HENRY I. BEERS
Thomas Johnson, of Oil City, held one-eighth of the Curtin interest and Patrick Johnson had a bevy of patrician wells at the summit of the tallest hill in the valley. The curtain has been rung down, the lights are out, the players have dispersed and none can hint of “Too Much Johnson.” The farm of sixty acres adjacent to the Curtin and the Criswell nook Hamilton McClintock traded to Daniel Smith in 1858 for a yoke of oxen. Smith sold it in 1860 for five-hundred dollars and sank the cash in a dry-hole on Oil Creek. P. P. Cornen and Henry I. Beers bought the farm in 1863 for twenty-five-hundred dollars, clearing two-millions from the investment. Cornen served as State-Senator in Connecticut and died in 1893. His sons operate in Warren county and down the Allegheny. Mr. Beers, who settled at McClintockville, for thirty years has been prominent in business and politics. He was a California argonaut, spent three years in San Francisco, built the first house in that city after the first great fire and revisited the East to marry “the girl he left behind him” in 1849. The Yankee well, erratic as George Francis Train, was the first glory of the Smith tract. The Reed caused a rush for one-acre leases at four-thousand-dollars bonus and half the oil. Picking up gold-dollars at every step would have been less lucrative. The wells were stayers and Daniel Smith was not “a Daniel come to judgment” in his estimate of the farm he implored J. W. Sherman to buy for two-hundred-and-fifty dollars.
Cornen & Beers first leased a half-dozen plots six rods square at one-half royalty. Two New-Englanders and Cyrus A. Cornen, son of Peter P. Cornen and nephew of Mr. Beers, drilled the first well, the queer Yankee. Some gas and no oil looked promising for a dry-hole, but the owners put in small tubing and pumped a plump day. They decided to draw the tubing, seed-bag higher and try it once more for luck. The tubing had been raised only a foot when the well flowed “like Mount Vesuvius spilling lava.” The flow lasted five minutes, stopped twenty, flowed five more, stopped twenty and kept up this program regularly twenty-one months. Sixty barrels a day was the average yield month after month, until one day the Yankee concluded to retire from active duty. Much of its product sold at ten to thirteen dollars a barrel, enriching all concerned. The Yankee boomed the crush for leases and was altogether a tempting plum. The Auburn, the second well on the Smith farm, was a good second to the Yankee, the Gromiger and Cattaraugus traveled in the one-hundred-and-fifty-barrel class, while the Watkins toed the two-hundred mark, with the Aazin and Fry chasing it closely.
S. S. Watkins, who died at St. Paul in the fall of 1896, was given a lot for a grocery, with the privilege of sinking one well for half the oil. He opened the store and sold the oil-right to Wade Brothers for twenty-five-hundred dollars. The Wades sold one-eighth of the working-interest to the Pittsburg Petroleum-Company, used the proceeds to drill the hole and stuck the tools in the third sand. The lookout for a paying strike was exceedingly poor, but James Wade held on and tubed the well above the tools. It flowed three-hundred barrels a day and Wade sold his seven-eighths to Frank Allen, who offered the Pittsburg Petroleum-Company seventy-five-thousand dollars for its eighth. When the Wade declined to fifty barrels the company pulled the tubing, moved the derrick three feet and drilled another, with no better result. Thereupon the Wade was abandoned, after having netted the Great-Republic Oil-Company a quarter-million dead loss. In 1864 Cornen & Beers organized the Cherry-Valley Oil-Company, sold twelve or fifteen leases and put down all the other wells themselves. The partnership dissolved in 1876, Mr. Beers maintaining the farm and Mr. Cornen dying at his Connecticut home in 1893. The Smith rated among the best properties in the region and it still rewards its fortunate owner with a moderate production, although merely a shadow of its former greatness.
PORTER PHIPPS.
Blacklegs, thieves and murderers ran little risk of punishment in the early days of oil-developments, unless they became unusually obstreperous and were brought to a period with a shot-gun. Scoundrels lay in wait for victims at every turn and stories of their misdeeds could be told by the hundred. The McFate farm was one of the first on Cherry Run to be sold at a fancy price. S. J. McFate, one of the brothers owning the property, two weeks after the sale in 1862, walked down to Oil City to draw several-thousand dollars from the bank. He displayed the money freely and left for home late at night. The road was dark and lonely and next morning, in a clump of bushes a mile above Oil City, his lifeless body was discovered. A ghastly wound in the head and the absence of the money explained the tragedy and the motive. No clue to the murderer was ever found, although squads of detectives “worked on the case” and queer fictions regarding the mysterious assassin were printed in many newspapers.
Queerly enough, the farms above the Smith were failures. Hundreds of wells clear up to Plumer never paid the expense of recording the leases. The territory was a roast for scores of stock-companies. Below Plumer a mile Bruns & Ludovici, of New York, built the Humboldt Refinery in 1862. Money was lavished on palatial quarters for the managers, enclosed grounds, cut-stone walls, a pipe-line to Tarr Farm and the largest refining capacity in America. Inconvenient location and improved methods of competitors forced the Humboldt to retire. Part of the machinery was removed, the structures crumbled and some of the dressed stone forms the foundations of the National Transit Building at Oil City. Plumer, which had a grist-mill, store, blacksmith-shop and tavern in 1840 and four-thousand population in 1866, is quiet as its briar-grown graveyard. The Brevoort Oil-Company, Murray & Fawcett and John P. Zane raked in shekels on Moody Run, which emptied into Cherry Run a half-mile south-west of the Reed well. Zane, whole-souled, resolute and manly, operated in the northern district and died at Bradford in 1894. A “forty-niner,” he supported John W. Geary for Mayor of San Francisco, built street-railways and worked gold-mines in California. He wrote on finance and petroleum, hated selfishness and stood firmly on the platform laid down in the beatitudes by the Man of Galilee.
“The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer-dust