CHARLES W. STONE.
At Clarendon and Stoneham hundreds of snug wells yielded three-thousand barrels a day from a regular sand that did not exhaust readily. Southward the Garfield district held on fairly and a narrow-gauge railroad was built to Farnsworth. The Wardwell pool, at Glade, four miles east of Warren, fizzed after the manner of Cherry Grove, rich in buried hopes and dissipated greenbacks. P. M. Smith and Peter Grace drilled the first well—a sixty-barreler—close to the ferry in July of 1873. Dry-holes and small wells alternated with provoking uncertainty until J. A. Gartland’s twelve-hundred-barrel gusher on the Clark farm, in May of 1885, inaugurated a panic in the market that sent crude down to fifty cents. The same day the Union Oil-Company finished a four-hundred-barrel spouter and May ended with fifty-six wells producing and a score of dusters. June and July continued the refrain, values see-sawing as reports of dry-holes or fifteen-hundred-barrel-strikes, some of them worked as “mysteries,” bamboozled the trade. Wardwell’s production ascended to twelve-thousand barrels and fell by the dizziest jumps to as many hundred, the porous rock draining with the speed of a lightning-calculator. Tiona developed a lasting deposit of superior oil. Kane has a tempting streak, in which Thomas B. Simpson and other Oil-City parties are interested. Gas has been found at Wilcox, Johnsonburg and Ridgway, Elk county, taking a slick hand in the game. Kinzua, four miles north-east of Wardwell, revealed no particular cause why the spirit of mortal ought to be proud. Although Forest and Warren, with a slice of Elk thrown in, were demoralizing factors in 1882-3-4, their aggregate output would only be a light luncheon for the polar bear in McKean county.
The Tidioute belt, varying in narrowness from a few rods to a half-mile, was one of the most satisfactory ever discovered. When lessees fully occupied the flats Captain A. J. Thompson drilled a two-hundred-barrel well on the point, at the junction of Dingley and Dennis Runs. Quickly the summit was scaled and amid drilling wells, pumping wells, oil-tanks and engine-houses the town of Triumph was created. Triumph Hill turned out as much money to the acre as any spot in Oildom. The sand was the thickest—often ninety to one-hundred-and-ten feet—and the purest the oil-region afforded. Some of the wells pumped twenty years. Salt-water was too plentiful for comfort, but half-acre plots were grabbed at one-half royalty and five-hundred dollars bonus. Wells jammed so closely that a man could walk from Triumph to New London and Babylon on the steam-boxes connecting them. Percy Shaw—he built the Shaw House—had a “royal flush” on Dennis Run that netted two-hundred-thousand dollars. From an investment of fifteen-thousand dollars E. E. and J. M. Clapp cleared a half-million.
“Spirits” located the first well at Stoneham and Cornen Brothers’ gasser at Clarendon furnished the key that unlocked Cherry Grove. Gas was piped from the Cornen well to Warren and Jamestown. Walter Horton was the moving spirit in the Sheffield field, holding interests in the Darling and Blue Jay wells and owning forty-thousand acres of land in Forest county. McGrew Brothers, of Pittsburg, spent many thousands seeking a pool at Garland. Grandin & Kelly’s operations below Balltown exploded the theory that oil would not be found on the south side of Tionesta Creek. Cherry Grove was at its apex when, in July of 1884, with Farnsworth and Garfield boiling over, two wells on the Thomas farm, a mile south-east of Richburg, flowed six-hundred barrels apiece. They were among the largest in the Allegany district, but a three-line mention in the Bradford Era was all the notice given the pair.
To the owner of a tract near “646,” who offered to sell it for fifty-thousand dollars, a Bradford operator replied: “I would take it at your figure if I thought my check would be paid, but I’ll take it at forty-five-thousand whether the check is paid or not!” The check was not accepted.
Tack Brothers drilled a dry-hole twenty-six-hundred feet in Millstone township, Elk county. Grandin & Kelly drilled four-thousand feet in Forest county and got lots of geological information, but no oil.
Get off the train at Trunkeyville—a station-house and water-tank—and climb up the hill towards Fagundas. After walking through the woods a mile an opening appears. A man is plowing. The soil looks too poor to raise grasshoppers, yet that man during the oil-excitement refused an offer of sixty-thousand dollars for this farm. His principal reason was that he feared a suitable house into which to move his family could not be obtained! On a little farther a pair of old bull-wheels, lying unused, tells that the once productive Fagundas pool has been reached. A short distance ahead on an eminence is a church. This is South Fagundas. No sound save the crowing of a chanticleer from a distant farm-yard breaks the silence. The merry voices heard in the seventies are no longer audible, the drill and pump are not at work, the dwellings, stores and hotels have disappeared. The deserted church stands alone. A few landmarks linger at Fagundas proper. There is one store and no place where the weary traveler can quench his thirst. The nearest resemblance to a drinking-place is a boy leaning over a barrel drinking rain-water while another lad holds him by the feet. Fagundas is certainly “dry.” The stranger is always taken to the Venture well. Its appearance differs little from that of hundreds of other abandoned wells. The conductor and the casing have not been removed. Robert W. Pimm, who built the rig, still lives at Fagundas. He will be remembered by many, for he is a jovial fellow and was “one of the boys.” The McQuade—the biggest in the field—the Bird and the Red Walking-beam were noted wells. If Dr. Stillson were to hunt up the office where he extracted teeth “without pain” he would find the building used as a poultry-house. Men went to Fagundas poor and departed with sufficient wealth to live in luxury the rest of their lives; others went wealthy and lost everything in a vain search for the greasy fluid. Passing through what was known as Gillespie and traversing three miles of a lonely section, covered with scrub-oak and small pine, Triumph is reached. It is not the Triumph oil-men knew twenty-five years ago, when it had four-thousand population, four good hotels, two drug-stores, four hardware-stores, a half-dozen groceries and many other places of business. No other oil-field ever held so many derricks upon the same area. The Clapp farm has a production of twelve barrels per day. Traces of the town are almost completely blotted out. The pilgrim traveling over the hill would never suspect that a rousing oil-town occupied the farm on which an industrious Swede has a crop of oats. Along Babylon hill, once dotted with derricks thickly as trees in the forest, nothing remains to indicate the spot where stood the ephemeral town.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”
John Henderson, a tall, handsome man, came from the east during the oil-excitement in Warren county and located at Garfield. In a fight at a gambling-house one night George Harkness was thrown out of an upstairs-window and his neck broken. Foul play was suspected, although the evidence implicated no one, and the coroner’s jury returned a verdict of accidental death. Harkness had left a young bride in Philadelphia and was out to seek his fortune. Henderson, feeling in a degree responsible for his death, began sending anonymous letters to the bereaved wife, each containing fifty to a hundred dollars. The letters were first mailed every month from Garfield, then from Bradford, then from Chicago and for three years from Montana. In 1893 she received from the writer of these letters a request for an interview. This was granted, the acquaintance ripened into love and the pair were married! Henderson is a wealthy stockman in Montana. In 1867 an English vessel went to pieces in a terrible storm on the coast of Maine. The captain and many passengers were drowned. Among the saved were two children, the captain’s daughters. One was adopted by a merchant of Dover, N. H. He gave her a good education, she grew up a beautiful woman and it was she who married George Harkness and John Henderson.
