“There yet remains one effort to be made.”—Samuel Johnson.
“Do what lieth in thy power and God will assist thy good-will.”—Thomas à Kempis.
EDWARD H. JENNINGS.
Pennsylvania was not to be the solitary oyster in the stew, the one and only winner in the petroleum-game. Although the Keystone State raked in the first jack-pot on Oil Creek with the Drake royal-flush, rival players were billed for an early appearance. Ohio, always ready to furnish presidents and office-holders for the whole nation, was equally willing to gather riches by the oleaginous route and dealt Mecca as its initial trump in the summer of 1860. Years before a farmer near the quiet town in Trumbull county, digging a well for water, found an evil-smelling liquid and promptly filled up the hole. This supplied a cue to J. H. Hoxie, after the news of Drake’s experiment reached him, and he sank a shallow well close to the farmer’s unlucky venture. Piercing a covering of dirt twenty feet and coarse sand-rock ten feet, the tools unlocked a reservoir of dark oil, which responded to the pump with the vehemence of a Venango spouter. Estimates of the daily yield, much of which floated down stream, varied from one-hundred to three-hundred barrels. Probably forty to fifty would be nearer the real figure. The oil, 26° gravity and very dark green in color, was a superior lubricant. This new phase of “the Ohio Idea” brought multitudes of visitors to the scene. Mecca became the mecca of all sorts, sizes and conditions of worshippers at the greasian shrine. To come and see was to desire a chance in the exciting lottery. Hoxie, elated beyond measure over the strike, traveled around the country to magnify the field and his own connection with it. Small leases were gobbled eagerly for a small cash-bonus and a royalty, sometimes half the oil done up in barrels. A three-pole derrick, a spring-pole and light tools hitched to a rope sufficed to “kick down” a well. Depths ranged from thirty feet to one-hundred. Portable engines and boilers followed when hand-power weakened and the wells must be pumped steadily. Rude drilling-outfits and board-shanties went up by hundreds. Needy adventurers might secure an acre of ground and sprout into prosperous oilmen in twenty or thirty days. The tempting bait was snapped at greedily. Rig-builders, carpenters, teamsters, tool-dressers, laborers, shop-keepers, saloonists and speculators crowded the busy spot in quest of jobs, locations or easy victims. Mecca seemed too far off, so a genuine “oil-town,” lacking none of the earmarks of such creations, was established on the James Cowdey farm and labeled Oil Diggings. It soon sported a post-office, which distributed stacks of mail, machine-shops, groceries and boarding-houses galore; nor were groggeries, gambling-dens and the usual incidentals difficult to discover.
The opening months of 1861 swelled the excitement and the population. The bright and the dark sides were not far apart. Many who came with high expectations in January returned disappointed in June. The field had extended south from Power’s Corners, substantial frames enclosed numerous wells and a refinery was erected. Yet the good quality of the oil was scantily appreciated until most of the wells had been about exhausted. Often it went begging vainly for purchasers in Cleveland or Buffalo. Then the price advanced, actually reaching fifty-two dollars a barrel in 1863-4. Adulteration with cheaper oils deteriorated the product and it dropped below a paying rate. Operators realized in the autumn of 1861 that the territory was declining rapidly and the wiser ones departed. Some held on a year or two longer, drilled their wells five-hundred feet in hope of hitting other sands and quit at last. George Moral, a one-eyed veteran of the war, has stuck to the Shaeffer farm, at the southern end of the district, and he is still getting a morsel of oil from a nest of shallow wells. The forest of derricks and engine-houses has disappeared. Oil Diggings is a tradition and “Ichabod” is written over the once stirring district.
“Old Rhinestein’s walls are crumbled now.
Stern Ruin’s ploughshare drives elate full on thy bloom.”
Mix & Force were, perhaps, the most successful Mecca operators. It was hard to extract the heavy oil from the rock by ordinary processes. Calvin Adams, of Pittsburg, conceived the idea of sinking a shaft and drifting into the sand, exactly as in gold-mining. He employed four men, pumped the oil and water that seeped in and hoisted lots of rock to the surface, where steam was used to force out the greasy fluid that saturated the sand. This novel method paid while oil was high-priced, but was too expensive when the stuff went zero-wards. The oil-bearing rock, known as Berea grit, lay in flat formations and was somewhat porous. Mr. Rider removed his refinery to Oil Creek in 1862, since which period refining has been a lost art in Trumbull county. Everybody has heard of the resolute pioneer who, bound for Colorado by the overland line of prairie-schooners, inscribed on his Conestoga wagon: “Pike’s Peak or Bust!” He was distanced by a band of petroleum-seekers at Oil Diggings. The jokers built their engine-house and belt-house parallel with the public road and emblazoned in two-foot capitals on the derrick: “Oil, Hell or China!” James A. Garfield, afterwards Chief Magistrate of the United States—he was a pilgrim to Mecca and owned an interest in the “Preachers’ Wells,” among the best in the bundle—once quoted this legend in Congress. Paying his respects pointedly to “Sunset” Cox, who represented an Ohio district in the House and had failed of re-election, Garfield closed with these words: