Frederick Crocker drilled a notable well on the McElhenny, near the Foster line, jigging the “spring-pole” in 1861 and piercing the sand at one-hundred-and-fifty feet. He pumped the well incessantly two months, getting clear water for his pains. Neighbors jeered, asked if he proposed to empty the interior of the planet into the creek and advised him to import a Baptist colony. Crocker pegged away, remembering that “he laughs best who laughs last.” One morning the water wore a tinge of green. The color deepened, the gas “cut loose,” and a stream of oil shot upwards! The Crocker well spurted for weeks at a thousand-barrel clip and was sold for sixty-five-thousand dollars. Shutting in the flow, to prevent waste, wrought serious injury. The well disliked the treatment, the gas sought a vent elsewhere, pumping coaxed back the yield temporarily to fifty barrels and in the fall it yielded up the ghost.
Bennett & Hatch spent the summer of 1861 drilling on a lease adjoining the Fountain, striking the third sand at the same depth. On September eighteenth the well burst forth with thirty-three-hundred barrels per day! This was “confusion worse confounded,” foreigners not wanting “the nasty stuff” and Americans not yet aware of its real value. The addition of three-thousand barrels a day to the supply—with big additions from other wells—knocked prices to twenty cents, to fifteen, to ten! All the coopers in Oildom could not make barrels as fast as the Empire well—appropriate name—could fill them. Bradley & Son, of Cleveland, bought a month’s output for five-hundred dollars, loading one-hundred-thousand barrels into boats under their contract! The despairing owners, suffering from “an embarrassment of riches,” tried to cork up the pesky thing, but the well was like Xantippe, the scolding wife of Socrates, and would not be choked off. They built a dam around it, but the oil wouldn’t be dammed that way. It just gorged the pond, ran over the embankment and greased Oil Creek as no stream was ever greased before! Twenty-two-hundred barrels was the daily average in November and twelve-hundred in March. The torrent played April-fool by stopping without notice, seven months from its inception. Cleaning out and pumping restored it to six-hundred barrels, which dropped two-thirds and stopped again in 1863. An “air blower” revived it briefly, but its vitality had fled and in another year the grand Empire breathed its last.
These wells boomed the territory immensely. Derricks and engine-houses studded the McElhenny farms, which operators hustled to perforate as full of holes as a strainer. To haul machinery from the nearest railroad doubled its cost. Pumping five to twenty barrels a day, when adjacent wells flowed more hundreds spontaneously, lost its charm and most of the small fry were abandoned. Everybody wanted to get close to the third-sand spouters, although the market was glutted and crude ruinously cheap. A town—Funkville—arose on the northern end of the upper farm, sputtered a year or two, then “folded its tent like the Arabs and silently stole away.” A search with a microscope would fail to unearth an atom of Funkville or the wells that created it. Fresh strikes in 1862 kept the fever raging. Davis & Wheelock’s rattler daily poured out fifteen-hundred barrels. The Densmore triplets, bunched on a two-acre lease, were good for six-hundred, four-hundred and five-hundred respectively. The Olmstead, American, Canfield, Aikens, Burtis and two Hibbard wells, of the vintage of 1863, rated from two-hundred to five-hundred each. A band of less account—thirty to one-hundred barrels—assisted in holding the daily product of the McElhenny farms, from the spring of 1862 to the end of 1863, considerably above six-thousand barrels. The mockery of fate was accentuated by a dry-hole six rods from the Sherman and dozens of poor wells in the bosom of the big fellows. Disposing of his timber-lands and saw-mills in 1863, Captain Funk built a mansion and removed to Titusville. Early in 1864 he sold his wells and oil-properties and died on August second, leaving an estate of two-millions. He built schools and churches, dispensed freely to the needy and was honest to the core. Pleased with the work of a clerk, he deeded him an interest in the last well he ever drilled, which the lucky young man sold for one-hundred-thousand dollars.
Almost simultaneously with the Empire, in September of 1861, the Buckeye well, on the George P. Espy farm, east of lower McElhenney, set off at a thousand-barrel jog. It was located on a strip of level ground too narrow for tanks, which had to be erected two-hundred feet up the hill. The pressure of gas sufficed to force the oil into these tanks for a year. The production fell to eighty barrels and then, tiring of a climbing job that smacked of Sisyphus and the rolling stone, took a permanent rest. From this famous well J. T. Briggs, manager of the Briggs and the Gillettee Oil-Companies, shipped to Europe in 1862 the first cargo of petroleum ever sent across the Atlantic. The Buckeye Belle stood about hip-high to its consort, a dozen other wells on the Epsy produced mildly and Northrup Brothers operated a refinery.
“Vare[“Vare] vos dose oil-wells now? Gone vhare dogs can’t bow-wow.”
PIONEER AS IT LOOKED IN 1864-5.
Improved methods of handling and new uses for the product advanced crude to five dollars in the spring of 1864. Operations encroached upon the higher lands, exploding the notion that paying territory was confined to flats bordering the streams. Pioneer Run, an affluent of Oil Creek, bisecting the western end of the upper McElhenney and Foster farms, panned out flatteringly. Substantial wells, yielding fifteen barrels to three-hundred lined the ravine thickly. The town of Pioneer attracted the usual throngs. David Emery and Lewis Emery, Frank W. Andrews and not a few leading operators resided there for a time. The Morgan House, a rude frame of one story, dished up meals at which to eat beef-hash was to beefashionable. Clark & McGowen had a feed-store, offices and warehouses abounded, tanks and derricks mixed in the mass and boats loaded oil for refineries down the creek or the Allegheny river. The characteristic oil-town has faded from sight, only the weather-beaten rail road-station and a forlorn iron-tank staying. John Rhodes, the last resident, was killed in February of 1892 by a train. He lived alone in a small house beside the track, which he was crossing when the engine hit him, the noisy waters in the culvert drowning the sound of the cars. Rhodes hauled oil in the old days to Erie and Titusville, became a producer, met with reverses, attended to some wells for a company, worked a bit of garden and felt independent and happy.
Matthew Taylor, a Cleveland saloonist, whom the sequel showed to be no saloonatic, took a four-hundred-dollar flyer at Pioneer, on his first visit to Oildom. A well on the next lease elevated values and Taylor returned home in two weeks with twenty-thousand dollars, which subsequent deals quadrupled. A Titusville laborer—“a broth of a b’y wan year frum Oireland”—who stuck fifty dollars into an out-of-the-way Pioneer lot, sold his claim in a month for five-thousand. He bought a farm, sent across the water for his colleen and “they lived happily ever after.” The driver of a contractor’s team, assigned an interest in a drilling-well for his wages, cleaned up thirty-thousand dollars by the transaction and went to Minnesota. Could the mellowest melodrama unfold sweeter melodies?
“The jingle of gold is earth’s richest music.”