DAVID DOUGALL.
Klondyke nuggets, cold, yellow and glittering, could not be more fascinating to lovers of the most exciting methods of gaining wealth than were the oil-wells that started Parker on the highway to prosperity. All eyes turned instinctively southward, believing the next center of activity lay in that direction. The Israelites scanning the horizon for a glimpse of the promised land were less earnest and anxious. Butler, not Canaan, was on everybody’s lips. “On to Richmond,” the frenzied cry during the civil war, appeared in the new dress of “On to Butler!” For a time, just to catch breath for the supreme movement, operators groped their way cautiously. But Napoleon scaled the Alps and the advance-couriers of the coming host of oilmen climbed Farren Hill and the slopes beyond. Julius Cæsar crossed the Rubicon in days of old, so Campbell and Lambing in 1871 crossed Bear Creek, three miles south-west of Parker, to plant the tall derricks which signified that the invasion of Butler by the petroleumites was about to begin and to be carried through to a finish. With Richard each of the bold invaders might declare:
“I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.”
Butler, the county-seat of Butler county, was laid out in 1802 by the Cunninghams, two brothers from Lancaster, who repose in the old cemetery. The surveyor was David Dougall, who lived seventy-five years alone, in a shanty near the court-house, dying at ninety-eight. He owned a row of tumble-down frames on the public-square, eye-sores to the community, but would not sell lest his poor tenants might suffer by a change of proprietors! His memory of local events was marvelous. He walked from Detroit through the forest to Butler, following an Indian trail, and remembered when Pittsburg had only three brick-buildings. He was agent of the McCandless family and once consented to spend a night at the mansion of his friends in Pittsburg. To do honor to the occasion he wore trousers made of striped bed-ticking. Fearing fire, he would not sleep up-stairs and a bed was provided in the parlor. About midnight an alarm sounded. Dougall jumped up, grabbed his shoes and hat and walked home-thirty-three miles-before breakfast. He was an eccentric bachelor and had his coffin ready for years. It was constructed of oak, grown on one of his farms, which he willed to a friend upon condition that the legatee buried him at the foot of a particular tree and kept a night-watchman at his grave one year. He was the last of his race and the last survivor of the bold pioneers to whom Butler owed its settlement.
BUTLER COUNTY
Well-known operators figured in the vicinity of Bear Creek. Joseph Overy drilled rows of good wells, pushed south and founded the town embalmed as St. Joe in compliment to its progenitor. Marcus Brownson—he was active in Venango and McKean and died at Titusville—had a walkover on the Walker farm, a mile in advance. On Donnelly’s eleven-hundred acres, offered in 1868 for six-thousand-dollars, scores of medium wells yielded from 1871 to 1878. S. D. Karns drained the Morrison farm and John McKeown hit the “sucker-rod belt”—so called from its extreme narrowness—near Martinsburg. Ralph Brothers tickled the sand on the Sheakley farm. Up the stream operations jogged and Argyle City sprouted on the hillside. Two miles ahead, upon the line dividing the Jameson and Blaney farms, Dimick, Nesbit & Co. finished a wildcat well on April seventeenth, 1892. This was the noted Fanny Jane—gallantly named in honor of a pretty girl—which pumped one-hundred barrels and gave birth to Petrolia, seven miles south by west of Parker. George H. Dimick, examining lands in Fairview township, Butler county, decided that a natural basin at the junction of South Bear Creek and Dougherty Run was oil-territory. Fifty men were raising a barn on the Campbell farm, overlooking this basin. Proceeding to the spot, he proposed to drill a test well if the owners of the soil would lease enough land to warrant the undertaking. Terms were agreed upon which secured twenty acres of the Blaney farm, sixteen of the Jameson, ten of the W. A. Wilson, ten of the James Wilson and ten of the Graham, at one-eighth royalty. The nearest producing wells at that date were three miles north. The Fanny Jane stirred the blood of the oil-clans. The moving mass began to-arrive in May and by July two-thousand people had their home at Petrolia.
A charter was obtained and Mr. Dimick was chosen burgess at the first borough-election, in February of 1873. The town expanded like the turnip Longfellow said “grew and it grew and it grew all it was able.” Hotels, stores, shops and offices lined the valley and dwellings crowned the hills. A narrow-gauge railroad from Parker was built in 1874, extended to Karns City and Millerstown and ultimately to Butler. Fisher Brothers paid sixty-thousand dollars for the Blaney farm and wells multiplied in all directions. A dog-fight or a street-scrap would gather hundreds of spectators. The Argyle Savings Bank handled hundreds-of-thousands of dollars daily. Ben Hogan erected a big opera-house and May Marshall was the Cora Pearl of the frail sisterhood. R. W. Cram ran the post-office and news-room. “Steve” Harley wafted newsy items to the newspapers. Dr. Frank H. Johnston, now of Franklin, was the first physician. Kindred spirits met at “Sam” McBride’s drug-store and Peter Christie’s Central Hotel. Poor “Sam,” “Dave” Mosier, H. L. McCance and S. S. Avery are in their graves and others have wandered nobody knows whither. Petrolia continued the metropolis four years and then dropped out of the game. Some straggling houses and left-over derricks alone remain of the gayest, sprightliest, hottest, busiest town that bloomed and withered in old Butler.
