Although surrounded by farms unrivaled as oil-territory and sold to Woods & Wright of New York at a fancy price, James Boyd’s seventy-five acres in Cornplanter township, south of the lower McElhenny, dodged the petroleum-artery. The sands were there, but so barren of oil that nine-tenths of the forty wells did not pay one-tenth their cost. The Boyd farm was for months the terminus of the railroad from Corry. Hotels and refineries were built and the place had a short existence, a brief interval separating its lying-in and its laying-out.
G. W. McClintock, in February of 1864, sold his two-hundred-acre farm, on the west side of Oil Creek, midway between Titusville and Oil City, to the Central Petroleum Company of New York, organized by Frederic Prentice and George H. Bissell. This notable farm embraced the site of Petroleum Centre and Wild-Cat Hollow, a circular ravine three-fourths of a mile long, in which two-hundred paying wells were drilled. Brown, Catlin & Co.’s medium well, finished in August of 1861, was the first on the McClintock tract. The company bored a multitude of wells and granted leases only to actual operators, for one-half royalty and a large bonus. For ten one-acre leases one-hundred-thousand dollars cash and one-half the oil, offered by a New-York firm in 1865, were refused. The McClintock well, drilled in 1862, figured in the thousand-barrel class. The Coldwater, Meyer, Clark, Anderson, Fox, Swamp-Angel and Bluff wells made splendid records. Altogether the Central Petroleum-Company and the corps of lessees harvested at least five-millions of dollars from the McClintock farm!
RYND FARM “KING OF THE HILLS”
PETROLEUM CENTRE-1894-
BOYD FARM-1864
STORY FARM.
Aladdin’s lamp was a miserly glim in the light of fortunes accruing from petroleum. The product of a flowing-well in a year would buy a tract of gold-territory in California or Australia larger than the oil-producing regions. Millions of dollars changed hands every week. The Central Company staked off a half-dozen streets and leased building-lots at exorbitant figures. Board-dwellings, offices, hotels, saloons and wells mingled promiscuously. It mattered nothing that discomfort was the rule. Poor fare, worse beds and the worst liquors were tolerated by the hordes of people who flocked to the land of derricks. Edward Fox, a railroad contractor who “struck the town” with eighty-thousand dollars, felicitously baptised the bantling Petroleum Centre. The owners of the ground opposed a borough-organization and the town traveled at a headlong go-as-you-please. Sharpers and prostitutes flourished, with no fear of human or divine law, in the metropolis of rum and debauchery. Dance-houses, beside which “Billy” McGlory’s Armory-Hall and “The.” Allen’s Mabille in New York were Sunday-school models, nightly counted their revelers by hundreds. In one of these dens Gus Reil, the proprietor, killed poor young Tait, of Rouseville. Fast women and faster men caroused and gambled, cursed and smoked, “burning the candle at both ends” in pursuit of—pleasure! Frequently the orgies eclipsed Monte Carlo—minus some of the glitter—and the Latin Quartier combined. Some readers may recall the night two “dead game sports” tossed dice twelve hours for one-thousand dollars a throw! But there was a rich leaven of first-class fellows. Kindred spirits, like “Sam” Woods, Frank Ripley, Edward Fox and Col. Brady were not hard to discover. Spades were trumps long years ago for Woods, who has taken his last trick and sleeps in an Ohio grave. Ripley is in Duluth, Fox is “out west” and Brady is in Harrisburg. Captain Ray and A. D. Cotton had a bank that handled barrels of money. For two or three years “The Centre”—called that for convenient brevity—acted as a sort of safety-valve to blow off the surplus wickedness of the oil-regions. Then “the handwriting on the wall” manifested itself. Clarion and Butler speedily reduced the four-thousand population to a mere remnant. The local paper died, houses were removed and the giddy Centre became “a back number.” The sounds of revelry were hushed, flickering lights no longer glared over painted harlots and the streets were deserted. Bissell’s empty bank-building, three dwellings, the public school, two vacant churches and the drygoods box used as a railway-station—scarcely enough to cast a shadow—are the sole survivors in the ploughed field that was once bustling, blooming, surging, foaming Petroleum Centre!
Across the creek from Petroleum Centre, on the east side of the stream, was Alexander Davidson’s farm of thirty-eight acres. A portion of this triangular “speck on the map” consisted of a mud-flat, a smaller portion of rising ground and the remainder set edgewise. Dr. A. G. Egbert, a young physician who had recently hung out his shingle at Cherrytree village, in 1860 negotiated for the farm. Davidson died and a hitch in the title delayed the deal. Finally Mrs. Davidson agreed to sign the deed for twenty-six-hundred dollars and one-twelfth the oil. Charles Hyde paid the doctor this amount in 1862 for one-half his purchase and it was termed the Hyde & Egbert farm. The Hollister well, drilled in 1861, the first on the land, flowed strongly. Owing to the dearness and scarcity of barrels, the oil was let run into the creek and the well was never tested. The lessees could not afford, as their contract demanded, to barrel the half due the land-owners, because crude was selling at twenty-five cents and barrels at three-fifty to four dollars! A company of Jerseyites, in the spring of 1863, drilled the Jersey well, on the south end of the property. The Jersey—it was a Jersey Lily—flowed three-hundred barrels a day for nine months, another well draining it early in 1864. The Maple-Shade, which cast the majority into the shade by its performance, touched the right spot in the third sand on August fifth, 1863. Starting at one-thousand barrels, it averaged eight-hundred for ten months, dropped to fifty the second year and held on until 1869. Fire on March second, 1864, burned the rig and twenty-eight tanks of oil, but the well kept flowing just the same, netting the owners a clear profit of fifteen-hundred-thousand dollars! “Do you notice it?” A plump million-and-a-half from a corner of the “measly patch” poor Davidson offered in 1860 for one-thousand dollars! And the Maple Shade was only one of twenty-three flowing wells on the despised thirty-eight acres!
Companies and individuals tugged and strained to get even the smallest lease Hyde & Egbert would grant. The Keystone, Gettysburg, Kepler, Eagle, Benton, Olive Branch, Laurel Hill, Bird and Potts wells, not to mention a score of minor note, helped maintain a production that paid the holders of the royalty eight-thousand dollars a day in 1864-5! E. B. Grandin and William C. Hyde, partners of Charles Hyde in a store at Hydetown, A. C. Kepler and Titus Ridgway obtained a lease of one acre on the west side of the lot, north of the wells already down, subject to three-quarters royalty. A bit of romance attaches to the transaction. Kepler dreamed that an Indian menaced him with bow and arrow. A young lady, considered somewhat coquettish, handed him a rifle and he fired at the dusky foe. The redskin vamoosed and a stream of oil burst forth. Visiting his brother, who superintended the farm, he recognized the scene of his dream. The lease was secured, on the biggest royalty ever offered. Kepler chose the location and bored the Coquette well. The dream was a nightmare? Wait and see.