The Albion brought Phillips to the front as an oil-operator. James Tarr readily leased him part of his farm and he began Phillips No. 1 well in the spring of 1861. The Crescent’s unexpected success spurred him to greater efforts. Hurrying an engine and boiler from Pittsburg, he started his second well on the flat hugging the stream twenty rods north of the Crescent. Steam-power rushed the tools at a boom-de-ay gait. The first sand, from which meanwhile No. 1 was rivaling the Crescent’s yield, had not a pinch of oil. The solid-silver lining of the petroleum-cloud assumed a plated look, but Phillips heeded it not. An expert driller, he hustled the tools and on October nineteenth, at four-hundred-and-eighty feet, pierced the shell above the third sand. At dusk he shut down for the night. The weather was clear and the moon shone brightly. Suddenly a vivid flame illumined the sky. Reuben Painter’s well on the Blood farm, a mile southward, had caught fire and blazed furiously. The rare spectacle of a burning well attracted everybody for miles. Phillips and Janes were among those who hastened to the fire, returning about midnight. An hour later they were summoned from bed by a man yelling at the Ella-Yaw pitch: “The Phillips is bu’sted and runnin’ down the creek!” People ran to the spot on the double-quick, past the Crescent and down the bank. Gas was settling densely upon the flats and into the creek oil was pouring lavishly. Dreading a fire, lights were extinguished on the adjoining tracts and needful precautions taken. For three or four days the flow raged unhindered, then a lull occurred and tubing was inserted. After the seed-bag swelled, a stop-cock was placed on the tubing and thenceforth it was easy to regulate the flow. When oil was wanted the stop-cock was opened and wooden troughs conveyed the stuff to boats drawn up the creek by horses, the chief mode of transportation for years. The oil was forty-four gravity and four-thousand barrels a day gushed out! In June of 1862, when Phillips and Major Frew, with their wives and a party of friends, inspected the well, a careful gauge showed it was doing thirty-six-hundred-and-sixty barrels! The Phillips well held the champion-belt twenty-seven years. It produced until 1871, getting down to ten or twelve barrels and ceasing altogether the night James Tarr expired, having yielded nearly one-million barrels! Cargoes of the oil were sold to boatmen at five cents a barrel, thousands of barrels were wasted, tens of thousands were stored in underground tanks and much was sold at three to thirteen dollars.
WOODFORD WELL. TARR FARM IN 1862. PHILLIPS WELL.
N. S. Woodford, Noble & Delamater’s contractor, had the foresight to lease the ground between the Crescent and the Phillips No. 2. His three-thousand barreler, finished in December, 1861, drew its grist from the Phillips crevice and interfered with the mammoth gusher. When the two became pumpers neither would give out oil unless both were worked. If one was stopped the other pumped water. Ultimately the Phillips crowd paid Woodford a half-million for his well and lease, a wad for which a man would ford even the atrocious Tarr-farm mud and complacently whistle “Ta-ra-ra.” He retired to his pleasant home, with six-hundred-thousand dollars to show for eighteen months’ operations on Oil Creek, and never bothered any more about oil. The Woodford well repaid its enormous cost. Lockhart and Frew bought out their partners at a high price and put the Phillips-Woodford interests into a stock-company capitalized at two-million dollars. The Phillips well—one result of a keen-eyed boatman’s observing an oily scum on the Allegheny River—enriched all concerned. Had Phillips failed to see the speck of grease that September day, who can tell how different oil-region history might have been? Happily for a good many persons, the Orphan Boy was not one of the “Ships that Pass in the Night.” What a field Oil Creek presents for the fervid fancy of a Dumas, a Dickens, a Wilkie Collins or a Charles Reade!
Comrades in business and good-fellowship, William Phillips and John Vanausdall removed to South Oil-City, lived neighbors and died twenty years ago. They resembled each other in appearance and temper, in charitable impulse and kindness to the poor. Phillips drilled dozens of wells—none of them dry—aided Oil-City enterprises and was a member of the shipping firm of Munhall & Co. until its dissolution in 1876. He was the first man to ship oil by steamer, the Venango taking the first load to Pittsburg, and the first to run crude in bulk down the creek. One son, John C. Phillips, and a married daughter live at Oil City and two sons at Freeport.
HEMAN JANES.
Heman Janes, of Erie, the first purchaser of the Tarr farm, from 1850 to 1861 shipped large quantities of lumber to the eastern market. Passing through Canada in 1858, he heard oil was obtained from gum-beds in Lambton county, south of Lake Huron, and visited the place. John Williams was dipping five barrels a day from a hole ten feet square and twenty feet deep. The best gum-beds spread over two-hundred acres of timbered land, which Mr. Janes bought at nine dollars an acre, the owner selling because “the stinking oil smelled five miles off.” Leasing four-hundred acres more, in 1860 he sold a half-interest in both tracts for fifteen-thousand dollars and retired from lumbering to devote his attention to oil. Large wells on his Canadian lands enabled him to sell the second half of the property in 1865 for fifty-five-thousand dollars. In February, 1861, he secured a thirty-day option on the J. Buchanan farm, the site of Rouseville, and tendered the price at the stipulated time, but the transaction fell through. In March of that year he went to West Virginia and leased one-thousand acres on the Kanawha River, including the famous “Burning Spring.” U. E. Everett & Co. agreed to pay fifty-thousand dollars for one-half interest in the property, at Parkersburg, on April twelfth. All parties met, a certified check was laid on the table and Attorney J. B. Blair started to draw the papers. At that moment a boy ran past, shouting: “Fort Sumpter’s fired on!” The gentlemen hurried out to learn the particulars. “The cat came back,” but Everett didn’t. A message told him to “hold off,” and he is holding off still. Janes stayed as long as a Northerner dared and was thankful to sell the batch of leases for seventy-five-hundred dollars. In 1862 he sued the owners of the Phillips well for his royalty in barrels. They refused to furnish the barrels, which were scarce and expensive, and the well was shut down for months pending the litigation. The suit was for one-hundred-and-twelve-thousand dollars, up to that time the largest amount ever involved in a case before the Venango court. Edwin M. Stanton, soon to be known as the illustrious War-Secretary, was one of the attorneys engaged by the plaintiff, for a fee of twenty-five-thousand dollars. A compromise was arranged for half the oil. The first oil sold after this agreement was at three dollars a barrel, taken from the first twelve-hundred-barrel tank ever seen in the region. A wooden tank of that size excited more curiosity in those days than a hundred iron-ones of forty-thousand barrels in this year of grace. Janes sold back half the farm to Tarr for forty-thousand dollars and two-thirds of the remaining half to Clark & Sumner for twenty-thousand, leaving him one-sixth clear of cost, the same month he bought the tract. He first suggested casing wells to exclude the water, built the first bulk-boat decked over—six-hundred barrels—to transport oil and was identified with the first practicable pipe-line. Paying seventy-five-thousand dollars for the Blackmar farm, at Pithole, he drilled three dry holes and then got rid of the land at a snug advance. Since 1878 Mr. Janes has been interested in the Bradford field and living at Erie. A man of forceful character and executive ability, hearty, vigorous and companionable, he deserves the large measure of success that rewarded him as an important factor in petroleum-affairs. In the words of the good Scottish mother to her son: “May your lot be wi’ the rich in this warld and wi’ the puir in the warld to come.”
The amazing output of the Phillips and Woodford wells stimulated the demand for territory to the boiling point. Men were infinitely less eager to “read their title clear to mansions in the skies” than to secure a title to a fragment of the Tarr farm. Rigs huddled on the bank and in the water, for nobody thought oil existed back in the hilly sections. Sixty yards below the Phillips spouter J. F. Crane sank a well that responded as pleasantly as “the swinging of the crane.” Densmore Brothers, at the lower end of the farm, drilled a seven-hundred-barreler late in 1861. A zoological freak introduced the animal-fad, which named the Elephant, Young Elephant, Tigress, Tiger, Lioness, Scared Cat, Anaconda and Weasel wells. Reckless speculation held the fort unchecked. The third sand was sixty feet thick, the territory was durable and three-hundred walking-beams exhibited “the poetry of motion” to the music of three-four-five-six-eight-ten-dollar oil. Mr. Janes built a commodious hotel and a town of two-thousand population flourished. James Tarr sold his entire interest in 1865, for gold equivalent to two-millions in currency, and removed to Crawford county. Another million would hardly cover his royalties. Three-million dollars ahead of the game in four years, he could afford to smile at the jibes of small-souled retailers of witless ridicule. If “money talks,” three-millions ought to be pretty eloquent. The churches, stores, houses, offices, wells and tanks have “gone glimmering.” Tarr-Farm station appears no more on railroad time-tables. Modern maps do not reveal it. Few know and fewer care who owns the place once the apple of the oilman’s eye, now a shadowy relic not worth carting off in a wheelbarrow!
Producers have enjoyed quite a reputation for “resolving,” and the first meeting ever held to regulate the price of crude was at Tarr farm in 1861. The moving spirits were Mr. Janes, General James Wadsworth and Josiah Oakes, the latter a New-York capitalist. The idea was to raise five-hundred-thousand dollars and buy up the territory for ten miles along Oil Creek. Wadsworth and Oakes raised over three-hundred-thousand dollars for this purpose, when the panic arising from the war ended the scheme. A contract was also made with Erie parties to lay a four-inch wooden pipe-line from Tarr farm to Oil City. On the advice of Col. Clark, of Clark & Sumner, and Sir John Hope, the eminent London banker, it was decided to abandon the project and apply for a charter for a pipe-line. This was done in the winter of 1861-2, Hon. Morrow B. Lowry, who represented the district in the State Senate, favoring the application. Hon. M. C. Beebe, the local member of the Legislature, opposed it resolutely, because, to quote his own words: “There are four-thousand teams hauling oil and my constituents won’t stand this interference.” The measure failing to carry, Clark & Hope built the Standard refinery at Pittsburg.