Chapter XIX: Just Odds and Ends 429-452 (7)

The opening months of 1860 were decidedly lively on the Cochran Farm, in Cranberry township, opposite the Hoover. The first well, the Keystone, on the flats above where the station now stands, was a second-sander of the hundred-barrel class. The first oil sold for fourteen dollars a barrel, at which rate land-owners and operators were not in danger of bankruptcy or the poor-house. Fourteen-hundred dollars a day from a three-inch hole would have seemed too preposterous for Munchausen before the Pennsylvania oil-regions demonstrated that “truth is stranger than fiction.” The Monitor, Raymond, Williams, McCutcheon and other wells kept the production at a satisfactory figure. Dale & Morrow, Horton & Son, Hoover & Co., George R. Hobby, Cornelius Fulkerson and George S. McCartney were early operators. B. E. Swan located on the farm in May of 1865 and drilled numerous fair wells. He has operated there for thirty-two years, sticking to the second-sand territory with a tenacity equal to the “perseverance of the saints.” When thousands of producers, imitating the dog that let go the bone to grasp the shadow in the water, quit their enduring small wells to take their chance of larger ones in costlier fields, he did not lose his head and add another to the financial wrecks that strewed the greasian shore. Appreciating his moral stamina, his steadfastness and ability, Mr. Swan’s friends insist that he shall serve the public in some important office. Walter Pennell—his father made the first car-wheels—and W. P. Smith drilled several snug wells on the uplands, Sweet & Shaffer following with six or eight. Eighteen wells are producing on the tract, which contains one-hundred-and-forty acres and has had only two dry-holes in its thirty-six years of active developments.

Alexander Cochran, for forty years owner of the well-known farm bearing his name, is one of the oldest citizens of Franklin. Winning his way in the world by sheer force of character, scrupulous integrity and a fixed determination to succeed, he is in the highest and best sense a self-made man. Working hard in boyhood to secure an education, he taught school, clerked in general stores, studied law and was twice elected Prothonotary without asking one voter for his support. In these days of button-holing, log-rolling, wire-pulling, buying and soliciting votes this is a record to recall with pride. Marrying Miss Mary Bole—her father removed from Lewistown to Franklin seventy-five years ago—he built the home at “Cochran Spring” that is one of the land-marks of the town and established a large dry-goods store. As his means permitted he bought city-lots, put up dwelling-houses and about 1852 paid sixteen-hundred dollars for the farm in Cranberry township for which in 1863, after it had yielded a fortune, he refused seven-hundred-thousand! The farm was in two blocks. A neighbor expostulated with him for buying the second piece, saying it was “foolish to waste money that way.” In 1861, when the same neighbor wished to mortgage his land for a loan, he naively remarked: “Well, Aleck, I guess I was the fool, not you, in 1852.” A man of broad views, Mr. Cochran freely grants to others the liberality of thought he claims for himself. A hater of cant and sham and hollow pretence, he believes less in musty creeds than kindly deeds, more in giving loaves than tracts to the hungry, and takes no stock in religion that thinks only of dodging punishment in the next world and fails to help humanity in this. In the dark days of low-priced oil and depressed trade, he would accept neither interest from his debtors nor royalty from the operators who had little wells on his farm. He never hounded the sheriff on a hapless borrower, foreclosed a mortgage to grab a coveted property or seized the chattels of a struggling victim to satisfy a shirt-tail note. There is no shred of the Pecksniff, the Shylock or the Uriah-Heep in his anatomy. At fourscore he is hale and hearty, rides on horseback, cultivates his garden, attends to business, likes a good play and keeps up with the literature of the day. The productive oil-farm is now owned by his daughters, Mrs. J. J. McLaurin, of Harrisburg, and Mrs. George R. Sheasley, of Franklin. The proudest eulogy he could desire is Alexander Cochran’s just desert: “The Poor Man’s Friend.”

Down to Sandy Creek many wells were drilled from 1860 to 1865, producing fairly at an average depth of four-hundred-and-fifty to five-hundred feet. These operations included the Miller, Smith and Pope farms, on the west side of the river, and the Rice, Nicklin, Martin and Harmon, on the east side, all second-sand territory. North of the Cochran and the Hoover work was pushed actively. George H. Bissell and Vance Stewart bored twelve or fifteen medium wells on the Stewart farm of two-hundred acres, which the Cameron Petroleum Company purchased in 1865 and Joseph Dale operated for some years. It lies below the lower bridge, opposite the Bleakley tract, from which a light production is still derived. Above the Stewart are the Fuller and the Chambers farms, the latter extending to the Allegheny-Valley depot. Scores of eager operators thronged the streets of Franklin and drilled along the Allegheny. Joseph Powley and Charles Cowgill entered the lists in the Cranberry district. Henry M. Wilson and George Piagett veered into the township and sank a bevy of dry-holes to vary the monotony. That was a horse on Wilson, but he got ahead of the game by a deal that won him the nicest territory on Horse Creek. Stirling Bonsall and Colonel Lewis—they’re dead now—were in the thickest of the fray, with Captain Goddard, Philip Montgomery, Boyd, Roberts, Foster, Brown, Murphy and many more whom old-timers remember pleasantly. Thomas King, whole-souled, genial “Tom”—no squarer man e’er owned a well or handled oil-certificates—and Captain Griffith were “a good pair to draw to.” King has “crossed over,” as have most of the kindred spirits that dispelled the gloom in the sixties.

Colonel W. T. Pelton, nephew of Samuel J. Tilden, participated in the scenes of that exciting period. He lived at Franklin and drilled wells on French Creek. He was a royal entertainer, shrewd in business, finely educated and polished in manner and address. He and his wife—a lovely and accomplished woman—were fond of society and gained hosts of friends. They boarded at the United-States Hotel, where Mrs. Pelton died suddenly. This affliction led Colonel Pelton to sell his oil-properties and abandon the oil-regions. Returning to New York, when next he came into view as the active agent of his uncle in the secret negotiations that grew out of the election of 1876, it was with a national fame. His death in 1880 closed a busy, promising career.

In the spring of 1864 a young man, black-haired, dark-eyed, an Apollo in form and strikingly handsome, arrived at Franklin and engaged rooms at Mrs. Webber’s, on Buffalo street. The stranger had money, wore good clothes and presented a letter of introduction to Joseph H. Simonds, dealer in real-estate, oil-wells and leases. He looked around a few days and concluded to invest in sixty acres of the Fuller farm, Cranberry township, fronting on the Allegheny river. The block was sliced off the north end of the farm, a short distance below the upper bridge and the Valley station. Mr. Simonds consented to be a partner in the transaction. The transfer was effected, the deed recorded and a well started. It was situated on the hill, had twenty feet of second-sand and pumped twenty barrels a day. The owner drilled two others on the bluff, the three yielding twenty barrels for months. The ranks of the oil-producers had received an addition in the person of—John Wilkes Booth.

The firm prospered, each of the members speculating and trading individually. M. J. Colman, a capital fellow, was interested with one or both in various deals. Men generally liked Booth and women admired him immensely. His lustrous orbs, “twin-windows of the soul,” could look so sad and pensive as to awaken the tenderest pity, or fascinate like “the glittering eye” of the Ancient Mariner or the gaze of the basilisk. “Trilby” had not come to light, or he might have enacted the hypnotic role of Svengali. His moods were variable and uncertain. At times he seemed morose and petulant, tired of everybody and “unsocial as a clam.” Again he would court society, attend parties, dance, recite and be “the life of the company.” He belonged to a select circle that exchanged visits with a coterie of young folks in Oil City. A Confederate sympathizer and an enemy of the government, his closest intimates were staunch Republicans and loyal citizens. William J. Wallis, the veteran actor who died in December of 1895, in a Philadelphia theater slapped him on the mouth for calling President Lincoln a foul name. Booth’s acting, while inferior to his brother Edwin’s, evinced much dramatic power. He controlled his voice admirably, his movements were graceful and he spoke distinctly, as Franklinites whom he sometimes favored with a reading can testify.

One morning in April, 1865, he left Franklin, telling Mr. Simonds he was going east for a few days. He carried a satchel, which indicated that he did not expect his stay to be prolonged indefinitely. His wardrobe, books and papers remained in his room. Nothing was heard of him until the crime of the century stilled all hearts and the wires flashed the horrible news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. The excitement in Franklin, the murderer’s latest home, was intense. Crowds gathered to learn the dread particulars and discuss Booth’s conduct and utterances. Not a word or act previous to his departure pointed to deliberate preparation for the frightful deed that plunged the nation in grief. That he contemplated it before leaving Franklin the weight of evidence tended to disprove. He made no attempt to sell any of his property, to convert his lands and wells into cash, to settle his partnership accounts or to pack his effects. He had money in the bank, wells bringing a good income and important business pending. All these things went to show that, if not a sudden impulse, the killing of Lincoln was prompted by some occurrence in Washington that fired the passionate nature John Wilkes Booth inherited from his father. The world is familiar with the closing chapters of the dark tragedy—the assassin’s flight, the pursuit into Virginia, the burning barn, Sergeant Corbett’s fatal bullet, the pathetic death-scene on the Garrett porch and the last message, just as the dawn was breaking on the glassy eyes that opened feebly for a moment: “Tell my mother I died for my country. I did what I thought was best.”

The wells and the land on the river were held by Booth’s heirs until 1869, when the tract changed hands. The farm is producing no oil and the Simonds-Booth wells have disappeared. Had he not intended to return to Franklin, Booth would certainly have disposed of these interests and given the proceeds to his mother. “Joe” Simonds removed to Bradford to keep books for Whitney & Wheeler, bankers and oil-operators, and died there years ago. He was an expert accountant, quick, accurate and neat in his work and most fastidious in his attire. A blot on his paper, a figure not exactly formed, a line one hair-breath crooked, a spot on his linen or a speck of dust on his coat was simply intolerable. He was correct in language and deportment and honorable in his dealings. Colman continued his oil-operations, in company with W. R. Crawford, a real-estate agency, until the eighties. He married Miss Ella Hull, the finest vocalist Franklin ever boasted, daughter of Captain S. A. Hull, and removed to Boston. For years paralytic trouble has confined him to his home. He is “one of nature’s nobleman.”

“French Kate,” the woman who aided Ben Hogan at Pithole and followed him to Babylon and Parker, was a Confederate spy and supposed to be very friendly with J. Wilkes Booth. Besides his oil-interests at Franklin, the slayer of Abraham Lincoln owned a share in the Homestead well at Pithole. A favorite legend tells how, by a singular coincidence, which produced a sensation, the well was burned on the evening of the President’s assassination. It caught fire about the same instant the fatal bullet was fired in Ford’s Theater and tanks of burning oil enveloped Pithole in a dense smoke when the news of the tragedy flashed over the trembling wires. The Homestead well was not down until Lincoln had been dead seven weeks, Pithole had no existence and there were no blazing tanks; otherwise the legend is correct. Two weeks before his appalling crime Booth was one of a number of passengers on the scow doing duty as a ferry-boat across the Allegheny, after the Franklin bridge had burned. The day was damp and the water very cold. Some inhuman whelp threw a fine setter into the river. The poor beast swam to the rear of the scow and Booth pulled him on board. He caressed the dog and bitterly denounced the fellow who could treat a dumb animal so cruelly. At another time he knocked down a cowardly ruffian for beating a horse that was unable to pull a heavy load out of a mud-hole. He has been known to shelter stray kittens, to buy them milk and induce his landlady to care for them until they could be provided with a home. Truly his was a contradictory nature. He sympathized with horses, dogs and cats, yet robbed the nation of its illustrious chief and plunged mankind into mourning. To newsboys Booth was always liberal, not infrequently handing a dollar for a paper and saying: “No change; buy something useful with the money.” The first time he went to the Methodist Sunday-school, with “Joe” Simonds, he asked and answered questions and put a ten-dollar bill in the collection-box.

Over the hills to the interior of the townships developments spread. Bredinsburg, Milton and Tarkiln loomed up in Cranberry, where Taylor & Torrey, S. P. McCalmont, Jacob Sheasley, B. W. Bredin and E. W. Echols have sugar-plums. In Sandycreek, between Franklin and Foster, Angell & Prentice brought Bully Hill and Mount Hope to the front. The biggest well in the package was a two-hundred barreler on Mount Hope, which created a mount of hopes that were not fully realized. George V. Forman counted out one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars for the Mount Hope corner. The territory lasted well and averaged fairly. Bully Hill merited its somewhat slangy title. Dr. C. D. Galbraith, George R. Sheasley and Mattern & Son are among its present operators. Angell and Prentice parted company, each to engage in opening up the Butler region. Prentice, Crawford, Barbour & Co. did not let the grass grow under their feet. They “knew a good thing at sight” and pumped tens-of-thousands of barrels of oil from the country south of Franklin. The firm was notable in the seventies. Considerable drilling was done at Polk, where the state is providing a half-million-dollar Home for Feeble-Minded Children, and in the latitude of Utica, with about enough oil to be an aggravation. The Shippen wells, a mile north of the county poor-house, have produced for thirty years. West of them, on the Russell farm, the Twin wells, joined as tightly as the derricks could be placed, pumped for years. This was the verge of productive territory, test wells on the lands of William Sanders, William Bean, A. Reynolds, John McKenzie, Alexander Frazier and W. Booth, clear to Cooperstown, finding a trifle of sand and scarcely a vestige of oil. The Raymonds, S. Ramage, John J. Doyle and Daniel Grimm had a very tidy offshoot at Raymilton. On this wise lubricating and second-sand oils were revealed for the benefit of mankind generally. The fly in the ointment was the clerical crank who wrote to President Lincoln to demand that the producing of heavy-oil be stopped peremptorily, as it had been stored in the ground to grease the axletree of the earth in its diurnal revolution! This communication reminded Lincoln of a “little story,” which he fired at the fellow with such effect that the candidate for a strait-jacket was perpetually squelched.

Hon. William Reid Crawford, a member of the firm of Prentice, Crawford, Barbour & Co., lives in Franklin. His parents were early settlers in north-western Pennsylvania. Alexander Grant, his maternal grandfather, built the first stone-house in Lancaster county, removed to Butler county and located finally in Armstrong county, where he died sixty-five years ago. In 1854 William R. and four of his brothers went to California and spent some time mining gold. Upon his return he settled on a farm in Scrubgrass township, Venango county, of which section the Crawfords had been prominent citizens from the beginning of its history. Removing to Franklin in 1865, Mr. Crawford engaged actively in the production of petroleum, operating extensively in various portions of the oil-regions for twenty years. He acquired a high reputation for enterprise and integrity, was twice a city-councillor, served three terms as mayor, was long president of the school-board, was elected sheriff in 1887 and State-Senator in 1890. Untiring fidelity to the interests of the people and uncompromising hostility to whatever he believed detrimental to the general welfare distinguished his public career. Genial and kindly to all, the friend of humanity and benefactor of the poor, no man stands better in popular estimation or is more deserving of confidence and respect. His friends could not be crowded into the Coliseum without bulging out the walls. Ebenezer Crawford, brother of William R., died at Emlenton in August of 1897, on his seventy-sixth birthday. John P. Crawford, another brother, who made the California trip in 1849, still resides in the southern end of the county and is engaged in oil-operations. E. G. Crawford, a nephew, twice prothonotary of Venango and universally liked, passed away last June. His cousin, C. J. Crawford, a first-class man anywhere and everywhere, served as register and recorder with credit and ability. The Crawfords “are all right.”

For money may come and money may go,
But a good name stays to the end of the show.

Captain John K. Barbour, a man of imposing presence and admirable qualities, removed to Philadelphia after the dissolution of the firm. The Standard Oil-Company gave him charge of the right-of-way department of its pipe-line service and he returned to Franklin. Two years ago, during a business visit to Ohio, he died unexpectedly, to the deep regret of the entire community. S. A. Wheeler operated largely in the Bradford field and organized the Tuna-Valley Bank of Whitney & Wheeler. For a dozen years he has resided at Toledo, his early home. Like Captain Barbour, “Fred,” as he was commonly called, had an exhaustless mine of bright stories and a liberal share of the elements of popularity. One afternoon in 1875, three days before the fire that wiped out the town, a party of us chanced to meet at St. Joe, Butler county, then the centre of oil-developments. An itinerating artist had his car moored opposite the drug-store. Somebody proposed to have a group-picture. The motion carried unanimously and a toss-up decided that L. H. Smith was to foot the bill. The photographer brought out his camera, positions were taken on the store-platform and the pictures were mailed an hour ahead of the blaze that destroyed most of the buildings and compelled the artist to hustle off his car on the double-quick. Samuel R. Reed, at the extreme right, operated in the Clarion field. He had a hardware-store in company with the late Dr. Durrant and his home is in Franklin. James Orr, between whom and Reed a telegraph-pole is seen, was connected with the Central Hotel at Petrolia and later was a broker in the Producers’ Exchange at Bradford. On the step is Thomas McLaughlin, now oil-buyer at Lima, once captain of a talented base-ball club at Oil City and an active oil-broker. Back of him is “Fred” Wheeler, with Captain Barbour on his right and L. H. Smith sitting comfortably in front. Mr. Smith figured largely at Pithole, operated satisfactorily around Petrolia and removed years ago to New York. Cast in a giant mould, he weighs three-hundred pounds and does credit to the illustrious legions of Smiths. He is a millionaire and has an office over the Seaboard Bank, at the lower end of Broadway. Joseph Seep, the king-bee of good fellows, sits besides Smith. Pratt S. Crosby, formerly a jolly broker at Parker and Oil City, stands behind Seep. Next him is “Tom” King, who has “gone to the land of the leal,” J. J. McLaurin ending the row. James Amm, who went from an Oil-city clerkship to coin a fortune at Bradford—a street bears his name—sits on the platform. Every man, woman, child and baby near Oil City knew and admired “Jamie” Amm, who is now enjoying his wealth in Buffalo. Two out of the eleven in the group have “passed beyond the last scene” and the other nine are scattered widely.

“Friend after friend departs,
Who hath not lost a friend?”

Frederic Prentice, one of the pluckiest operators ever known in petroleum-annals, was the first white child born on the site of Toledo, when Indians were the neighbors of the pioneers of Northern Ohio. His father left a fine estate, which the son increased greatly by extensive lumbering, in which he employed three-thousand men. Losses in the panic of 1857 retired him from the business. He retrieved his fortune and paid his creditors their claims in full, with ten per cent. interest, an act indicative of his sterling character. Reading in a newspaper about the Drake well, he decided to see for himself whether the story was fast colors. Journeying to Venango county by way of Pittsburg, he met and engaged William Reed to accompany him. Reed had worked at the Tarentum salt-wells and knew a thing or two about artesian-boring. The two arrived at Franklin on the afternoon of the day Evans’s well turned the settlement topsy-turvy. Next morning Prentice offered Evans forty-thousand dollars for a controlling interest in the well, one-fourth down and the balance in thirty, sixty and ninety days. Evans declining to sell, the Toledo visitor bought from Martin & Epley an acre of ground on the north bank of French Creek, at the base of the hill, and contracted with Reed to “kick down” a well, the third in the district. Prentice and Reed tramped over the country for days, locating oil-deposits by means of the witch-hazel, which the Tarentumite handled skillfully. This was a forked stick, which it was claimed turned in the hands of the holder at spots where oil existed. Various causes delayed the completion of the well, which at last proved disappointingly small. Meanwhile Mr. Prentice leased the Neeley farm, two miles up the Allegheny, in Cranberry township, and bored several paying wells. A railroad station on the tract is named after him and R. G. Lamberton has converted the property into a first-class stock-farm. Favorable reports from Little Kanawha River took him to West Virginia, where he leased and purchased immense blocks of land. Among them was the Oil-Springs tract, on the Hughes River, from which oil had been skimmed for generations. Two of his wells on the Kanawha yielded six-hundred barrels a day, which had to be stored in ponds or lakes for want of tankage. Confederate raiders burned the wells, oil and machinery and drove off the workmen, putting an extinguisher on operations until the Grant-Lee episode beneath the apple-tree at Appomattox.

Assuming that the general direction of profitable developments would be north-east and south-west, Mr. Prentice surveyed a line from Venango county through West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. This idea, really the foundation of “the belt theory,” he spent thousands of dollars to establish. Personal investigation and careful surveys confirmed his opinion, which was based upon observations in the Pennsylvania fields. The line run thirty years ago touched numerous “springs” and “surface shows” and recent tests prove its remarkable accuracy. On this theory he drilled at Mount Hope and Foster, opening a section that has produced several-million barrels of oil. C. D. Angell applied the principle in Clarion and Butler counties, mapping out the probable course of the “belt” and leasing much prolific territory. His success led others to adopt the same plan, developing a number of pools in four states, although nature’s lines are seldom straight and the oil-bearing strata are deposited in curves and beds at irregular intervals.

In company with W. W. Clark of New York, to whom he had traded a portion of his West-Virginia lands, Mr. Prentice secured a quarter-interest in the Tarr farm, on Oil Creek, shortly before the sinking of the Phillips well, and began shipping oil to New York. They paid three dollars apiece for barrels, four dollars a barrel for hauling to the railroad and enormous freights to the east. The price dropping below the cost of freights and barrels, the firm dug acres of pits to put tanks under ground, covering them with planks and earth to prevent evaporation. Traces of these storage-vats remain on the east bank of Oil Creek. Crude fell to twenty-five cents a barrel at the wells and the outlook was discouraging. Clark & Prentice stopped drilling and turned their attention to finding a market. They constructed neat wooden packages that would hold two cans of refined-oil, two oil-lamps and a dozen chimneys and sent one to each United-States Consul in Europe. Orders soon rushed in from foreign countries, especially Germany, France and England, stimulating the erection of refineries and creating a large export-trade. Clark & Summer, who also owned an interest in the Tarr farm, built the Standard Refinery at Pittsburg and agreed to take from Clark & Prentice one-hundred-thousand barrels of crude at a dollar a barrel, to be delivered as required during the year. Before the delivery of the first twenty-five-thousand barrels the price climbed to one-fifty and to six dollars before the completion of the contract, which was carried out to the letter. The advance continued to fourteen dollars a barrel, lasting only one day at this figure. These were vivifying days in oleaginous circles, never to be repeated while Chronos wields his trusty blade.

When crude reached two dollars Mr. Prentice bought the Washington-McClintock farm, on which Petroleum Centre was afterwards located, for three-hundred-thousand dollars. Five New-Yorkers, one of them the president of the Shoe and Leather Bank and another the proprietor of the Brevoort House, advanced fifty-thousand dollars for the first payment. Within sixty days Prentice sold three-quarters of his interest for nine-hundred-thousand dollars and organized the Central Petroleum Oil-Company, with a capital of five-millions! Wishing to repay the New-York loan, the Brevoort landlord desired him to retain his share of the money and invest it as he pleased. For his ten-thousand dollars mine host received eighty-thousand in six months, a return that leaves government-bond syndicates and Cripple-Creek speculations out in the latitude of Nansen’s north-pole. The company netted fifty-thousand dollars a month in dividends for years and lessees cleared three or four millions from their operations on the farm. Greenbacks circulated like waste-paper, Jules Verne’s fancies were surpassed constantly by actual occurrences and everybody had money to burn.

Prentice and his associates purchased many tracts along Oil Creek, including the lands where Oil City stands and the Blood farm of five-hundred acres. In the Butler district he drilled hundreds of wells and built the Relief Pipe-Line. Organizing The Producers’ Consolidated Land-and-Petroleum-Company, with a capital of two-and-a-half millions, he managed it efficiently and had a prominent part in the Bradford development. Boston capitalists paid in twelve-hundred-thousand dollars, Prentice keeping a share in his oil-properties representing thirteen-hundred-thousand more. The company is now controlled by the Standard, with L. B. Lockhart as superintendent. Its indefatigable founder also organized the Boston Oil Company to operate in Kentucky and Tennessee, put down oil-wells in Peru and gas-wells in West Virginia, produced and piped thousands of barrels of crude daily and was a vital force in petroleum-affairs for eighteen years. The confidence and esteem of his compatriots were attested by his unanimous election to the presidency of the Oilmen’s League, a secret-society formed to resist the proposed encroachments of the South-Improvement Company. The League accomplished its mission and then quietly melted out of existence.

Since 1877 Mr. Prentice has devoted his attention chiefly to lumbering in West Virginia and to his brown-stone quarries at Ashland, Wisconsin. The death of his son, Frederick A., by accidental shooting, was a sad bereavement to the aged father. His suits to get possession of the site of Duluth, the city of Proctor Knott’s impassioned eulogy, included in a huge grant of land deeded to him by the Indians, were scarcely less famous than Mrs. Gaines’s protracted litigation to recover a slice of New Orleans. The claim involved the title to property valued at twelve-millions of dollars. From his Ashland quarries the owner took out a monolith, designed for the Columbian Exposition in 1893, forty yards long and ten feet square at the base. Beside this monster stone Cleopatra’s Needle, disintegrating in Central Park, Pompey’s Pillar and the biggest blocks in the pyramids are Tom-Thumb pigmies. At seventy-four Mr. Prentice, foremost in energy and enterprise, retains much of his youthful vigor. Earnest and sincere, a master of business, his word as good as gold, Frederic Prentice holds an honored place in the ranks of representative oil-producers, “nobles of nature’s own creating.”

A native of Chautauqua county, N. Y., where he was born in 1826, Cyrus D. Angell received a liberal education, served as School-Commissioner and engaged in mercantile pursuits at Forestville. Forced through treachery and the monetary stringency of the times to compromise with his creditors, he recovered his financial standing and paid every cent of his indebtedness, principal and interest. In 1867 he came to the oil-regions with a loan of one-thousand dollars and purchased an interest in property at Petroleum Centre that paid handsomely. Prior to this, in connection with Buffalo capitalists, he had bought Belle Island, in the Allegheny River at Scrubgrass, upon which soon after his arrival he drilled three wells that averaged one-hundred barrels each for two years, netting the owners over two-hundred-thousand dollars. Operations below Franklin, in company with Frederic Prentice, also proved highly profitable. His observations of the course of developments along Oil Creek and the Allegheny led Mr. Angell to the conclusion that petroleum would be found in “belts” or regular lines. He adopted the theory that two “belts” existed, one running from Petroleum Centre to Scrubgrass and the other from St. Petersburg through Butler county. Satisfied of the correctness of this view, he leased or purchased all the lands within the probable boundaries of the “belt” from Foster to Belle Island, a distance of six miles. The result justified his expectations, ninety per cent. of the wells yielding abundantly. With “the belt theory,” which he followed up with equal success farther south, Mr. Angell’s name is linked indissolubly. His researches enriched him and were of vast benefit to the producers generally. He did much to extend the Butler region, drilling far ahead of tested territory. The town of Angelica owed its creation to his fortunate operations in the neighborhood, conducted on a comprehensive scale. Reverses could not crush his manly spirit. He did a large real-estate business at Bradford for some years, opening an office at Pittsburg when the Washington field began to loom up. Failing health compelling him to seek relief in foreign travel, last year he went to Mexico and Europe to recuperate. Mr. Angell is endowed with boundless energy, fine intellectual powers and rare social acquirements. During his career in Oildom he was an excellent sample of the courageous, unconquerable men who have made petroleum the commercial wonder of the world.

An old couple in Cranberry township, who eked out a scanty living on a rocky farm near the river, sold their land for sixty-thousand dollars at the highest pitch of the oil-excitement around Foster. This was more money than the pair had ever before seen, much less expected to handle and own. It was paid in bank-notes at noon and the log-house was to be vacated next day. Towards evening the poor old woman burst into tears and insisted that her husband should give back the money to the man that “wanted to rob them of their home.” She was inconsolable, declaring they would be “turned out to starve, without a roof to cover them.” The idea that sixty-thousand dollars would buy an ideal home brought no comfort to the simple-minded creature, whose hopes and ambitions were confined to the lowly abode that had sheltered her for a half-century. A promise to settle near her brother in Ohio reconciled her somewhat, but it almost broke her faithful heart to leave a spot endeared by many tender associations. John Howard Payne, himself a homeless wanderer, whose song has been sung in every tongue and echoed in every soul, jingled by innumerable hand-organs and played by the masters of music, was right:

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

The refusal of his wife to sign the deed conveying the property enabled a wealthy Franklinite to gather a heap of money. The tract was rough and unproductive and the owner proposed to accept for it the small sum offered by a neighboring farmer, who wanted more pasture for his cattle. For the first time in her life the wife declined to sign a paper at her husband’s request, saying she had a notion the farm would be valuable some day. The purchaser refused to take it subject to a dower and the land lay idle. At length oil-developments indicated that the “belt” ran through the farm. Scores of wells yielded freely, netting the land-owner a fortune and convincing him that womanly intuition is a sure winner.

A citizen of Franklin, noted for his conscientiousness and liberality, was interested in a test-well at the beginning of the Scrubgrass development. He vowed to set aside one-fourth of his portion of the output of the well “for the Lord,” as he expressed it. To the delight of the owners, who thought the venture hazardous, the well showed for a hundred barrels when the tubing was put in. On his way back from the scene the Franklin gentleman did a little figuring, which proved that the Lord’s percentage of the oil might foot up fifty dollars a day. This was a good deal of money for religious purposes. The maker of the vow reflected that the Lord could get along without so much cash and he decided to clip the one-fourth down to one-tenth, arguing that the latter was the scripture limit. Talking it over with his wife, she advised him to stick to his original determination and not trifle with the Lord. The husband took his own way, as husbands are prone to do, and revisited the well next day. Something had gone wrong with the working-valve, the tubing had to be drawn out and the well never pumped a barrel of oil! The disappointed operator concluded, as he charged two thousand dollars to his profit-and-loss account, that it was not the Lord who came out at the small end of the horn in the transaction.

Rev. Clarence A. Adams, the eloquent ex-pastor of the First Baptist Church at Franklin, is the lucky owner of a patch of paying territory at Raymilton. Recently he finished a well which pumped considerable salt-water with the oil. Contrary to Cavendish and the ordinary custom, another operator drilled very close to the boundary of the Adams lease and torpedoed the well heavily. Instead of sucking the oil from the preacher’s nice pumper, the new well took away most of the salt-water and doubled the production of petroleum! Commonly it would seem rather mean to rob a Baptist minister of water, but in this case Dr. Adams is perfectly resigned to the loss of aqueous fluid and gain of dollar-fifty crude. A profound student of Shakespeare, Browning and the Bible, a brilliant lecturer and master of pulpit-oratory, may he also stand on a lofty rung of the greasian ladder and attain the goodly age of Franklin’s “grand old man,” Rev. Dr. Crane. This “father in Israel,” whose death in February of 1896 the whole community mourned, left a record of devoted service as a physician and clergyman for over sixty years that has seldom been equaled. He healed the sick, smoothed the pillow of the dying, relieved the distressed, reclaimed the erring, comforted the bereaved, turned the faces of the straying Zionward and found the passage to the tomb “a gentle wafting to immortal life.” Let his memory be kept green.

“Though old, he still retained
His manly sense and energy of mind.
Virtuous and wise he was, but not severe,
For he remembered that he once was young;
His kindly presence checked no decent joy.
Him e’en the dissolute admired. Can he be dead
Whose spiritual influence is upon his kind?”

The late Thomas McDonough, a loyal-hearted son of the Emerald Isle, was also an energetic operator in the lubricating region. He had an abundance of rollicking wit, “the pupil of the soul’s clear eye,” and an unfailing supply of the drollest stories. Desiring to lease a farm in Sandy-Creek township, supposed to be squarely “on the belt,” he started at daybreak to interview the owner, feeling sure his mission would succeed. An unexpected sight presented itself through the open door, as the visitor stepped upon the porch of the dwelling. The farmer’s wife was setting the table for breakfast and Frederic Prentice was folding a paper carefully. McDonough realized in a twinkling that Prentice had secured the lease and his trip was fruitless. “I am looking for John Smith” he stammered, as the farmer invited him to enter, and beat a hasty retreat. For years his friends rallied the Colonel on his search and would ask with becoming solemnity whether he had discovered John Smith. The last time we met in Philadelphia this incident was revived and the query repeated jocularly. The jovial McDonough died in 1894. It is safe to assume that he will easily find numerous John Smiths in the land of perpetual reunion. One day he told a story in an office on Thirteenth street, Franklin, which tickled the hearers immensely. A full-fledged African, who had been sweeping the back-room, broke into a tumultuous laugh. At that moment a small boy was riding a donkey directly in front of the premises. The jackass heard the peculiar laugh and elevated his capacious ears more fully to take in the complete volume of sound. He must have thought the melody familiar and believed he had stumbled upon a relative. Despite the frantic exertions of the boy, the donkey rushed towards the building whence the boisterous guffaw proceeded, shoved his head inside the door and launched a terrific bray. The bystanders were convulsed at this evidence of mistaken identity, which the jolly story-teller frequently rehearsed for the delectation of his hosts of friends.

Looking over the Milton diggings one July day, Col. McDonough met an amateur-operator who was superintending the removal of a wooden-tank from a position beside his first and only well. A discussion started regarding the combustibility of the thick sediment collected on the bottom of the tank. The amateur maintained the stuff would not burn and McDonough laughingly replied, “Well, just try it and see!” The fellow lighted a match and applied it to the viscid mass before McDonough could interfere, saying with a grin that he proposed to wait patiently for the result. He didn’t have to wait “until Orcus would freeze over and the boys play shinny on the ice.” In the ninetieth fraction of a second the deposit blazed with intense enthusiasm, quickly enveloping the well-rig and the surroundings in flames. Clouds of smoke filled the air, suggesting fancies of Pittsburg or Sheol. Charred fragments of the derrick, engine-house and tank, with an acre of blackened territory over which the burning sediment had spread, demonstrated that the amateur’s idea had been decidedly at fault. The experiment convinced him as searchingly as a Roentgen ray that McDonough had the right side of the argument. “If the ‘b. s.’ had been as green as the blamed fool, it wouldn’t have burned,” was the Colonel’s appropriate comment.

Miss Lizzie Raymond, daughter of the pioneer who founded Raymilton and erected the first grist-mill at Utica, has long taught the infant-class of the Presbyterian Sunday-school at Franklin. Once the lesson was about the wise and the foolish virgins, the good teacher explaining the subject in a style adapted to the juvenile mind. A cute little tot, impressed by the sad plight of the virgins who had no oil in their lamps, innocently inquired: “Miss ’Aymond, tan’t oo tell ’em dirls to turn to our house an’ my papa ’ll div’ ’em oil f’um his wells?” Heaven bless the children that come as sunbeams to lighten our pathway, to teach us lessons of unselfishness and prevent the rough world from turning our hearts as hard as the mill-stone.

Judge Trunkey, who presided over the Venango court a dozen years and was then elected to the Supreme Bench, was hearing a case of desertion. An Oil-City lawyer, proud of his glossy black beard, represented the forsaken wife, a comely young woman from Petroleum Centre, who dandled a bright baby of twenty months on her knee. Mother and baby formed a pretty picture and the lawyer took full advantage of it in his closing appeal to the jury. At a brilliant climax he turned to his client and said: “Let me have the child!” He was raising it to his arms, to hold before the men in the box and describe the heinous meanness of the wretch who could leave such beauty and innocence to starve. The baby spoiled the fun by springing up, clutching the attorney’s beard and screaming: “Oh, papa!” The audience fairly shrieked. Judge Trunkey laughed until the tears flowed and it was five minutes before order could be restored. That ended the oratory and the jury salted the defendant handsomely. Hon. James S. Connelly, an Associate Judge, who now resides in Philadelphia and enjoys his well-earned fortune, was also on the bench at the moment. Judge Trunkey, one of the purest, noblest men and greatest jurists that ever shed lustre upon Pennsylvania, passed to his reward six years ago.

In your wide peregrinations from the poles to the equator,
Should you hear some ignoramus—let out of his incubator—
Say the heavy-oil of Franklin is not earth’s best lubricator,
Do as did renown’d Tom Corwin, the great Buckeye legislator,
When a jabberwock in Congress sought to brand him as a traitor,
Just “deny the allegation and defy the allegator!”

KEEPING STEP.

The Shasta was Karns City’s first well.

Missouri has two wells producing oil.

North Dakota has traces of natural-gas.

Ninety wells in Japan pump four-hundred barrels.

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

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

Alaska-oil is cousin of asphalt-pitch, very heavy, and thick as New-Orleans molasses in midwinter.

Wade Hampton, postmaster of Pittsburg, and cousin of Governor Wade Hampton, organized one of the first petroleum companies in the United States.

General Herman Haupt, of Philadelphia, now eighty-one years old, surveyed the route and constructed the first pipe-line across Pennsylvania.

Robert Nevin, founder of the Pittsburg _Times_, drilled a dry-hole four-hundred feet, ten miles west of Greensburg, in 1858, a year before Drake’s successful experiment in Oil Creek.

The Powell Oil-Company, superintended by Col. A. C. Ferris, still a resident of New York, paid fifty-thousand dollars in cash for the Shirk farm, half way between Franklin and Oil City, drilled a dry-hole and abandoned the property.

The gentle wife who seeks your faults to cover
You don’t deserve; prize naught on earth above her;
Keep step and be through life her faithful lover.

The new town of Guffey, the liveliest in Colorado, thirty miles from Cripple Creek, is fitly named in honor of James M. Guffey, the successful Pennsylvania oil-producer and political leader, who has big mining interests in that section.

The Fonner pool, Greene county, was the oil-sensation of 1897 in Pennsylvania. The Fonner well, struck in March, and territory around it sold for two-hundred-thousand dollars. Elk Fork wore the West-Virginia belt, Peru took the Hoosier biscuit and Lucas county the Buckeye premium.

Say, boys, seein’ how fast th’ ranks iz thinnin’—
Th’ way thar droppin’ out sets my head spinnin’—
An’ knownin’ ez how death may take an innin’
An’ clean knock out our underpinnin’,
I kalkilate we oughter swar off sinnin’,
Jes’ quit fer keeps our dog-gon’ chinnin’,
Start in th’ narrer road fer a beginning’,
An’ so strike oil in Heav’n fer a sure winnin’
When up the golden-stairs we goes a-shinnin’.

When the biggest well in Indiana flowed oil fifty feet above the derrick, at Van Buren, a local paper noted the effect thus: “The strike has given the town a tremendous boom. Several real-estate offices have opened and the town-council has raised the license for faro-banks from five dollars a year to twelve dollars.” At this rate Van Buren ought soon to be in the van.

JOHN VANAUSDALL. WM. PHILLIPS.
GEO. K. ANDERSON.
F. S. TARBELL. F. W. ANDREWS.
ORIGINAL D. W. KENNEY’S ALLEMAGOOZELUM-CITY WELL No 2.
CAPT. WM. HASSON. JOHN P. ZANE.
HENRY R. ROUSE.
]

VII.
THE VALLEY OF PETROLEUM.

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

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

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

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

“God has placed in his great bank—mother earth—untold wealth and many a
poor man’s check has been honored here for large amounts of
oil.”—_T. S. Scoville, A. D. 1861._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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