Col. S. P. Armstrong, who experienced a siege of hard luck in the upper latitudes, in 1884 leased a portion of the Marshall farm, on Thorn Creek, six miles south-west of the town of Butler. Operators had been skirmishing around the southern rim of the basin, looking for an annex to the Baldridge pool. Andrew Shidemantle was drilling near the mouth of the creek, on the north bank of which Johnson & Co.’s well, finished in May, found plenty of sand and salt-water and a taste of oil. More than once Armstrong was pressed for funds to pay the workmen drilling the well he began on the little stream and he sold an interest to Boyd & Semple. A vein of oil was met on June twenty-seventh, gas ignited the rig and for a week the well burned fiercely. The flames were subdued finally, the well pumped and flowed one-hundred-and-fifty barrels a day and No. 2 was started fifty rods north-east. Meanwhile Phillips Brothers set the tools dancing on the Bartlett farm, adjoining the Marshall on the north. They hit the sand on August twenty-ninth and the well flowed five-hundred barrels next day. Drilling ten feet deeper jagged a veritable reservoir of petroleum, the well flowing forty-two-hundred barrels on September fifteenth! At last Phillips & Vanausdall’s spouter on Oil Creek had been eclipsed. The trade was “shaken clear out of its boots.” Glowing promises of a healthy advance in prices were frost-bitten. Scouts had been hovering around and their reckoning was utterly at fault. Brokers knew not which way to turn. Crude staggered into the ditch and speculators on the wrong side of the market went down like the Louisiana Tigers at Gettysburg. The bull-element thought the geyser “a scratch,” quite sure not to be duplicated, and all hands awaited impatiently the completion of Hezekiah Christie’s venture on a twenty-five acre plot hugging the Phillips lease. The one redeeming feature of the situation was that nobody had the temerity to remark, “I told you so!”
TELEGRAPH-OFFICE IN CARRIAGE, GROUP OF SCOUTS AND PHILLIPS WELL, THORN CREEK.
A telegraph office was rigged up near the Phillips well in an abandoned carriage, one-third mile from the Christie. About it the sharp-eyed scouts thronged night and day. On October eleventh the Christie was known to be nearing the critical point. Excitement was at fever-heat among the group of anxious watchers. In the afternoon some knowing-one reported that the tools were twenty-seven feet in the sand, with no show of oil. The scouts went to condole with Christie, who was sitting in the boiler-house, over his supposed dry-hole. One elderly scout, whose rotundity made him “the observed of all observers,” was especially warm in his expressions of sympathy. “That’s all right, Ben,” said Christie, “but before night you’ll be making for the telegraph-office to sell your oil at a gait that will make a euchre-game on your coat-tails an easy matter.” When the scout had gone he walked into the derrick and asked his driller how far he was in the sand. “Only twenty-two feet and we are sure to strike oil before three o’clock. Those scouts don’t know what they’re talking about.” Christie went back to the boiler-house and waited. It was an interesting scene. About the old buggy were the self-confident scouts, many of whom had already wired their principals that the well was dry. The intervals between the strokes of the drill appeared to be hours. At length the well began to gas. Then came a low, rumbling sound and those about the carriage saw a cloud-burst of oil envelop the derrick. The Christie well was in and the biggest gusher the oil-country had ever known! The first day it did over five-thousand barrels, seven-thousand for several days after torpedoing, and for a month poured out a sea of oil. Christie refused one-hundred-thousand dollars for his monster, which cast the Cherry Grove gushers completely into the shade. Phillips No. 3, four-hundred barrels, Conners No. 1, thirty-seven-hundred, and Phillips No. 2, twenty-five hundred, were added to the string on October eighteenth, nineteenth and twenty-first. Crude tumbled, the bears pranced wildly and everybody wondered if Thorn Creek had further surprises up its sleeve. Bret Harte’s “heathen Chinee” with five aces was less of an enigma.
All this time Colonel Armstrong, who borrowed money to build his first derrick and buy his first boiler, was pegging away at his second well. The sand was bored through into the slate beneath and the contractor pronounced the well a failure. The scouts agreed with him unanimously and declared the contractor a level-headed gentleman. The owner, who looked for something nicer than salt-water and forty-five feet of ungreased sand, did not lose every vestige of hope. He decided to try the persuasive powers of a torpedo. At noon on October twenty-seventh sixty quarts of nitro-glycerine were lowered into the hole. The usual low rumbling responded, but the expected flow did not follow immediately. One of the scouts laughingly offered Armstrong a cigar for the well, which the whole party declared “no good.” They broke for the telegraph-office in the buggy to wire that the well was a duster. Prices stiffened and the bulls breathed more freely.
The scouts changed their minds and their messages very speedily. The rumbling increased until its roar resembled a small Niagara. A sheet of salt-water shot out of the hole over the derrick, followed by a shower of slate, stones and dirt. A moment later, with a preliminary cough to clear its passage, the oil came with a mighty rush. A giant stream spurted sixty feet above the tall derrick, dug drains in the ground and saturated everything within a radius of five-hundred feet! The Jumbo of oil-wells had been struck. Thousands of barrels of oil were wasted before the cap could be adjusted on the casing. Tanks had been provided and a half-dozen pipes were needed to carry the enormous mass of fluid. It was an inspiring sight to stand on top of the tank and watch the tossing, heaving, foaming deluge. The first twenty-four hours Armstrong No. 2 flowed eight-thousand-eight-hundred barrels! It dropped to six-thousand by November first, to six-hundred by December first and next morning stopped altogether[altogether], having produced eighty-nine-thousand barrels in thirty-seven days! Armstrong then divided his lease into five-acre patches, sold them at fifteen-hundred dollars bonus and half the oil and quit Thorn Creek in the spring a half-million ahead.
MILLER & YEAGLE FLOWING INTO TANK
ARMSTRONG FLOWING INTO TANK
ARMSTRONG WELL
Fisher Brothers were the largest operators in the field. From the Marshall farm of three-hundred acres—worth ten dollars an acre for farming—they took four-hundred-thousand dollars’ worth of oil. Their biggest well flowed forty-two-hundred barrels on November fifteenth, when the total output of the field was sixteen-thousand, its highest notch. Miller & Yeagle’s spouter put forty-five-hundred into the tank, sending out a stream that filled a five-inch pipe. Thomas B. Simpson, of Oil City, joined with Thomas W. Phillips in leasing the Kennedy farm and drilling a three-thousand-barrel well. They sold to the Associated Producers in December for eighty-thousand dollars and Simpson, a sensible man every day in the year, presented his wife with a Christmas check for his half of the money. McBride and Campbell, two young drillers who had gone to Thorn Creek in search of work, went a mile in advance of developments and bored a well that did five-thousand barrels a day. They sold out to the Associated Producers for ninety-thousand and six months later their big well was classed among the small pumpers. Campbell saved what he had made, but success did not sit well on McBride’s shoulders. After lighting his cigars awhile with five-dollar bills he touched bottom and went back to the drill. Hell’s Half Acre, a crumb of land owned by the Bredin heirs, emptied sixty-thousand barrels into the tanks of the Associated Producers. The little truck-farm of John Mangel put ninety-thousand into its owner’s pocket, although a losing venture to the operators, producing barely a hundred-thousand barrels. For the half-acre on which the red school-house was built, ten rods from the first Phillips well, the directors were offered fifty-thousand dollars. This would have endowed every school in the township, but legal obstacles prevented the sale and the district was the loser. By May the production declined to seven-thousand barrels and to one-thousand by the end of 1885. The sudden rise of the field made a score of fortunes and its sudden collapse ruined as many more. Thorn Creek, like reform measures in the Legislature, had a brilliant opening and an inglorious close.
The Thorn-Creek white-sanders encouraged wildcatting to an extraordinary degree. In hope of extending the pool or disclosing a fresh one, “men drilled who never drilled before, and those who always drilled but drilled the more.” Johnson & Co., Campbell & McBride, Fisher Brothers and Shidemantle’s dusters on the southern end of the gusher-farms condemned the territory in that direction. Painter Brothers developed a small pool at Riebold Station. Craig & Cappeau, who struck the initial spouter at Kane, and the Fisher Oil-Company failed to open up a field in Middlesex township. Some oil was found at Zelienople and gas at numerous points in raking over Butler county. The country south-west of Butler, into West Virginia and Ohio, was overrun by oil-prospectors, intent upon tying up lands and seeing that no lurking puddle of petroleum should escape. Test wells crossed the lines into Allegheny and Beaver counties and Shoustown, Shannopin, Mt. Nebo, Coraopolis, Undercliff and Economy figured in the newspapers as oil-centers of more or less consequence. Members of the old guard, fortified with a stack of blues at their elbow to meet any contingency, shared in these proceedings. Brundred & Marston drilled on Pine Creek, at the lower end of Armstrong county, in the seventies, a Pittsburg company repeating the dose in 1886. At New Bethlehem they bored two-thousand feet, finding seven-hundred feet of red-rock. This rock varies from one to three-hundred feet on Oil Creek and geologists assert is six-thousand feet thick at Harrisburg, diminishing as it approaches the Alleghenies. The late W. J. Brundred, agent at Oil City of the Empire Line until its absorption by the Pennsylvania Railroad, was a skilled oil-operator, practical in his ideas and prompt in his methods. His son, B. F. Brundred, is president of the Imperial Refining Company and a prosperous resident of Oil City. Joseph H. Marston died in California, whither he had gone hoping to improve his health, in 1880. He was an artist at Franklin in the opening years of developments and removed to Oil City. He owned the Petroleum House and was exceptionally genial, enterprising and popular.