Six-hundred inhabitants dwelt peacefully at Bradford ten years after the Pithole bubble had been blown and pricked. The locomotive and track of a branch of the Erie Railroad had supplanted A. W. Newell’s rude engine, which transported small loads to and from Carrollton. An ancient coach, weather-beaten and worm-eaten, sufficed for the scanty passenger-traffic and the quiet borough bade fair to stay in the old rut indefinitely. The collection of frames labeled Tarport—a suit of tar and feathers presented to a frisky denizen begot the name—snuggled on a muddy road a mile northward. Seven miles farther, at Limestone, the “spirits” directed Job Moses to buy ten-thousand acres of land. He bored a half-dozen shallow wells in 1864, getting some oil and gas. Jonathan Watson skirmished two miles east of Limestone, finding slight tinges of greasiness. A mile south-west of Moses the Crosby well was dry. Another mile south the Olmsted well, on the Crooks farm, struck a vein of oil at nine-hundred feet and flowed twenty barrels on July fourteenth, 1875. The sand was poor and dry-holes south and west augured ill for the territory. Frederick Crocker drilled a duster early in 1875 on the Kingsbury lands, east side of Tuna Creek. He had grit and experience and leased an angular piece of ground formed by a bend of the creek for his second venture. It was part of the Watkins farm, a mile above Tarport. A half-mile south-west, on the Hinchey farm, the Foster Oil-Company had sunk a twenty-barrel well in 1872, which somehow passed unnoticed. On September twenty-sixth, 1875, from a shale and slate at nine-hundred feet, the Crocker well flowed one-hundred-and-seventy barrels. This opened the gay ball which was to transmute the Tuna Valley from its arcadian simplicity to the intense bustle of the grandest petroleum-region the world has ever known. The valley soon echoed and re-echoed the music of the tool-dresser and rig-builder and the click of the drill as well as the vigorous profanity of the imported teamster. Frederick Crocker, who drilled on Oil Creek in 1860 and devised the valve which kept the Empire well alive, had won another victory and the great Bradford field was born. He lived at Titusville fifteen years, erected the home afterwards occupied by Dr. W. B. Roberts, sold his Bradford property, operated in the Washington district and died at Idlewild on February twenty-second, 1895. Mr. Crocker possessed real genius, decision and the qualities which “from the nettle danger pluck the flower success.” Active to the close of his long and useful eighty-three years, he met death calmly and was laid to rest in the cemetery at Titusville.
Scarcely had the Crocker well tanked its initial spurt ere “the fun grew fast and furious.” Rigs multiplied like rabbits in Australia. Train-loads of lively delegates from every nook and cranny of Oildom crowded the streets, overran the hotels and taxed the commissary of the village to the utmost. Town-lots sold at New-York prices and buildings spread into the fields. At B. C. Mitchell’s Bradford House, headquarters of the oil-fraternity, operators and land-holders met and drillers “off tour” solaced their craving for “the good things of this life” playing billiards and practising at the hotel-bar. Hundreds of big contracts were closed in the second-story room where Lewis Emery, “Judge” Johnson, Dr. Book and the advance-guard of the invading hosts assembled. Main street blazed at night with the light of dram-shops and the gaieties incidental to a full-fledged frontier-town. Noisy bands appealed to lovers of varieties to patronize barnlike-theatres, strains of syren music floated from beer-gardens, dance-halls of dubious complexion were thronged and gambling-dens ran unmolested. The free-and-easy air of the community, too intent chasing oil and cash to bother about morality, captivated the ordinary stranger and gained “Bad Bradford” notoriety as a combination of Pithole and Petroleum Centre, with a dash of Sodom and Pandemonium, condensed into a single package. In February of 1879 a city-charter was granted and James Broder was elected mayor. Radical reforms were not instituted with undue haste, to jar the sensitive feelings of the incongruous masses gathered from far and near. Their accommodating nature at last adapted itself to a new state of affairs and accepted gracefully the restrictions imposed for the general welfare. Checked temporarily by the Bullion spasm in 1876-7, the influx redoubled as the lower country waned. Fires merely consumed frame-structures to hasten the advent of costly brick-blocks. Ten churches, schools, five banks, stores, hotels, three newspapers, street-cars, miles of residences and fifteen-thousand of the liveliest people on earth attested the permanency of Bradford’s boom. Narrow-gauge railroads circled the hills, traversed spider-web trestles and brought tribute to the city from the outlying districts. The area of oil-territory seemed interminable. It reached in every direction, until from sixteen-thousand mouths seventy-five thousand acres poured their liquid treasure. The daily production waltzed to one-hundred-thousand barrels! Iron-tanks were built by the thousand to store the surplus crude. Two, three or four-thousand-barrel gushers were lacking, but wells that yielded twenty-five to two-hundred littered the slopes and valleys. The field was a marvel, a phenomenon, a revelation. Bradford passed the mushroom-stage safely and was not snuffed out when developments receded and the floaters wandered south in quest of fresh excitement. To-day it is a thriving railroad and manufacturing centre, the home of ten-thousand intelligent, independent, go-ahead citizens, proud of its past, pleased with its present and confident of its future.
To trace operations minutely would be an endless task. Crocker sold a half-interest in his well and drilled on an adjacent farm. Gillespie, Buchanan & Kelly came from Fagundas in 1874 and sank the two Fagundas wells—twenty and twenty-five barrels—a half-mile west of Crocker, in the fall and winter. Butts No. 1, a short distance north, actually flowed sixty barrels in November of 1874. Jackson & Walker’s No. 1, on the Kennedy farm, north edge of town, on July seventeenth, 1875, flowed twenty barrels at eleven-hundred feet. The dark, pebbly sand, the best tapped in McKean up to that date, encouraged the belief of better strata down the Tuna. On December first, two months after Crocker’s strike, the yield of the Bradford district was two-hundred-and-ten barrels. The Crocker was doing fifty, the Olmsted twenty-five, the Butts fifteen, the Jackson & Walker twenty and all others from one to six apiece. The oil, dark-colored and forty-five gravity, was loaded on Erie cars direct from the wells, most of which were beside the tracks. The Union Company finished the first pipe-line and pumped oil to Olean the last week of November. Prentice, Barbour & Co. were laying a line through the district and 1875 closed with everything ripe for the millenium these glimmerings foreshadowed.
Lewis Emery, richly dowered with Oil-Creek experience and the get-up-and-get quality that forges to the front, was an early arrival at Bradford. He secured the Quintuple tract of five-thousand acres and drilled a test well on the Tibbets farm, three miles south of town. Its success confirmed his judgment of the territory and began the wonderful Quintuple development. The Quintuple rained staying wells on the lucky, plucky graduate from Pioneer, quickly placing him in the millionaire-class. He built blocks and refineries, opened an immense hardware-store, constructed pipe-lines, established a daily-paper, served two terms in the Senate and opposed the Standard “tooth and toe-nail.” Thoroughly earnest, he champions a cause with unflinching tenacity. He owns a big ranche in Dakota, big lumber-tracts and saw-mills in Kentucky, a big oil-production and a big share in the United-States Pipe-Line. He has traveled over Europe, inspected the Russian oil-fields and gathered in his private museum the rarest collection of curiosities and objects of interests in the state. Senator Emery is a staunch friend, a fighter who “doesn’t know when he is whipped,” liberal, progressive, fluent in conversation and firm in his convictions.
“A prince can mak’ a belted knight,
A marquis, duke and a’ that;
But an honest man’s aboon his might—
Guid faith, he maunna fa’ that.”
Hon. David Kirk sticks faithfully to Emery in his hard-sledding to array petroleumites against the Standard. He manages the McCalmont Oil-Company, which operated briskly in the Forest pools, at Bradford and Richburg. Mr. Kirk is a rattling speaker, positive in his sentiments and frank in expressing his views. He extols Pennsylvania petroleum, backs the outside pipe-lines and is an influential leader of the Producers’ Association.
Dr. W. P. Book, who started at Plumer, ran big hotels at Parker and Millerstown and punched a hole in the Butler field occasionally, leased nine-hundred acres below Bradford in the summer of 1875. He bored two-hundred wells, sold the whole bundle to Captain J. T. Jones and went to Washington Territory with eight-hundred-thousand dollars to engage in lumbering and banking. Captain Jones landed on Oil Creek after the war, in which he was a brave soldier, and drilled thirteen dry-holes at Rouseville! Repulses of this stripe would wear out most men, but the Captain had enlisted for the campaign and proposed to stand by his guns to the last. His fourteenth attempt—a hundred-barreler on the Shaw farm—recouped former losses and inaugurated thirty years of remarkable prosperity. Fortune smiled upon him in the Clarion field. Pipe-lines, oil-wells, dealings in the exchanges, whatever he touched turned into gold. Not handicapped by timid partners, he paddled his own canoe and became the largest individual operator in the northern region. Acquiring tracts that proved to be the heart of the Sistersville field, he is credited with rejecting an offer last year of five-million dollars for his West-Virginia and Pennsylvania properties! From thirteen wells, good only for post-holes if they could be dug up and retailed by the foot, to five-millions in cash was a pretty stretch onward and upward. He preferred staying in the harness to the obscurity of a mere coupon-clipper. He lives at Buffalo, controls his business, enjoys his money, remembers his legions of old friends and does not put on airs because of marching very near the head of the oleaginous procession.