buchanan’s three-hundred on the same terms—one-fourth the oil for

ninety years. Forming a partnership with Henry R. Rouse and Samuel Q.

Brown, he “kicked down” the first well in 1860 to the first sand. It

pumped ten barrels a day and was bought by A. Potter, who sank it and

another to the third sand in 1861. A three-hundred-barreler for

months, No. 1 changed hands four times, was bought in 1865 by Gould &

Stowell and produced oil—it pumped for fifteen years—that sold for

two-hundred-and-ninety-thousand dollars! This veteran was the third or

fourth producing well in the region. The Curtis, usually considered

“the first flowing-well,” in July of 1860 spouted freely at

two-hundred feet. It was not tubed and surface-water soon mastered the

flow of oil. The Brawley—sixty-thousand barrels in eight months—Goble

& Flower, Shaft and Sherman were moguls of 1861-2. Beech & Gillett,

Alfred Willoughby, Taylor & Rockwell, Shreve & Glass, Allen Wright,

Wesley Chambers—his infectious laugh could be heard five squares—and a

host of companies operated in 1861-2-3. Franklin S. Tarbell, E. M.

Hukell, E. C. Bradley, Harmon Camp, George Long and J. T. Jones

arrived later. The territory was singularly profitable. Mitchell &

Brown erected a refinery, divided the tracts into hundreds of

acre-plots for leases and laid out the town of Buchanan Farm. Allen

Wright, president of a local oil-company, in February of 1861 printed

his letter-heads “Rouseville” and the name was adopted unanimously.

Rouseville grew swiftly and for a time was headquarters of the oil

industry. Churches and schools arose, good people feeling that man lives

not by oil alone any more than by bread. Dwellings extended up Cherry

Run and the slopes of Mt. Pisgah. Wells and tanks covered the flats and

there were few drones in the busy hive. If Satan found mischief for the

idle only, he would have starved in Rouseville. Stores and shops

multiplied. James White fitted up an opera-house and C. L. Stowell

opened a bank. Henry Patchen conducted the first hotel. N. W. Read

enacted the role of “Petroleum V. Nasby, wich iz postmaster.” The

receipts in 1869 exceeded twenty-five-thousand dollars. Miss Nettie

Dickinson, afterwards in full charge of the money-order department at

Pittsburg and partner with Miss Annie Burke in a flourishing Oil-City

bookstore, ran the office in an efficient style Postmaster-General

Wilson would have applauded. Yet moss-backed croakers in pants, left

over from the Pliocene period, think the gentle sex has no business with

business! The town reached high-water mark early in the seventies, the

population grazing nine-thousand. Production declined, new fields

attracted live operators and in 1880 the inhabitants numbered

seven-hundred, twice the present figure. Rouseville will go down in

history as an oil-town noted for progressiveness, intelligence, crooked

streets and girls “pretty as a picture.”

You could always count on a lively rustle—

The boys knew how to get up and hustle,

And of course the girls had plenty of bustle.

[Illustration: WESLEY CHAMBERS.]

The Buchanan-Farm Oil-Company purchased Mitchell & Brown’s interest and

the Buchanan Royalty Oil-Company acquired the one-fourth held by the

land-owners. Both realized heavily, the Royalty Company paying its

stock-holders—Arnold Plumer, William Haldeman and Dr. C. E. Cooper were

principals—about a million dollars. The senior Buchanan, after receiving

two or three-hundred-thousand dollars—fifty times the sum he would ever

have gained farming—often denounced “th’ pirates that robbed an old man,

buyin’ th’ farm he could ’ave sold two year later fur two millyun!” The

old man has been out of pirate range twenty-five years and the Buchanan

families are scattered. Most of the old-time operators have handed in

their final account. Poor Fred Rockwell has mouldered into dust. Wright,

Camp, Taylor, Beech, Long, Shreve, Haldeman, Hostetter, Cooper, Col.

Gibson and Frank Irwin are “grav’d in the hollow ground.” Death claimed

“Hi” Whiting in Florida and last March stilled the cheery voice of

Wesley Chambers. The earnest, pleading tones of the Rev. R. M. Brown

will be heard no more this side the walls of jasper and the gates of

pearl. Scores moved to different parts of the country. John L. Mitchell

married Miss Hattie A. Raymond and settled at Franklyn. He organized the

Exchange Bank in 1871 and was its president until ill-health obliged him

to resign. Foster W. Mitchell also located at the county-seat and built

the Exchange Hotel. He operated extensively on Oil Creek and in the

northern districts, developed the Shaw Farm and established a bank at

Rouseville, subsequently transferring it to Oil City. He was active in

politics and in the producers’ organizations, treasurer of the

Centennial Commission and an influential force in the Oil-Exchange.

David H. Mitchell likewise gained a fortune in oil, founded a bank and

died at Titusville. Samuel Q. Brown, their relative and associate in

various undertakings, was a merchant and banker at Pleasantville.

Retiring from these pursuits, he removed to Philadelphia and then to New

York to oversee the financial work of the Tidewater Pipe-Line. He

procured the charter for the first pipe-line and acquired a fortune by

his business-talent and wise management.

“Let Hercules himself do what he may,

The cat will mew, the dog will have his day.”

Born in New York in 1824, Henry R. Rouse studied law, taught school in

Warren county and engaged in lumbering and storekeeping at Enterprise.

He served in the legislatures of 1859-60, acquitting himself manfully.

Promptly catching the inspiration of the hour, he shared with William

Barnsdall and Boone Meade the honor of putting down the third oil-well

in Pennsylvania. With John L. Mitchell and Samuel Q. Brown he leased the

Buchanan farm and invested in oil-lands generally. Fabulous wealth began

to reward his efforts. Had he lived “he would have been a giant or a

bankrupt in petroleum.” Operations on the John Buchanan farm were pushed

actively. Near the upper line of the farm, on the east side of Oil

Creek, at the foot of the hill, Merrick & Co. drilled a well in 1861,

eight rods from the Wadsworth. On April seventeenth, at the depth of

three-hundred feet, gas, water and oil rushed up, fairly lifting the

tools out of the hole. The evening was damp and the atmosphere

surcharged with gas. People ran with shovels to dig trenches and throw

up a bank to hold the oil, no tanks having been provided. Mr. Rouse and

George H. Dimick, his clerk and cashier, with six others, had eaten

supper and were sitting in Anthony’s Hotel discussing the fall of Fort

Sumter. A laborer at the Merrick well bounded into the room to say that

a vein of oil had been struck and barrels were wanted. All ran to the

well but Dimick, who went to send barrels. Finishing this errand, he

hastened towards the well. A frightful explosion hurled him to the

earth. Smouldering coals under the Wadsworth boiler had ignited the gas.

In an instant the two wells, tanks and an acre of ground saturated with

oil were in flames, enveloping ninety or a hundred persons. Men digging

the ditch or dipping the oil wilted like leaves in a gale. Horrible

shrieks rent the air. Dense volumes of black smoke ascended. Tongues of

flame leaped hundreds of feet. One poor fellow, charred to the bone,

died screaming with agony over his supposed arrival in hell. Victims

perished scarcely a step from safety. Rouse stood near the derrick at

the fatal moment. Blinded by the first flash, he stumbled forward and

fell into the marshy soil. Throwing valuable papers and a wallet of

money beyond the circuit of fire, he struggled to his feet, groped a

dozen paces and fell again. Two men dashed into the sea of flame and

dragged him forth, his flesh baked and his clothing a handful of shreds.

He was carried to a shanty and gasped through five hours of excruciating

torture. His wonderful self-possession never deserted him, no word or

act betraying his fearful suffering. Although obliged to sip water from

a spoon at every breath, he dictated a concise will, devising the bulk

of his estate in trust to improve the roads and benefit the poor of

Warren county. Relatives and intimate friends, his clerk and hired boy,

the men who bore him from the broiling furnace and honest debtors were

remembered. This dire calamity blotted out nineteen lives and disfigured

thirteen men and boys permanently. The blazing oil was smothered with

dirt the third day. Tubing was put in the well, which flowed

ten-thousand barrels in a week and then ceased. Nothing is left to mark

the scene of the sad tragedy. The Merrick, Wadsworth, Haldeman, Clark &

Banks, Trundy, Comet and Imperial wells, the tanks and the dwellings

have been obliterated. Dr. S. S. Christy—he was Oil City’s first

druggist—Allen Wright, N. F. Jones, W. B. Williams and William H.

Kinter, five of the six witnesses to Rouse’s remarkable will, are in

eternity, Z. Martin alone remaining.

Warren’s greatest benefactor, the interest of the half-million dollars

Rouse bequeathed to the county has improved roads, constructed bridges

and provided a poor-house at Youngsville. Rouse was distinguished for

noble traits, warm impulses, strong attachments, energy and decision of

character. He dispensed his bounty lavishly. It was a favorite habit to

pick up needy children, furnish them with clothes and shoes and send

them home with baskets of provisions. He did not forget his days of

trial and poverty. His religious views were peculiar. While reverencing

the Creator, he despised narrow creeds, deprecated popular notions of

worship and had no dread of the hereafter. To a preacher, in the little

group that watched his fading life, who desired an hour before the end

to administer consolation, he replied: “My account is made up. If I am a

debtor, it would be cowardly to ask for credit now. I do not care to

discuss the matter.” He directed that his funeral be without display,

that no sermon be preached and that he be laid beside his mother at

Westfield, New York. Thus lived and died Henry R. Rouse, of small

stature and light frame, but dowered with rare talents and heroic soul.

Perhaps at the Judgment Day, when deeds outweigh words, many a strict

Pharisee may wish he could change places with the man whose memory the

poor devoutly bless. As W. A. Croffut has written of James Baker in “The

Mine at Calumet”:

“‘Perfess’? He didn’t perfess. He hed

One simple way all through—

He merely practiced an’ he sed

That that wud hev to do.

‘Under conviction’? The idee!

He never done a thing

To be convicted fer. Why, he

Wuz straighter than a string.”

Seventy-five wells were drilled on Hamilton McClintock’s four-hundred

acres in 1860-1. Here was Cary’s “oil-spring” and expectations of big

wells soared high. The best yielded from one-hundred to three-hundred

barrels a day. Low prices and the war led to the abandonment of the

smaller brood. A company bought the farm in 1864. McClintockville, a

promising village on the flat, boasted two refineries, stores, a hotel

and the customary accessories, of which the bridge over Oil Creek is the

sole reminder. Near the upper boundary of the farm the Reno Railroad

crossed the valley on a giddy center-trestle and timber abutments, not a

splinter of which remains. General Burnside, the distinguished

commander, superintended the construction of this mountain-line,

designed to connect Reno and Pithole and never completed. Occasionally

the dignified general would be hailed by a soldier who had served under

him. It was amusing to behold a greasy pumper, driller or teamster step

up, clap Burnside on the shoulder, grasp his hand and exclaim: “Hello,

General! Deuced glad to see you! I was with you at Fredericksburg! Come

and have a drink!”

The Clapp farm of five-hundred acres had a fair allotment of long-lived

wells. George H. Bissell and Arnold Plumer bought the lower half, in the

closing days of 1859, from Ralph Clapp. The Cornplanter Oil Company

purchased the upper half. The Hemlock, Cuba, Cornwall—a

thousand-barreler—and Cornplanter, on the latter section, were notably

productive. The Williams, Stanton, McKee, Elizabeth and Star whooped it

up on the Bissell-Plumer division. Much of the oil in 1862-3 was from

the second sand. Four refineries flourished and the tract coined money

for its owners. A mile east was the prolific Shaw farm, which put

two-hundred-thousand dollars into Foster W. Mitchell’s purse. Graff &

Hasson’s one-thousand acres, part of the land granted Cornplanter in

1796, had a multitude of medium wells that produced year after year. In

1818 the Indian chief, who loved fire-water dearly, sold his reservation

to William Connely, of Franklin, and William Kinnear, of Centre county,

for twenty-one-hundred-and-twenty-one dollars. Matthias Stockberger

bought Connely’s half in 1824 and, with Kinnear and Reuben Noyes,

erected the Oil-Creek furnace, a foundry, mill, warehouses and

steamboat-landing at the east side of the mouth of the stream. William

and Frederick Crary acquired the business in 1825 and ran it ten years.

William and Samuel Bell bought it in 1835 and shut down the furnace in

1849. The Bell heirs sold it to Graff, Hasson & Co. in 1856 for

seven-thousand dollars. James Hasson located on the property with his

family and farmed five years. Graff & Hasson sold three-hundred

acres in 1864 to the United Petroleum Farms Association for

seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars. James Halyday settled on the

east side in 1803. His son James, the first white baby in the

neighborhood, was born in 1809. The Bannon family came in the forties,

Thomas Moran built the Moran House—it still lingers—in 1845 and died in

1857. Dr. John Nevins arrived in 1850 and in the fall of 1852 John P.

Hopewell started a general store. Hiram Gordon opened the “Red Lion

Inn,” Samuel Thomas shod horses and three or four families occupied

small habitations. And this was the place, when 1860 dawned, that was to

become the petroleum-metropolis and be known wherever men have heard a

word of “English as she is spoke.”

Cornplanter was the handle of the humble settlement, towards which a

stampede began with the first glimmer of spring. To trace the uprising

of dwellings, stores, wharves and boarding-houses would be as difficult

as perpetual motion. People huddled in shanties and lived on barges

moored to the bank. Derricks peered up behind the houses, thronged the

marshy flats, congregated on the slopes, climbed the precipitous bluffs

and established a foothold on every ledge of rock. Pumping-wells and

flowing-wells scented the atmosphere with gas and the smell of crude.

Smoke from hundreds of engine-houses, black, sooty and defiling,

discolored the grass and foliage. Mud was everywhere, deep, unlimited,

universal—yellow mud from the newer territory—dark, repulsive, oily mud

around the wells—sticky, tricky, spattering mud on the streets and in

the yards. J. B. Reynolds, of Clarion county, and Calvin and William J.

McComb, of Pittsburg, opened the first store under the new order of

things in March of 1860. T. H. and William M. Williams joined the firm.

They withdrew to open the Pittsburg store next door. Robson’s

hardware-store was farther up the main street, on the east side, which

ended abruptly at Cottage Hill. William P. Baillee—he lives in

Detroit—and William Janes built the first refinery, on the same street,

in 1861, a year of unexampled activity. The plant, which attracted

people from all parts of the country—Mr. Baillee called it a

“pocket-still”—was enlarged into a refinery of five stills, with an

output of two-hundred barrels of refined oil every twenty-four hours.

Fire destroyed it and the firm built another on the flats near by. On

the west side, at the foot of a steep cliff, Dr. S. S. Christy opened a

drug-store. Houses, shops, offices, hotels and saloons hung against the

side of the hill or sat loosely on heaps of earth by the creek and

river. One evening a half-dozen congenial spirits met in Williams &

Brother’s store. J. B. Reynolds, afterwards a banker, who died several

years since, thought Cornplanter ought to be discarded and a new name

given the growing town. He suggested one which was heartily approved.

Liquid refreshments were ordered and the infant was appropriately

baptized OIL CITY.

[Illustration: MAIN STREET, EAST SIDE OF OIL CREEK, OIL CITY, IN 1861.]

Peter Graff was laid to rest years ago. The venerable James Hasson

sleeps in the Franklin cemetery. His son, Captain William Hasson, is an

honored resident of the city that owes much to his enterprise and

liberality. Capable, broad-minded and trustworthy, he has been earnest

in promoting the best interests of the community, the region and the

state. A recent benefaction was his splendid gift of a public park—forty

acres—on Cottage Hill. He was the first burgess and served with

conspicuous ability in the council and the legislature. Alike as a

producer, banker, citizen, municipal officer and lawgiver, Captain

Hasson has shown himself “every inch a manly man.”

When you talk of any better town than Oil City, of any better section

than the oil-regions, of any better people than the oilmen, of any

better state than Pennsylvania, “every potato winks its eye, every

cabbage shakes its head, every beet grows red in the face, every onion

gets stronger, every sheaf of grain is shocked, every stalk of rye

strokes its beard, every hill of corn pricks up its ears, every foot of

ground kicks” and every tree barks in indignant dissent.

Such was the narrow ravine, nowhere sixty rods in width, that figured so

grandly as the Valley of Petroleum.

[Illustration: FARMS ON OIL CREEK, VENANGO COUNTY, PA., IN 1860-65.]

A SPLASH ON OIL CREEK.

The dark mud of Oil Creek! Unbeautiful mud,

That couldn’t and wouldn’t be nipped in the bud!

Quite irreclaimable,

Wholly untamable;

There it was, not a doubt of it,

People couldn’t keep out of it;

On all sides they found it,

So deep none dare sound it—

No way to get ’round it.

To their necks babies crept in it,

To their chins big men stept in it;

Ladies—bless the sweet martyrs!

Plung’d far over their garters;

Girls had no exemption,

Boys sank past redemption;

To their manes horses stall’d in it,

To their ear-tips mules sprawl’d in it!

It couldn’t be chain’d off,

It wouldn’t be drain’d off;

It couldn’t be tied up,

It wouldn’t be dried up;

It couldn’t be shut down,

It wouldn’t be cut down.

Riders gladly abroad would have shipp’d it,

Walkers gladly at home would have skipp’d it.

Frost bak’d it,

Heat cak’d it;

To batter wheels churned it,

To splashes rains turned it,

Bad teamsters gol-durned it!

Each snow-flake and dew-drop, each shower and flood

Just seem’d to infuse it with lots of fresh blood,

Increasing production,

Increasing the ruction,

Increasing the suction!

Ev’ry flat had its fill of it,

Ev’ry slope was a hill of it,

Ev’ry brook was a rill of it;

Ev’ry yard had three feet of it,

Ev’ry road was a sheet of it;

Ev’ry farm had a field of it,

Ev’ry town had a yield of it.

No use to glare at it,

No use to swear at it;

No use to get mad about it,

No use to feel sad about it;

No use to sit up all night scheming

Some intricate form of blaspheming;

No use in upbraiding—

You _had_ to go wading,

Till wearied humanity,

Run out of profanity,

Found rest in insanity;

Or winged its bright way—unless dropp’d with a thud—

To the land of gold pavements and no Oil-Creek mud!

[Illustration:

WELLS ON BENNINGHOFF RUN, VENANGO COUNTY, PA., IN 1866.

[From a photograph taken one hour before they were destroyed by

lightning.]

]

VIII.

PICKING RIPE CHERRIES.

JUICY STREAKS BORDERING OIL CREEK—FAMOUS BENNINGHOFF ROBBERY—CLOSE CALL

FOR A FORTUNE—CITY SET UPON A HILL—ALEMAGOOSELUM TO THE FRONT—CHERRY

RUN’S WHIRLIGIG—ROMANCE OF THE REED WELL—SMITH AND MCFATE

FARMS—PLEASANTVILLE, SHAMBURG AND RED HOT—EXPERIENCES NOT UNWORTHY

OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS.

----------

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

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

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

“No two successes ever were alike.”—_Hawthorne._

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

Auctor._

“The toad beneath the harrow knows

Exactly where each tooth-point goes.”—_Kipling._

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

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

“There are days when every stream is Pachlus and every man is

Crœsus.”—_Richard Le Gallienne._

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

----------

[Illustration: JOHN BENNINGHOFF, HARKINS WELLS ON BENNINGHOFF FARM]

Rich pickings, luscious as the clustering grapes beyond the fox’s reach,

were not limited to the wonderful Valley of Petroleum. Live operators

quickly learned that big wells could be found away from the low banks of

Oil Creek. Anon they climbed the hills, ascended the ravines and invaded

the near townships. Very naturally the tributary streams were favored at

first, until experience inspired courage and altitude failed to be a

serious obstacle. In this way many juicy streaks were encountered,

broadening men’s ideas and the area of profitable developments to a

marvelous degree. Alaska nuggets are fly-specks compared with the golden

spoil garnered from oil-wells on scores of farms in Allegheny,

Cherrytree and Cornplanter. Tales of the petroleum-seesaw’s ups and

downs, without any “mixture rank of midnight weeds” that savor of

“something rotten in Denmark,” need no Klondyker’s imagination,

measureless as the ice-floes of the Yukon, to awaken interest and be

worthy of attention.

By the side of the romance, the pathos, the tragedy and the startling

incidents of the oil-regions thirty years ago the gold-excitements of

California and Australia and the diamond-fever of South Africa are tame

and vapid. Prior to the oil-development settlers in the back-townships

lived very sparingly. Children grew up simple-minded and untutored. The

sale of a pig or a calf or a turkey was an event looked forward to for

months. Petroleum made not a few of these rustics wealthy. Families that

had never seen ten dollars suddenly owned hundreds-of-thousands.

Lawless, reckless, wicked communities sprang up. The close of the war

flooded the region with paper-currency and bold adventurers. Leadville

or Cheyenne at its zenith was a camp-meeting compared with Pithole,

Petroleum Centre or Babylon. Men and women of every degree of decency

and degradation huddled as closely as the pig-tailed Celestials in

Chinatown. Millions of dollars were lost in bogus stock-companies.

American history records no other such era of riotous extravagance. The

millionaire and the beggar of to-day might change places to-morrow.

Blind chance and consummate rascality were equally potent. Of these

centers of sin and speculation, strange transformations and wild

excesses, scarcely a trace remains. Where hosts of fortune-seekers and

devotees of pleasure strove and struggled nothing is to be seen save the

bare landscape, a growth of underbrush or a grassy field. Sodom was not

blotted out more completely than Pithole, the type of many oil-towns

that have been utterly exterminated.

North and west of the lower McElhenny farm, at the bend in Oil Creek,

lay John Benninghoff’s two big blocks of land, through which Benninghoff

Run flowed southward. Pioneer Run crossed the north-east corner of the

property, the greater part of which was on the hills. Five acres on Oil

Creek and the slopes on Pioneer Run were first developed. Leases for a

cash-bonus and liberal royalty were gobbled greedily. Up Benninghoff Run

and back of the hills operations spread. For one piece of ground the

owner declined tempting offers, because he would not permit his

potato-patch to be trodden down! Some wells pumped and some flowed from

twenty-five to three-hundred barrels a day seven days in the week.

William Jenkins, the Huidekoper Oil-Company, the DeKalb Oil-Company and

Edward Harkins had regular bonanzas. The Lady Herman, which Robert

Herman had the politeness to name for his wife, was a genuine beauty.

The first well ever cased and the first pump-station—it hoisted oil to

Shaffer—were on the hillside at the mouth of Benninghoff Run. The

platoon of wells in the illustration of that locality, as they appeared

in 1866, includes these and a hint of the barn beside the homestead. The

busy scene—pictured now for the first time—was photographed within an

hour of its obliteration. The artist had not finished packing his outfit

when lightning struck one of the derricks and a disastrous fire swept

the hill as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard! Wealth deluged the

thrifty land-holder, oil converting his broad acres into a veritable

Golconda. He awoke one morning to find himself rich. He was awakened one

night to find himself famous, the newspapers devoting whole pages—under

“scare-heads”—to the unpretending farmer in the southern end of Cherry

tree. “And thereby hangs a tale.”

Suspicious of banks, Benninghoff stored his money at home. Purchasing a

cheap safe, he placed it in a corner of the sitting-room and stocked it

with a half-million dollars in gold and greenbacks! Cautious friends

warned him to be careful, lest thieves might “break through and steal.”

James Saeger, of Saegertown, a handsome, popular young fellow, who

sometimes played cards, heard of the treasure in the flimsy receptacle.

“Jim” belonged to a respectable family and had been a merchant at

Meadville. Napoleon melted silver statues of the apostles to put the

precious metal in circulation and Saeger concluded to give Benninghoff’s

pile an airing. He spoke to George Miller of the ease with which the

safe could be cracked and engaged two Baltimore burglars, McDonald and

Elliott, to manage the job. Jacob Shoppert, of Saegertown, and Henry

Geiger, who worked for Benninghoff and slept in the house, were

enlisted. The deed, planned with extreme care not to miss fire, was

fixed for a night when Joseph Benninghoff, the son, was to attend a

dance.

On Thursday evening, January sixteenth, 1868, Saeger, Shoppert,

McDonald and Elliott left Saegertown in a two-horse sleigh for

Petroleum Centre, twenty-nine miles distant. At midnight they knocked

at Benninghoff’s door. Geiger answered the rap and was quickly gagged,

said to be as arranged previously. John Benninghoff, his wife and

daughter were bound and the experts proceeded to open the safe. The

frail structure was soon ransacked. The marauders bundled up their

booty, sampled Mrs. Benninghoff’s pies, drank a gallon of milk and

departed at their leisure, leaving the inmates of the house securely

tied. Joseph returned in an hour or two and relieved the prisoners

from their unpleasant predicament. An examination of the safe showed

that two-hundred-and-sixty-five-thousand dollars had been taken! The

bulk of this was in gold. A package of two-hundred-thousand dollars,

in large bills, done up in a brown paper, the looters passed

unnoticed! The alarm was given, the wires flashed the news everywhere

and the press teemed with sensational reports. By noon on Friday the

oil-regions had been set agog and people all over the United States

were talking of “the Great Benninghoff Robbery.”

Saegar and his pals drove back and stopped at Louis Warlde’s hotel to

divide the spoils. McDonald, Elliott and Saeger took the lion’s share,

Geiger and Shoppert received smaller sums and Warlde accepted

thirteen-hundred dollars for his silence. The Baltimore toughs lingered

in the neighborhood a week and then sought the wintry climate of Canada,

Saeger staying around home. Intense excitement prevailed. Hundreds of

detectives, eager to gain reputation and the reward of ten-thousand

dollars, spun theories and looked wise. Ex-Chief-of-Police Hague, of

Pittsburg, was especially alert. For three months the search was vain.

George Miller, whom McDonald wished to put out of the road “to keep his

mouth shut,” in a quarrel with Saeger over a game of cards, blurted out:

“I know about the Benninghoff robbery!” Saeger pacified Miller with a

thousand dollars, which the latter scattered quickly. Jacob Shoppert was

his boon companion and the pair spent money at a rate that caused

officers to shadow them. Shoppert visited a town on the edge of Ohio and

was arrested. Calling for a pen and paper, he wrote to Louis Warlde, the

Saegertown hotel-keeper, reproaching him for not sending money. The

jailer handed the detectives the letter, on the strength of which

Warlde, who had started a brewery in Ohio, and Miller were arrested. The

three were convicted and sentenced to a short term in the penitentiary.

Geiger’s complicity in the plot could not be proved beyond a doubt and

he was acquitted. Officer Hague captured McDonald and Elliott in

Toronto, but Canadian lawyers picked flaws in the papers and they could

not be extradited. Escaping to Europe, they were heard of no more.

Saeger, who had not been suspected until after his departure, went west

and was lost sight of for many a day.

Three years later a noted cattle king of the Texas-Colorado trail

entered a saloon in Denver to treat a party of friends. The bar-tender,

Gus. Peiflee, formerly of Meadville, recognized the customer as “Jim.”

Saeger. He telegraphed east and Chief-of-Police Rouse, of Titusville,

posted off to Denver with Joseph Benninghoff. They secured

extradition-papers and arrested Saeger, who coolly remarked: “You’ll be

a devilish sight older before you see me in Pennsylvania.” Their lawyers

informed them that a hundred of Saeger’s cowboys were in the

city—reckless, lawless fellows, certain to kill whoever attempted to

take him away. Rouse and Benninghoff dropped the matter and returned

alone. Saeger is living in Texas, prosperous and respected. He is just

in his dealings, a bountiful giver, and not long ago sent five-thousand

dollars to the widow of George Miller. Perhaps he may yet turn up in

Washington as Congressman or United-States Senator. This is the story of

a robbery that attracted more attention than the first woman in

bloomers.

John Benninghoff was born in Lehigh county, where his ancestors were

among the first German immigrants, on Christmas Day, 1801. His father,

Frederick Benninghoff, settled near New Berlin, Union county, in John’s

boyhood. There the son married Elizabeth Heise in 1825 and in 1828

located on a farm near Oldtown, Clearfield county. Thence he removed to

Venango county, living close to Cherry tree village four years. In 1836

he bought a piece of land on the south border of Cherrytree township,

near what was to become Petroleum Centre. He added to his purchase as

his means permitted, until he owned about three-hundred acres, with

solid buildings and modern improvements. He was in easy circumstances

prior to the oil-developments that enriched him. Contrary to the general

opinion, the robbery did not impoverish him, as one-half the money was

untouched. His twelve children—eight boys and four girls—grew up and

eight are still living. Selling his farms in Venango, he removed to

Greenville, Mercer county, in the spring of 1868 and died in March,

1882. At his death he had sixty-one grandchildren and fifteen

great-grandchildren. He left his family a large estate. The Benninghoff

farms, so far as oil is concerned, are utterly deserted.

West and north of Benninghoff were the farms of John and R. Stevenson.

On the former, extending south to Oil Creek, Reuben Painter, a live

operator, drilled a well in 1863. The contractor reporting it dry,

Painter moved the machinery and surrendered the lease. He and his

brothers operated profitably in Butler and McKean counties, Reuben dying

at Olean in 1892. In November of 1864 the Ocean Oil-Company of

Philadelphia bought John Stevenson’s lands. The Ocean well began flowing

at a six-hundred-barrel pace on September first, 1865, with the Arctic a

good second. Fifty others varied from fifty to two-hundred barrels.

Thomas McCool built a refinery and the farm paid the company about

two-thousand per cent! The principal wells on both Stevenson tracts

clustered far above the flats, the derricks and buildings resembling “a

city set on a hill.” Major Mills, justly proud of his King of the Hills,

an elegant producer, delighted to visit it with his wife and two young

daughters, one of them now Mrs. John D. Archbold, of New York. Painter’s

supposed dry-hole, drilled seventeen feet deeper, gushed furiously,

proving to be the best well in the collection! Said the Ocean manager,

as he watched the oily stream ascend “higher ’n a steeple”: “A million

dollars wouldn’t touch one side of this property!” Sinking a four-inch

hole seventeen feet farther would have given Reuben Painter this

splendid return two years earlier! He missed a million dollars by only

seventeen feet! A Gettysburg soldier, from whose nose a rifle-ball

shaved a piece of cuticle the size of a pin-head, wittily observed:

“That shot came mighty near missing me!” Inverting this remark, Painter

had cause to exclaim: “That million came mighty near hitting me!”

“A miss is as good as a mile.”

Various companies bored three-hundred wells on Cherrytree Run and its

tiny branches without jarring the trade particularly. Prolific strikes

on the Niagara tract, in the rear of the Benninghoff lands, added to the

wealth of Phillips Brothers. Kane City, two miles north of Rynd, raised

Cain in mild style, “wearing like leather.” Farther back D. W. Kenney’s

wells, lively as the Kilkenny cats, stirred a current that wafted in

Alemagooselum City. Its unique name, the biggest feature of the “City,”

was worked out by Kenney, a fun-loving genius, known far and wide as

“Mayor of Alemagooselum.” He and his wells and town have long been “out

of sight.” Kane City casts an attenuated shadow.

[Illustration: ELLS ON THE NIAGARA TRACT, CHERRYTREE RUN.]

Rev. William Elliott, who united in one package the fervor of Paul and

the snap of Ebenezer Elliott, “the Corn-Law Rhymer,” lived and preached

at Rynd. He organized a Sunday-school in Kenney’s parish, which a devout

settler undertook to superintend. At the close of the regular service on

the opening day, Mr. Elliott asked the pious ruralist to “say a few

words.” The good man, wishing to clinch the lesson—about Mary

Magdalene—in the minds of the youngsters, implored them to follow the

example of “Miss Magdolin.” The older brood tittered at this

Hibernianism, the laugh swelled into a cloudburst. Mr. Elliott nearly

swallowed his pocket-handkerchief trying to shut in his smiles and a new

query was born, which had a long run. It was fired at every visitor to

the settlement. Small boys hurled it at the defenceless superintendent,

who resigned his job and broke up the school the next Sunday. Possibly

Br’er Elliott, when ushered into Heaven, would not be one whit surprised

to hear some white-winged cherub from Alemagooselum sing out: “Say, do

you know Miss Mag Dolin?”

[Illustration: FISHING OUT THE PREACHER’S HORSE.]

The scanty herbage on the tail of the parson’s horse gave rise to

endless surmises. The animal stranded in a mud-hole and keeled over on

his side. Four sturdy fellows tried to fish him out. In his misguided

zeal one of the rescuers, tugging at the caudal appendage, pulled so

hard that half the hair peeled off, leaving the denuded nag a fitting

mate for Tam O’Shanter’s tailless Meg.

A Kane-City youngster prayed every morning and night that a well her

father was drilling would be a good one. It was a hopeless failure,

finished the day before Christmas. The result disturbed the child

exceedingly. That night, as the loving mother was preparing her for bed,

the little girl observed: “I dess it’s no use prayin’ till after Kismas,

’cos God’s so busy helpin’ Santa Claus He hasn’t time for nobody else!”

[Illustration:

VAMPIRE AND WADE WELLS-CHERRY RUN

OLD REED WELL

W. REED

ROUSEVILLE 1868

MT. PISCAH, NEAR ROUSEVILLE

]

Cherry Run, once the ripest cherry in the orchard, had a satisfactory

run. A spice of romance flavored its actual realities. Not two miles up

the stream William Reed, in 1863, drilled a dry-hole six-hundred feet

deep. Two miles farther, in the vicinity of Plumer, a test well was sunk

seven-hundred feet, with no better result. Wells near the mouth of the

ravine produced very lightly. Fifty-thousand dollars would have been an

extreme price for all the land from Rouseville to Plumer, the tasteful

village Henry McCalmont named in honor of Arnold Plumer. In May of 1864

Taylor & Rockwell opened a fresh vein on the run. At two-hundred feet

their well threw oil above the derrick and flowed sixty barrels a day

regularly. Operators reversed their opinion of the territory. To the

surprise of his acquaintances, who deemed him demented, Reed started

another well four rods below his failure of the previous year. It was on

the right bank of the run, on a five-acre patch bought from John Rynd in

1861 by Thomas Duff, who sold two acres to Robert Criswell. Reed was not

over-stocked with cash and Criswell joined forces with him to sink the

second well. I. N. Frazer took one-third interest. At the proper depth

the outlook was gloomy. The sand appeared good, but days of pumping

failed to bring oil. On July eighteenth, 1864, the well commenced

flowing three-hundred barrels a day, holding out at this rate for

months. Criswell realized thirty-thousand dollars from his share of the

oil and then sold his one-fourth interest in the land and well for

two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand to the Mingo Oil-Company. He operated in

the Butler field, lived at Monterey, removed to Ohio and died near

Cincinnati. One son, David S., a well-known producer, resides at Oil

City; another, Robert W., is on the editorial staff of a New-York daily.

Frazer sold for one-hundred-thousand dollars and next loomed up as “the

discoverer of Pithole.” Reed sold to Bishop & Bissell for

two-hundred-thousand dollars, after pocketing seventy-five-thousand from

oil. Coming to Venango county with Frederic Prentice in 1859, he drilled

wells by contract, sometimes “a solid Muldoon” and sometimes “a broken

Reed.” He returned east—his birthplace—with the proceeds of the

world-famed well bearing his name. An idea haunted him that Captain

Kidd’s treasure was buried at a certain part of the Atlantic coast. He

boarded at a house on the shore and hunted land and sea for the hidden

deposit. He would dig in the sand, sail out some distance and peer into

the water. One day he went off in his skiff, a storm arose, the boat

drifted away and that was the last ever seen of William Reed. He was a

liberal supporter of the United-Presbyterian church and his nearest

relatives live in the vicinity of Pittsburg.

The Reed well put Cherry Run at the head of the procession. Within sixty

days it enriched Reed, Criswell and Frazer nearly seven-hundred-thousand

dollars. The new owners drilled three more on the same acre, getting

back every cent of their purchase-money and fifty per cent. extra for

good measure. In other words, the five-acre collection of rocks and

stumps, with eleven producing wells and one duster, harvested

two-million dollars! The Mountain well mounted high, the Phillips &

Egbert was a fillip and the Wadsworth & Wynkoop rolled out oil in wads

worth a wine-coop of gold-eagles. The fever to lease or buy a spot to

plant a derrick burned fiercely. The race to gorge the ravine with rigs

and drilling appliances would shut out Edgar Saltus in his “Pace that

Kills.” Soon three-hundred wells lined the flats and lofty banks

guarding the purling streamlet. Clanking tools, wheezy engines and

creaking pumps assailed the ears. Smoke from a myriad soft-coal fires

attacked the eyes. An endless cavalcade of wagons churned the soil into

vicious batter. The activities of the Foster, McElhenny, Farrell,

Davison and Tarr farms were condensed into one surging, foaming caldron,

quickening the pulse-beats and sending the brain see-sawing.

Across the run the Curtin Oil-Company farmed out forty acres. The Baker

well, an October biscuit, flowed one-hundred barrels a day all the

winter of 1864-5 and pumped six years. Water, bane of flannel-suits and

uncased oil-wells, deluged it and its neighbors. Hugh Cropsey, a

New-York lawyer and last owner of the well nearest the Baker, “ran

engine,” saved a trifle, pulled up stakes in 1869 and tried his luck at

Pleasantville. Returning to Cherry Run, he resuscitated a well on the

hill and was suffocated by gas in a tank containing a few inches of

fresh crude. His heirs sold me the old well, which pumped nine months

without varying ten gallons in any week and repaid twice its cost.

Unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, its production was

the steadiest in the chronicles of grease. One Saturday evening N. P.

Stone, superintendent of the St. Nicholas Oil-Company, bought it from me

at the original price. His men took charge of it at noon on Tuesday. At

five o’clock the well quit forever, “too dead to skin!” Cleaning out,

drilling deeper, casing, torpedoing and weeks of pumping could not

persuade it to shed another drop of oil or water. This close shave was a

small by-play in a realistic drama teeming with incidents far stranger

than “The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown.” B. H. Hulseman, president

of the St. Nicholas Oil-Company, was a wealthy leather-merchant in

Philadelphia. He spent much of his time on Cherry Run, lost heavily in

speculations, entered the oil-exchange and died at Oil City.

Kind-hearted, sincere and unpretending, his good remembrance is a legacy

to cherish lovingly.

“Nothing in his life

Became him like the leaving it; he died

As one who had been studied in his death,

To throw away the dearest thing he owned,

As ’twere a careless trifle.”

Two-hundred yards above the Baker a half-dozen wells crowded upon a

half-acre. True to its title, the Vampire sucked the life-blood from its

pal and produced bounteously. The Munson, owned by the first sacrifice

to nitro-glycerine, sustained the credit of its environment. The Wade

was the star-performer of the group. James Wade, an Ohio teamster,

earned money hauling oil. Concluding to wade in, he secured a bantam

lease and engaged Thomas Donnelly to drill a well. It surpassed the

Reed, flowing four-hundred barrels a day at the start. Frank Allen,

agent of a gilt-edged New-York company, rode from Oil City to see a well

described to him as “livelier than chasing a greased pig at a

county-fair.” His exalted conceptions of petroleum befitted the

representative of a company capitalized at three-millions, in which

August Belmont, Russell Sage and William B. Astor were said to be

stockholders. The fuming, gassing stream of oil suited him to a t. “I’ll

give you three-hundred-thousand dollars for it,” he said to Wade, whom

the offer well-nigh paralyzed. The two men went into the grocery close

by, Wade signed a transfer of the well and Allen handed him a New-York

draft. The happiest being in the pack, Wade packed his carpet-bag,

hitched his horses to the wagon, bade the boys good-bye and drove to Oil

City to get the paper cashed. He wore greasy clothes and did not wear

the air of a millionaire. “Is Mr. Bennett in?” he asked a clerk at the

bank. “Naw; what do you want?” was the reply. “I want a draft cashed.”

“Oh, you do, eh? I guess I can cash it!” The clerk’s haughty demeanor

fell below zero upon beholding the draft. He invited Wade to be seated.

Mr. Bennett, the urbane cashier, returned in a few moments. The bank

hadn’t half the currency to meet the demand on the instant. Wade left

directions to forward the money to his home in Ohio, where he and his

faithful steeds landed two days later. He bought fine farms for his

brothers and himself, invested two-hundred-thousand dollars in

government-bonds and wisely enjoyed, amid the peaceful scenes of

agricultural life, the fruits of his first and last oil-venture. Few

have been as sensible, for the petroleum-coast is encrusted with

financial wrecks—vast fortunes amassed only to be lost on the perilous

sea of speculation. The world has heard of the _prizes_ in the lottery

of oil, while the _blanks_—tenfold more numerous—are glossed over by the

glamour of the Sherman, Empire, Noble, Phillips, Reed and other wells,

“familiar as household words.”

[Illustration: PETER P. CORNEN]

[Illustration: HENRY I. BEERS]

Thomas Johnson, of Oil City, held one-eighth of the Curtin interest and

Patrick Johnson had a bevy of patrician wells at the summit of the

tallest hill in the valley. The curtain has been rung down, the lights

are out, the players have dispersed and none can hint of “Too Much

Johnson.” The farm of sixty acres adjacent to the Curtin and the

Criswell nook Hamilton McClintock traded to Daniel Smith in 1858 for a

yoke of oxen. Smith sold it in 1860 for five-hundred dollars and sank

the cash in a dry-hole on Oil Creek. P. P. Cornen and Henry I. Beers

bought the farm in 1863 for twenty-five-hundred dollars, clearing

two-millions from the investment. Cornen served as State-Senator in

Connecticut and died in 1893. His sons operate in Warren county and down

the Allegheny. Mr. Beers, who settled at McClintockville, for thirty

years has been prominent in business and politics. He was a California

argonaut, spent three years in San Francisco, built the first house in

that city after the first great fire and revisited the East to marry

“the girl he left behind him” in 1849. The Yankee well, erratic as

George Francis Train, was the first glory of the Smith tract. The Reed

caused a rush for one-acre leases at four-thousand-dollars bonus and

half the oil. Picking up gold-dollars at every step would have been less

lucrative. The wells were stayers and Daniel Smith was not “a Daniel

come to judgment” in his estimate of the farm he implored J. W. Sherman

to buy for two-hundred-and-fifty dollars.

Cornen & Beers first leased a half-dozen plots six rods square at

one-half royalty. Two New-Englanders and Cyrus A. Cornen, son of Peter

P. Cornen and nephew of Mr. Beers, drilled the first well, the queer

Yankee. Some gas and no oil looked promising for a dry-hole, but the

owners put in small tubing and pumped a plump day. They decided to draw

the tubing, seed-bag higher and try it once more for luck. The tubing

had been raised only a foot when the well flowed “like Mount Vesuvius

spilling lava.” The flow lasted five minutes, stopped twenty, flowed

five more, stopped twenty and kept up this program regularly twenty-one

months. Sixty barrels a day was the average yield month after month,

until one day the Yankee concluded to retire from active duty. Much of

its product sold at ten to thirteen dollars a barrel, enriching all

concerned. The Yankee boomed the crush for leases and was altogether a

tempting plum. The Auburn, the second well on the Smith farm, was a good

second to the Yankee, the Gromiger and Cattaraugus traveled in the

one-hundred-and-fifty-barrel class, while the Watkins toed the

two-hundred mark, with the Aazin and Fry chasing it closely.

S. S. Watkins, who died at St. Paul in the fall of 1896, was given a lot

for a grocery, with the privilege of sinking one well for half the oil.

He opened the store and sold the oil-right to Wade Brothers for

twenty-five-hundred dollars. The Wades sold one-eighth of the

working-interest to the Pittsburg Petroleum-Company, used the proceeds

to drill the hole and stuck the tools in the third sand. The lookout for

a paying strike was exceedingly poor, but James Wade held on and tubed

the well above the tools. It flowed three-hundred barrels a day and Wade

sold his seven-eighths to Frank Allen, who offered the Pittsburg

Petroleum-Company seventy-five-thousand dollars for its eighth. When the

Wade declined to fifty barrels the company pulled the tubing, moved the

derrick three feet and drilled another, with no better result. Thereupon

the Wade was abandoned, after having netted the Great-Republic

Oil-Company a quarter-million dead loss. In 1864 Cornen & Beers

organized the Cherry-Valley Oil-Company, sold twelve or fifteen leases

and put down all the other wells themselves. The partnership dissolved

in 1876, Mr. Beers maintaining the farm and Mr. Cornen dying at his

Connecticut home in 1893. The Smith rated among the best properties in

the region and it still rewards its fortunate owner with a moderate

production, although merely a shadow of its former greatness.

[Illustration: PORTER PHIPPS.]

Blacklegs, thieves and murderers ran little risk of punishment in the

early days of oil-developments, unless they became unusually

obstreperous and were brought to a period with a shot-gun. Scoundrels

lay in wait for victims at every turn and stories of their misdeeds

could be told by the hundred. The McFate farm was one of the first on

Cherry Run to be sold at a fancy price. S. J. McFate, one of the

brothers owning the property, two weeks after the sale in 1862, walked

down to Oil City to draw several-thousand dollars from the bank. He

displayed the money freely and left for home late at night. The road was

dark and lonely and next morning, in a clump of bushes a mile above Oil

City, his lifeless body was discovered. A ghastly wound in the head and

the absence of the money explained the tragedy and the motive. No clue

to the murderer was ever found, although squads of detectives “worked on

the case” and queer fictions regarding the mysterious assassin were

printed in many newspapers.

Queerly enough, the farms above the Smith were failures. Hundreds of

wells clear up to Plumer never paid the expense of recording the leases.

The territory was a roast for scores of stock-companies. Below Plumer a

mile Bruns & Ludovici, of New York, built the Humboldt Refinery in 1862.

Money was lavished on palatial quarters for the managers, enclosed

grounds, cut-stone walls, a pipe-line to Tarr Farm and the largest

refining capacity in America. Inconvenient location and improved methods

of competitors forced the Humboldt to retire. Part of the machinery was

removed, the structures crumbled and some of the dressed stone forms the

foundations of the National Transit Building at Oil City. Plumer, which

had a grist-mill, store, blacksmith-shop and tavern in 1840 and

four-thousand population in 1866, is quiet as its briar-grown graveyard.

The Brevoort Oil-Company, Murray & Fawcett and John P. Zane raked in

shekels on Moody Run, which emptied into Cherry Run a half-mile

south-west of the Reed well. Zane, whole-souled, resolute and manly,

operated in the northern district and died at Bradford in 1894. A

“forty-niner,” he supported John W. Geary for Mayor of San Francisco,

built street-railways and worked gold-mines in California. He wrote on

finance and petroleum, hated selfishness and stood firmly on the

platform laid down in the beatitudes by the Man of Galilee.

“The good die first,

And they whose hearts are dry as summer-dust

Burn to the socket.”

In the winter of 1859-60 Robert Phipps, of Clinton township, sold a

horse to D. Knapp, who owned a farm, “between Plumer and the mouth of

Oil Creek,” that extended across Cherry Run some distance above the

Smith patch. Phipps followed up the horse-sale by paying Knapp

twenty-five dollars and one-eighth the oil for one acre of his land. He

took A. Lowry for a partner, and sent his son, Porter Phipps, and John

Haas, a German blacksmith, to “kick down” a well. Haas constructed a set

of light tools—the augur stem was one-inch iron—lumber for a shanty and

the rig was drawn from Hood’s Mill on Pithole Creek and a forty-foot

hemlock served as a spring-pole. Drilling began in April of 1860 at the

first well on the bank of Cherry Run. Young Phipps would carry the bit

or the reamer daily on his shoulder to be dressed at a blacksmith-shop

on Hamilton McClintock’s farm. The work had continued three months, when

one day the tools struck a crevice at a hundred feet, a gurgling sound

greeted the ears of the expectant drillers and they awaited the flow.

Sulphur-water, not oil, was the outcome and the well was abandoned.

Robert Phipps “exchanged mortality for life” at a ripe old age. His

parents settled in Venango county a century ago and the Phipps family

has always been noted for intelligence and progressiveness. Porter

Phipps, known everywhere as ’Squire, was reared on the farm, had his

initial tussle with oil-wells in 1860 and operated at Bullion and in

Butler county. He is Vice-president of the Monroe Oil-Company and makes

Pittsburg his headquarters.

[Illustration: DR. G. SHAMBURG.]

Two miles east of Miller-Farm station, on the eighty-acre tract of

Oliver Stowell, the Cherry-Run Petroleum-Company finished a well in

February of 1866. It was eight-hundred feet deep, drilled through the

sixth sand and pumped one-hundred barrels a day. The company operated

systematically, using heavy tools, tall derricks and large casing. It

was managed by Dr. G. Shamburg, a man of character and ability, who

studied the strata carefully and gathered much valuable data. The second

well equalled No. 1 in productiveness and longevity, both lasting for

years. J. B. Fink’s, a July posy of two-hundred barrels, was the third.

The grand rush began in December, 1867, the Fee and Jack-Brown wells, on

the Atkinson farm, flowing four-hundred barrels apiece. A lively town,

eligibly located in a depression of the table-lands, was properly named

Shamburg, as a compliment to the genial doctor. The Tallman, Goss,

Atkinson and Stowell farms whooped up the production to three-thousand

barrels. Frank W. and W. C. Andrews, Lyman and Milton Stewart, John W.

Irvin and F. L. Backus had bought John R. Tallman’s one-hundred acres in

1865. Their first well began producing in September, 1867, and in 1868

they sold two-hundred-thousand barrels of oil for nearly

eight-hundred-thousand dollars! A. H. Bronson—bright, alert, keen in

business and popular in society—paid twenty-five-thousand for the

Charles Clark farm, a mile north-east. His first well—three-hundred

barrels—paid for the property and itself in sixty days. Operations in

the Shamburg pool were almost invariably profitable and handsome

fortunes were realized. A peculiarity was the presence of green and

black oils, a line on the eastern part of the Cherry-Run Company’s land

defining them sharply. Their gravity and general properties were

identical and the black color was attributed to oxide of iron in the

rock. Dr. Shamburg died at Titusville and the town he founded is taking

a perpetual vacation.

Carl Wageforth, a genius well known in early days as one of the owners

of the Story farm, started a “town” in the woods two miles above

Shamburg. The “town” collapsed, Wageforth clung to his store a season

and next turned up in Texas as the founder of a German colony. He

secured a claim in the Lone-Star State about thrice the size of Rhode

Island, settled it with thrifty immigrants from the “Faderland” and

bagged a bushel of ducats. He made and lost fortunes in oil and could no

more be kept from breaking out occasionally than measles or small-pox.

East of Petroleum Centre three miles, on the bank of a pellucid stream,

John E. McLaughlin drilled a well in 1868 that flowed fourteen-hundred

barrels. The sand was coarse, the oil dark and the magnitude of the

strike a surprise equal to the answer of the dying sinner who, asked by

the minister if he wasn’t afraid to meet an angry God, unexpectedly

replied: “Not a bit; it’s the other chap I’m afraid of!” Excepting the

half-dozen mastodons on Oil Creek, the McLaughlin was the biggest well

in the business up to that date. Wide-awake operators struck a bee-line

for leases. A town was floated in two weeks, a Pithole grocer erecting

the first building and labeling the place “Cash-Up” as a gentle hint to

patrons not to let their accounts get musty with age. The name fitted

the town, which a twelvemonth sufficed to sponge off the slate. Small

wells and dry-holes ruled the roost, even those nudging “the big ’un”

missing the pay-streak. The McLaughlin—a decided freak—declined

gradually and pumped seven years, having the reservoir all to itself.

Located ten rods away in any direction, it would have been a duster and

Cash-Up would not have existed! A hundred surrounding it did not cash-up

the outlay for drilling.

[Illustration: WELLS IN THE PLEASANTVILLE FIELD IN 1871.]

Attracted by the quality of the soil and the beauty of the

location—six-hundred feet above the level of Oil Creek and abundantly

watered—in 1820 Abraham Lovell forsook his New York farm to settle in

Allegheny township, six miles east by south of Titusville. Aaron

Benedict and Austin Merrick came in 1821. John Brown, the first

merchant, opened a store in 1833. A pottery, tannery, ashery, store and

shops formed the nucleus of a village, organized in 1850 as the borough

of Pleasantville. Three wells on the outskirts of town, bored in 1865-6,

produced a trifling amount of oil. Late in the fall of 1867 Abram James,

an ardent spiritualist, was driving from Pithole to Titusville with

three friends. A mile south of Pleasantville his “spirit-guide” assumed

control of Mr. James and humped him over the fence into a field on the

William Porter farm. Powerless to resist, the subject was hurried to the

northern end of the field, contorted violently, jerked through a species

of “couchee-couchee dance” and pitched to the ground! He marked the spot

with his finger, thrust a penny into the dirt and fell back pale and

rigid. Restored to consciousness, he told his astonished companions it

had been revealed to him that streams of oil lay beneath and extended

several miles in a certain direction. Putting no faith in “spirits” not

amenable to flasks, they listened incredulously and resumed their

journey. James negotiated a lease, borrowed money—the “spirit-guide”

neglected to furnish cash—and planted a derrick where he had planted the

penny. On February twelfth, 1868, at eight-hundred-and-fifty feet, the

Harmonial Well No. 1 pumped one-hundred-and-thirty barrels!

The usual hurly-burly followed. People who voted the James adventure a

fish-story writhed and twisted to drill near the spirited Harmonial. New

strikes increased the hubbub and established the sure quality of the

territory. Scores of wells were sunk on the Porter, Brown, Tyrell,

Beebe, Dunham and other farms for miles. Prices of supplies advanced and

machine-shops in the oil-regions ran night and day to meet orders. Land

sold at five-hundred to five-thousand dollars an acre, often changing

hands three or four times a day. Interests in wells going down found

willing purchasers. Strangers crowded Pleasantville, which trebled its

population and buildings during the year. It was a second edition of

Pithole, mildly subdued and divested of frothy sensationalism. If

gigantic gushers did not dazzle, dry-holes did not discourage. If nobody

cleared a million dollars at a clip, nobody cleared out to avoid

creditors. Nobody had to loaf and trust to Providence for daily bread.

Providence wasn’t running a bakery for the benefit of idlers and work

was plentiful at Pleasantville. The production reached three-thousand

barrels in the summer of 1868, dropping to fifteen-hundred in 1870.

Three banks prospered and imposing brick-blocks succeeded unsubstantial

frames. Fresh pastures invited the floating mass to Clarion, Armstrong

and Butler. Small wells were abandoned, machinery was shipped southward

and the pretty village moved backward gracefully. Pleasantville had

“marched up the hill and then marched down again.”

Abram James, a man of fine intellect, nervous temperament and lofty

principle, lived at Pleasantville a year. He located a dozen paying

wells in other sections, under the influence of his “spirit-guide.” The

Harmonial was his greatest hit, bringing him wealth and distinction. His

worst break—a dry-hole on the Clarion river eighteen-hundred feet

deep—cost him six-thousand dollars in 1874. None questioned his absolute

sincerity, although many rejected his theories of the supernatural.

Whether he is still in the flesh or has become a spirit has not been

manifested to his old friends in Oildom.

Samuel Stewart, an old resident and prosperous land-owner, is a leading

citizen of Cherrytree township. He operated successfully in his own

neighborhood and around Pleasantville. His acquaintance with men and

affairs is not surpassed in Venango county. He is half-brother of Mrs.

William R. Crawford, Franklin. Lyman and Milton Stewart, of Titusville,

have not stayed in the rear. They drilled hundreds of wells in

Pennsylvania and invested liberally in California territory. Good men

and true are the Stewarts from beginning to end.

[Illustration: SAMUEL STEWART.]

Red-Hot, in the palmy era of the Shamburg excitement a place of much

sultriness, is cold enough to chill any stray visitor who knew the

mushroom at its warmest stage. Windsor Brothers, of Oil City—they

built the Windsor Block—drilled a well in 1869 that flowed

three-hundred-and-fifty barrels. Others followed rapidly, people

flocked to the newest centre of attraction and a typical oil-town

strutted to the front. The territory lacked the staying quality, the

Butler region was about to dawn and 1871 saw Red-Hot reduced to three

houses, a half-dozen light wells and a muddy road. Lightning-rod

pedlars, book-agents and medical fakirs no longer disturb its calm

serenity. Not a scrap of the tropical town has been visible for two

decades.

[Illustration: RED-HOT, A TYPICAL OIL-TOWN, IN 1870.]

Tip-Top filled a short engagement. Operations around Shamburg and

Pleasantville directed attention to the Captain Lyle and neighboring

farms, midway between these points. “Ned” Pitcher’s well, drilled in

1866 on the Snedaker farm, east of Lyle, had started at eighty barrels

and pumped twenty for two years. Pithole was booming and nobody thought

of Ned’s pitcher until 1868. Many of the wells produced fairly, but the

territory soon depreciated and the elevated town—aptly named by a poet

with an eye to the eternal fitness of things—lost its hold and glided

down to nothingness. The hundred-eyed Argus could not find a sliver that

would prick a thumb or tip a top.

[Illustration: VIEW AT M’CLINTOCKVILLE IN 1862.]

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

OILY OOZINGS.

Kerosene is often the last scene.

The ladies—God bless them!—are nothing if not consistent—at times. It

used to be a fad with Bradford wives to keep a stuffed owl in the parlor

for ornament and a stuffed club in the hall for the night-owl’s benefit.

The Oil-Creek girls are the dandy girls,

For their kiss is most intense;

They’ve got a grip like a rotary-pump

That will lift you over the fence.

The steel of a rimmer was lost in a drilling well on Cherry Run. After

fishing for it for a longtime the well-owner, becoming discouraged,

offered a man one-thousand dollars to take it out. He broomed the end of

a tough block, ran it down the well attached to the tools and in ten

minutes had the steel out.

The woman who eagerly seized the oil-can

And to pour kerosene in the cook-stove began,

So that people for miles to quench the fire ran,

While she soar’d aloft like a flash in the pan,

Didn’t know it was loaded.

At a drilling well near Rouseville the tools were lowered on Monday

morning and, after running a full screw, were drawn minus the bit, with

the stem-box greatly enlarged. After fishing several days for it the

drillers were greatly surprised to find the lost bit standing in the

slack-tub. The tools had been lowered in the darkness with no bit on.

An Oil-City tramp on the pavement drear

Saw something that seem’d to shine;

He pick’d it up and gave a big cheer—

’Twas a nickel bright, the price of a beer—

And shouted “The world is mine!”

William McClain, grandfather of Senator S. J. M. McCarrell, Harrisburg,

once owned and occupied the Tarr farm, on Oil Creek. Fifty or more years

ago he sold the tract to James Tarr for a rifle and an old gray horse

named Diamond. McClain removed to Washington county and settled on a

farm which his son inherited and sold before oil was found in the

neighborhood. Like the Tarr farm on Oil Creek, the McClain farm in

Washington county proved a petroleum-bonanza to the purchasers.

Said a Shamburg young maiden: “Alas, Will,

You come every night,

And talk such a sight,

And burn so much light,

My papa declares you’re a Gas Bill!”

All kinds of engines, from one to fifty horse-power, were used on Oil

Creek in the sixties. The old “Fabers,” with direct attachment, will

recall many a broad grin. The boys called them “Long Johns.” The

Wallace-engine had hemp-packing on the piston, and the inside of the

cylinder, rough as a rasp, soon used it up and leaked steam like a

sieve. The Washington-engine was the first to come into general use. C.

M. Farrar, of Farrar & Trefts, whose boilers and engines have stood

every test demanded by improvements in drilling, made the drawing for

the first locomotive-pattern boiler on a drilling well—a wonderful

stride in advance of the old-time boiler. Trefts made the castings for

the engine that pumped the Drake well and was the first man, in company

with J. Willard, to use ropes on Oil Creek in drilling. This was on the

Foster farm, near the world-famed Empire well, in 1860. Willard made the

second set of jars on the creek. Senator W. S. McMullan was a stalwart

blacksmith, who made drilling-tools noted for their enduring quality.

[Illustration:

GRANT WELL EUREKA WELL

GENERAL VIEW OF PITHOLE IN AUG 95

UNITED STATES WELL HOLMDEN ST.

]

IX.

A GOURD IN THE NIGHT.