march, 1968 - Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission

OIL MOON continued from page 21
the morning. Shadrach in his many trips to the hotel during the
night had reserved a room. The dawn had already broken and
silhouetted the white-painted Morey House to the east.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FEBRUARY 8, 1866 HAD BEEN a very exhausting day for
Tom Dunn. Even though he was healthy, husky and young, the
12-mile walk from Titusville to Pithole, the struggling he did
to bring the bruised pack peddler to the Morey House, the
running and the excitement of the Tremont House fire and then
the long night's work at The Record had tired Tom. Now as
he rested in bed sleep would not come. His room at the Chase
overlooked busy, noisy Holmden Street. At daybreak nine stage
coaches would be leaving. Horses snorted and whinnied. Jn the
valley barked the peppy pump engines. Someone shouted reservations
for Miller Farm where train connections could be made
for Pittsburgh, Chicago, Buffalo, New York. As one coach
clattered off for that Oil Creek station over the only plank road
in the oil region at that time passengers crowded into a Pomeroy
Express stage making up for the four-hour ride to Titusville
and for West Hickory, the latter a new oil port in the
forests of Warren County fifteen miles to the north. Coaches
were leaving early that morning to travel on a pavement of
heavy frost. Frozen roads would permit good speed until the
ponderous wagons freighting timber, engines, flour, building
bricks, drilling rigs and iron stock tanks reappeared on all
roads converging on busy Pithole. It seemed to Tom that he
had barely fallen asleep to the calls of the stage drivers when
another caller banged on his door.
"Wake up, Tom. " It's three o'clock in the afternoon]
"You've sleeping through one of Pithole's most exciting
days. And Pithole's has many. See you in the dining room.
Ask for Colonel Morton's table, if you can't see us. The room
is getting crowded. We'll all eat together," the voice trailed
off in the hallway. Some time passed before Tom could orient
himself and identify his rouser as his new employer and surrender
his restful if unfamiliar bed.
Although the day had dawned clear clouds had rolled in
from Lake Erie by midmorning. Snow had fallen. About three
inches now covered the roofs of the unheated pumphouse shanties.
The picture out of Tom's window was an etching of black
and white, of soot on snow. Surrounding hills and trees were
white. The shacks, the high, black stovepipes jutting out of
each building and the 50-foot oil derricks on the flats near
Pithole Creek stood out dirty-dark against the clean blanket.
Tom had a corner room. From the north window he could
see a mob milling on the hillside two blocks away. Below him
on Holmden Street people moved about with buckets and shovels.
The buckets and shovels were to be mementos of the oil
miners — participants in Pithole's greatest and perhaps last
excitement. A row of barrels and containers on both sides
narrowed John Street to a lane.
Liquid black gold for which people drilled deep into the
earth now was flowing out of water wells and hillside springs
and seeping into trenches, oozing into ditches, potholes, filling
street ruts and appearing under heel prints. This was a great
hour. Mother Nature now made it simple for any and all to
get rich. Get a shovel and a tin bucket or a coffee pot and
embark upon an oil business in Pithole.
This was a great event. It towered above all events that
made Pithole the most exciting city in Pennsylvania in less
than 500 days.
It was as momentous a day as the day I. N. Frazier brought
$100,000 in profits from his Cherry Run Oil operations near
Oil City and came to the rolling buckwheat fields of the Holmden
Farm where he started to drill the experimental well.
Reward came for his gamble. Six hundred fifty barrels of oil
gushed out of the Frazier on her first day, January 7, 1865.
The oil now seeping into tin buckets on John Street was
causing more excitement than the re-emphasis of Frazier's
find which came with the completion of the Twin Wells, on
January 17 and 19, less than two weeks later. The Twins gave
the wilderness eight hundred more barrels of oil each day.
When the news of these three prolific producers echoed through
the tall timber of Cornplanter Township to Titusville north and
Oil City south and to the oil-wise valley on Oil Creek to the
west, a great mob climbed the plateau country of northeastern
Venango County. Seven extra trains with women clinging on
the top of box cars and as many as forty people crammed into
cattle cars and with others roosting on filled oil barrels like
chickens arrived in Miller Farm in one day.
But the oozings on John Street now caused more excitement
than did the birth of Grant Well which spouted 450 barrels in
its first offering on the second day of August, 1865, and then
became more generous vomiting incessantly 1,200 barrels of
liquid gold — worth then $10 a barrel — every day. It made a
millionaire in less than 100 days. After the Grant came other
liberal producers and hundreds of smaller contributors until
Pithole could no longer cart away, barrel, store, impound on
the surface or divert into hastily dug pits or waste the thousands
of barrels of "liquid greenbacks." Seventeen monstrous
1,200-barrel iron stock-tanks were like a cup against the sea.
The oil overflowed all containers and ran into scenic Pithole
Creek. Down this wild glen it poured into the Allegheny River.
On the riffle at the mouth of Pithole Creek were stranded long
lumber rafts, the hard-hewn sweat and product of the Warren
and Forest County. The golden froth impregnated the oak,
white pine, ash and hickory. Raftsmen cursed it and the government
for not clearing a deep channel so that the rafts could
have unobstructed sailing.
This day of February 9, 1866 was more exciting than the
day when the Pennsylvania Tubing and Transportation Company
completed its seven mile "squirt gun," a six-inch pipeline
dug into Pithole Creek's twisting vein to Oleopolis. This company
poured much of Pithole's wealth into pipe. Gravity rushed
it along on a drop of sixty feet to a mile, seven miles to river
freighters and oil barges sailing for Pittsburgh, 130 miles
away. This was a greater day than any day in the last nine
months when Pithole erected almost 500 buildings, where
streets "more elaborate than Central Park" were planned.
This seemed a more important day than the day when a locomotive
built in Philadelphia with companion freight cars and
long rails arrived at Oleopolis by river freighter from Pittsburgh
... A greater hour than the hour when six hundred men
began to build a path for this iron monster ....
A more exciting day than when the announcement came
just two days ago that the locomotive's smoke could be seen
around the first bend below Pithole City. And this too, was a
greater day than the days when the same hillside now leaking
its oily treasure into buckets and contaminating water wells
figured in a real estate transaction that involved more than a
million dollars. In July, 1865, three Titusville investors took
an option to buy this greasy hillside, a part of the famous
Holmden Farm, for $1,300,000. A few days later, after furious
proposals, they almost surrendered their option to a New York i
investor for $1,600,000. So valuable was the farm slope that
midwestern capitalists offered a block of the City of Chicago,
estimated to be worth $400,000, for a block of muddy streets,
dirty shanties and cottages in Pithole which inflated estimates
placed at $175,000.
A few days ago the Chicagoans might have considered
themselves lucky. Pithole's oil flow had dropped from 8,000
barrels a day to 2,000. "For Sale" signs were appearing in
store windows in the block containing the Tremont Hotel, the
livery stable and other buildings. People were leaving. The
Record readied its own "For Sale" announcement.
On top of all came the fire which gutted some of the
contested real estate. It was the beginning of the end.
But then oil flowed into the water wells.
THE REMAINS of Pithole City—a historical marker and
souvenir shop.
PART FOUR NEXT MONTH
22 PENNSYLVANIA ANGLER