FREDERICK FISHER
JOHN J. FISHER HENRY FISHER
The first suggestion of improvement in transportation was made in 1860, at Parkersburg, W. Va., by General Karns to C. L. Wheeler, now of Bradford. An old salt-well Karns had resurrected at Burning Springs pumped oil freely and he conceived the plan of a six-inch line of pipe to Parkersburg to run the product by gravity. The war interfered and the project was not carried out. At a meeting at Tarr Farm, in November of 1861, Heman Janes broached the idea of laying a line of four-inch wooden-pipes to Oil City, to obviate the risk, expense and uncertainty of transporting oil by boats or wagons. He proposed to bury the pipe in a trench along the bank of the creek and let the oil gravitate to its destination. A contract for the entire work was drawn with James Reed, of Erie. Col. Clark, of Clark & Sumner, grasped the vast possibilities the method might involve and advised applying to the Legislature for a general pipe-line charter. Reed’s contract was not signed and a bill was introduced in 1862 to authorize the construction of a pipe-line from Oil Creek to Kittanning. The opposition of four-thousand teamsters engaged in hauling oil defeated the bill and the first effort to organize a pipe-line company.
J. L. Hutchings, a Jersey genius, came to the oil-country in the spring of 1862 with a rotary-pump he had patented. To show its adaptation to the oil-business he laid a string of tubing from Tarr Farm to the Humboldt Refinery, below Plumer. He set his pump working and sent a stream of crude over the hills to the refinery. The pipe was of poor quality, the joints leaked and a good deal of oil fell by the wayside, yet the experiment showed that the idea was feasible. Although eminent engineers declared friction would be fatal, the result proved that distance and grade were not insurmountable. Eminent engineers had declared the locomotive would not run on smooth rails and that a cow on the track would disrupt George Stephenson’s whole system of travel, hence their dictum regarding pipe-lines had little weight. Dr. Dionysius Lardner nearly burst a flue laughing at the absurdity of a vessel without sails crossing the ocean and wrote a treatise to demonstrate its impossibility, but the saucy Sirius steamed over the herring-pond all the same. The rotary-pump at Tarr Farm confounded the scientists who worshipped theory and believed friction would knock out steam and pipe and American ingenuity and keep oil-operators forever subject to mud and pond-freshets. The two-inch line to the Humboldt Refinery planted the seed that was to become a great tree. Nobody saw this more plainly than the teamsters, who proceeded to tear up the pipe and warn producers to quit monkeying with new-fangled methods of transportation. That settled the first pipe-line and left the rampant teamsters, modern imitators of “Demetrius the silversmith,” the upper dog in the fight.
Hutchings—the boys called him “Hutch”—had pump and pipe-line on the brain and would not be suppressed. He put down a line in 1863 from the big Sherman well to the terminus of the railroad at Miller Farm. The pipes were cast-iron, connected by lead-sockets and laid in a shallow ditch. The jarring of the pump loosened the joints and three-fourths of the oil started at the well failed to reach the tanks, two miles north. The teamsters were not in business solely for their health and they tore up the line to be sure it would not cut off any of their revenue. Hutchings persisted in his endeavors until debts overwhelmed him and he died penniless and disappointed. The ill-starred inventor, who lived a trifle ahead of the times, deserves a bronze statue on a shaft of imperishable granite.
The Legislature granted a pipe-line charter in 1864 to the Western Transportation Company, which laid a line from the Noble & Delamater[Delamater] well to Shaffer. The cast-iron pipe, five inches in diameter, was laid on a regular grade in the mode of a water-pipe. The lead points leaked like a fifty-cent umbrella, just as the Hutchings line had done, and the attempt to improve transportation was abandoned.
Samuel Van Syckle, a Jerseyite of inventive bent, arrived at Titusville in the fall of 1864. The problem of oil-transportation, rendered especially important by the opening of the Pithole field, soon engrossed his attention. In August of 1865 he completed a two-inch line from Pithole to Miller Farm. Mr. Wood and Henry Ohlen, of New York, held an interest and the First National Bank of Titusville loaned the money to forward the project. J. N. Wheeler screwed the first joints together. Two pump-stations, a mile west of Pithole and at Cherry Run, at first helped force the oil through the pipe, which was buried two feet under ground “to be out of the way of the farmer’s plow.” Eight-hundred barrels a day could be run and the frantic teamsters talked of resorting to violence to cripple so formidable a rival. The pipeage was one dollar a barrel, at which rate the Pithole and Miller Farm Pipe-Line ought to have been a bonanza. Van Syckle traded heavily in oil and commanded plenty of capital. A. W. Smiley managed the line and bought oil for Van Syckle, who conducted this branch of business in his son’s name. Smiley’s largest transaction was a purchase of one-hundred-thousand barrels, at five dollars a barrel, from the United-States Petroleum Company, in one lot. Young Van Syckle spent money as the whim struck him. If Smiley refused his demand for a hundred or a thousand dollars, the fly youth would refuse to sign drafts and threaten to stop the whole concern. There was nothing to do in such cases but imitate Colonel Scott’s coon and “come down.” The Culver failure in May of 1866 compelled the First National Bank to press its claim against the line, which passed into the hands of Jonathan Watson. J. T. Briggs and George S. Stewart operated it for the bank and Watson until William H. Abbott and Henry Harley purchased the entire equipment.
Reverses beset Van Syckle, who induced George S. and Milton Stewart to erect a big refinery at Titusville to test his pet theory of “continuous distillation.” Failure, tedious litigation and heavy loss resulted. Van Syckle’s mind teemed with new schemes and new devices for refining. He possessed the rare faculty of finding friends willing to listen to his plans and back him with cash. Some of his ideas were valuable and they are in use to-day. Mismanagement swamped the enterprises he created and Van Syckle finally removed to Buffalo, where his checkered life closed peacefully on March second, 1894. While often unsuccessful financially, earnest men like Samuel Van Syckle benefit mankind. The oil-business is much better for the fertile brain and perseverance of the man whose pipe-line was the first to deliver oil to a railroad. His example stimulated other men combining keen perception and executive ability, who could sift the wheat from the chaff and discard the useless and impracticable.
In the fall of 1865 Henry Harley began a pipe-line from Benninghoff Run to Shaffer, the terminus of the Oil-Creek Railroad. Teamsters cut the pipes, burned the tanks and retarded the work seriously. An armed patrol arrested twenty of the ring-leaders, dispersed the mob and quelled the riot. The line—two-inch tubing of extra weight—handled oil expeditiously, a pump at Benninghoff forcing six to eight-hundred barrels a day into the tanks at Shaffer. The system was a public improvement, personal interest had to yield and four-hundred teams left the region the week Harley’s line pumped its first oil. Abbott and Harley owned an interest in the Pithole line and secured control by purchasing Jonathan Watson’s claim, to run it in connection with the Benninghoff line. They organized the firm of Abbott & Harley and operated both lines several months. At Miller Farm they constructed iron-tanks and loading-racks, which enabled two men to load a train of oil-cars in a few hours. Avery & Hedden laid a line from Shamburg to Miller Farm, establishing a station on the highest point of the Tallman farm and running the oil to the railroad by gravity. Abbott & Harley supplemented this with a branch from the Pithole line at the crossing of Cherry Run. Crude was a good price, operators prospered and Miller Farm became a busy place. Railroads extended to the region and pipe-lines pumped oil directly from the wells to the cars or refineries. In the fall of 1867 Abbott & Harley acquired control of the Western Transportation Company, the only one empowered by the Legislature to pipe oil to railway-stations. Under its charter they combined the Western and their own two lines as the Allegheny Transportation Company. The first board of directors, elected in January of 1869, consisted of Henry Harley, president; W. H. Abbott, secretary; Jay Gould, J. P. Harley and Joshua Douglass. T. W. Larsen was appointed treasurer and William Warmcastle—genial, capable “Billy” Warmcastle—general superintendent. Jay Gould purchased a majority of the stock in 1868 and appointed Mr. Harley general oil-agent of the Atlantic & Great Western and Erie Railroads. In 1871 the Commonwealth Oil and Pipe Company was organized in the interest of the Oil-Creek Railroad. Harley contrived to effect a combination and reorganize the Allegheny and the Commonwealth as the Pennsylvania Transportation Company, with a capital of nearly two-million dollars and five-hundred miles of pipes to Tidioute, Triumph, Irvineton, Oil City, Shamburg, Pleasantville and Titusville, centering at Miller Farm. Among the stock-holders were Jay Gould, Thomas A. Scott, William H. Kemble, Mrs. James Fisk and George K. Anderson. The new enterprise absorbed a swarm of small lines and was considered the acme of pipe-line achievement.
W. H. ABBOTT. PIPE-LINE AT MILLER FARM IN 1866. HENRY HARLEY.