A music teacher turned up in the community and I was at once set at five-finger exercises, and I was kept at them and all that follows them for many years; but I found no joy in what I was doing. It is possible that with different teachers from those available there might have been a spring touched, for untrained as I am I am not without a certain appreciation of music.
I mastered the mechanics of piano playing well enough, however, to become later one of the regular performers in the high school in the town to which we were to move—Titusville, Pennsylvania. I remembered nothing of this until two of my old friends in Titusville, school chums, told me that I was one of the three or four who played the piano for the morning exercises, that I sometimes played my show pieces, and that on one occasion I was an actor in a scene which they recalled with glee. They told me I was playing a duet with a classmate. We either lost our place or did not agree as to time—stopped entirely, argued the matter out, began over, and this time went through without dissension; but I have only this secondhand memory of my contribution to the musical life of the Titusville High School.
I remember the efforts of my father and mother to show me something of the outside world much more clearly than I do those to awaken my interest in books and music. There were little trips, once as far as Cleveland—the whole family—the marvel of the “best hotel,” of new hats and coats and armfuls of toys. There were summers at the farm, only thirty miles away. Best remembered and most enjoyed were the all-day-excursion picnics. No one can understand the social life of a great body of the American people in the latter part of the nineteenth century without understanding the hold the picnic had on them. The Tarbell household took the picnic so seriously that it had a special equipment of stout market baskets, tin cups and plates, steel knives and forks, tin spoons, worn napkins (the paper ones were then unheard of). The menus were as fixed as that for a Thanksgiving dinner: veal loaf, cold tongue, hard-boiled eggs—“two apiece”—buttered rusks, spiced peaches, jelly, cucumber pickles, chowchow, cookies, doughnuts (we called them fried cakes), and a special family cake. And you ate until you were full.
Our grandest picnic excursions in those days were to Chautauqua Lake, a charming sheet of water only some fifty miles from home. Near the head of the lake lay an old Chautauqua County town, Mayville; at its foot, Jamestown where my father for several years had been a student in the Academy, and from which in vacations he had gone on his annual trips down the Ohio. Loaded with big baskets of lunch, we took an early train to Mayville, changed there to a little white steamer: zigzagged the length of the lake, twenty or so miles, stopping at point after point. We ate our lunch en route, and at Jamestown went uptown to drink a bottle of “pop.” And then came the slow return home, where we arrived after dark exhausted by pleasure.
Three or four miles from Mayville on the west side of the lake jutted a wooded promontory—Fair Point—the site in those days of a Methodist camp meeting; and here we sometimes stopped for the day. We never liked it so well as going to Jamestown; neither did father.
2
I DECIDE TO BE A BIOLOGIST
Five years went by in the house on the hill, and then in 1870 when I was thirteen I found myself in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in a new house my father had built. How characteristic of the instability of the oil towns of that day, as well as of the frugality of my father, was this house! From the beginning of the Pithole excitement he had, as I have said, made money—more than he could ever have dreamed, I fancy; and then about 1869 practically without warning the bottom fell out, as the vernacular of the region put it. The end shut up my father’s shops there, but it also gave us the makings of a home. In that rapid development, only four years long, a town of some twenty thousand had grown up with several big hotels—among them, one called the Bonta House. It had features which delighted my father—long French windows, really fine iron brackets supporting its verandahs, handsome woodwork. The Bonta House was said to have cost $60,000, but its owners were glad to take the $600 father offered when the town “blew up.” He paid the money, tore down the building, loaded its iron brackets and fine doors and windows, mouldings and all, and I suppose much of its timber, onto wagons and carted it ten miles away to Titusville where, out of it, he built the house which was our home for many years.
Titusville was not like Rouseville, which had suddenly sprung from the mud as uncertain as a mushroom of the future. It had been a substantial settlement twenty years before oil was found there, small but sturdy with a few families who had made money chiefly in lumber, owning good homes, carefully guarding the order and decency of the place.
The discovery of oil overran the settlement with hundreds of fortune seekers. They came from far and near, on foot, horseback, wagon. The nearest railroad connection was sixteen miles away, and the roads and fields leading in were soon cut beyond recognition by the heavy hauling, its streets at times impassable with mud.
The new industry demanded machinery, tools, lumber—and the bigger it grew, the greater the demand. Titusville, the birthplace of all this activity, as well as the gateway down the Creek, must furnish food and shelter for caravans of strangers, shops for their trades, offices for speculators and brokers, dealers in oil lands and leases, for oil producers, surveyors, and draftsmen—all the factors of the big business organization necessary to develop the industry. In 1862 the overflow was doubled by the arrival of a railroad with a connection sixteen miles away with the East and West. The disbanding of the Army in June of 1865 brought a new rush—men still in uniform, their rifles and knapsacks on their backs. Most of this fresh inflow was bound to the scene of the latest excitement, Pithole.