Over the river!
Music forever and beauty for aye,
Sunlight unending—the sunlight and day,
Never a farewell to weep on the way,
Over the river!”
BEAVER CREEK AT JEFFERSON FURNACE.
East, north and west the area of prolific territory widened. Wells on the Young farm started a jaunty development at Jefferson Furnace. Once the scene of activity in iron-manufacture, the old furnace had been neglected for three decades. Oil awakened the spot from its Rip-Van-Winkle slumber. A narrow-gauge railroad crossed Beaver Creek on a dizzy trestle, which afforded an enticing view of derricks, streams, hills, dales, cleared farms and wooded slopes. The wells have pumped out, the railroad has been switched off and the stout furnace stands again in its solitary dignity. James M. Guffey, J. T. Jones, Wesley Chambers and other live operators kept branching out until Beaver City, Mongtown, Mertina, Edenburg, Knox, Elk City, Fern City and Jerusalem, with Cogley as a supplement, were the centers of a production that aggregated ten-thousand barrels a day. The St. Lawrence well, on the Bowers farm, a mile north of Edenburg, was finished in June of 1872 and directed attention to Elk township. For two years it pumped sixty-nine barrels a day, six days each week, the owners shutting it down on Sunday. Previously Captain Hasson, of Oil City, and R. Richardson, then of Tarr Farm and now of Franklin, had drilled in the vicinity. Ten dusters north of the Bowers farm augured poorly for the St. Lawrence. It disappointed the prophets of evil by striking a capital sand and producing with a regularity surpassed only by one well on Cherry Run. It was not “a lovely toy, most fiercely sought, that lost its charm by being caught.”
The St. Lawrence jumped the northern end of the Clarion district to the front. Hundreds of wells ushered in new towns. Knox, on the Bowers farm, attained a post-office, a hardware store and a dozen dwellings, its proximity to Edenburg preventing larger growth. The cross-roads collection of five houses[five houses] and a store known as Edenburg progressed immensely. John Mendenhall and J. I. Best’s farm-houses, ’Squire Kribbs’s country-store and justice-mill, a blacksmith-shop and three dwellings constituted the place at the date of the St. Lawrence advent. The nearest hotel—the Berlin House—was three miles northward. In six months the quiet village became a busy, hustling, prosperous town of twenty-five hundred population. It had fine hotels, fine stores, banks and people whom a destructive fire—it eliminated two-thirds of the buildings in one night—could not “send to the bench.” When the flames had been subdued, a crowd of sufferers gathered at two o’clock in the morning, sang “Home, Sweet Home,” and at seven were clearing away the embers to rebuild. Narrow-gauge railroads were built and the folks didn’t scare at the cars. Elk City flung its antlers to the breeze two miles east. Isaac N. Patterson—he is president of the Franklin Savings Bank and a big operator in Indiana—had a creamy patch on the Kaiser farm. Jerusalem’s first arrival—Guffey’s wells created it—was a Clarion delegate with a tent and a cargo of liquids. He dealt the drink over a rough board, improvised as a counter, so briskly that his receipts in two days footed up seven-hundred dollars. He had no license, an officer got on the trail and the vendor decamped. He is now advance-agent of a popular show, wears diamonds the size of walnuts and tells hosts of oil-region stories. The Clarion field was not inflamed by enormous gushers, but the wells averaged nicely and possessed the cardinal virtue of enduring year after year. It is Old Sol, steady and persevering, and not the flashing meteor, “a moment here, then gone forever,” that lights and heats the earth and is the fellow to bank upon.
An Edenburg mother fed her year-old baby on sliced cucumbers and milk, and then desired the prayers of the church “because the Lord took away her darling.” “How is the baby?” anxiously inquired one lady of another at Beaver City. “Oh, baby died last week, I thank you,” was the equivocal reply.