Bradford, Tarport, Limestone, Sawyer, Gillmor, Derrick, Red Rock, State Line, Four-Mile, Duke Centre, Rexford, Bordell, Rew City, Coleville, Custer and De Golia, with their thousands of wells, their hosts of live people, their boundless activity, their crowded railways, their endless procession of teams and their unlimited energy, were for the nonce the brightest galaxy of oil-towns that ever flourished in the busy realm of petroleum. Some have vanished, others are mere skeletons and Bradford alone retains a fair semblance of its pristine greatness.
The bee-line for the north was fairly and squarely “on the belt.”
THE SEX MEN ADORE.
A little girl at Titusville, when she prayed to have herself and all of her relations cared for during the night, added: “And, dear God, do try and take good care of yourself, for if anything should happen to you we should all go to pieces. Amen.”
A young lady at Sawyer City accepted a challenge to climb a derrick on the Hallenback farm, stand on top and wave her handkerchief. She was to receive a silk-dress and a ten-dollar greenback. The feat was performed in good shape. It is probably the only instance on record where a woman had the courage to climb an eighty-foot derrick, stand on top and wave her handkerchief to those below. It was done and the enterprising girl gathered in the wager.
Mrs. Sands, formerly a resident of Oil City, built the Sands Block and owned wells on Sage Run. McGrew Brothers, of Pittsburg, struck a spouter in 1869 that boomed Sage Run a few months. A lady at Pleasantville, who had coined money by shrewd speculations in oil-territory, purchased two-hundred acres near the McGrew strike, while the well was drilling and nobody thought it worth noticing. The lady was Mrs. Sands, who enacted the role of “a poor lone widow,” anxious to secure a patch of ground to raise cabbage and garden-truck, to get the property. She worked so skillfully upon the sensibilities of the Philadelphians owning the land that they sold it for a trifle “to help a needy woman!” Her first well, finished the night before the “thirty-day shut down,” flowed five-hundred barrels each twenty-four hours. The “poor lone widow” valued the tract at a half-million dollars and at one time was rated at six-hundred-thousand, all “earned by her own self.” Yet weak-minded men and strong-minded women talk of the suppressed sex!
A Franklin lady asked her husband one morning to buy five-thousand barrels of oil on her account, saying she had an impression the price would advance very soon. To please her he promised to comply. At dinner she inquired about it and was told the order had been filled by an Oil-City broker. In the afternoon the price advanced rapidly. Next morning the lady asked hubby to have the lot sold and bring her the profits. The miserable husband was in for it. He dared not confess his deception and the only alternative was to pay the difference and keep mum. His sickly smile, as he drew fifteen-hundred dollars out of the bank to hand his spouse, would have cracked a mirror an inch thick. Solomon got a good deal of experience from his wives and that Franklin husband began to think “a woman might know something about business after all.”
Mrs. David Hanna, of Oil City, is not one of the women whose idea of a good time is to go to a funeral and cry. She tried a bit of speculation in certificates and the market went against her. She tried again and again, but the losses exceeded the profits by a large majority. The phenomenal spurt in April of 1895 was her opportunity. She held down a seat in the Oil-Exchange gallery three days, sold at almost the top notch and cleared twelve-thousand dollars. People applauded and declared the plucky little woman “had a great head.”
SCHRUBRASS FERRY 1873