A pretty girl might as well expect to escape admiring glances as petroleum to escape a fire occasionally. “Uncle Billy” Smith’s lantern ignited the first tank at the Drake well and a long procession has followed in its smoky trail. The lantern-fiend has been a prolific cause of oil-conflagrations, boiling-over refinery-stills have not been slack in this particular, the cigarette with a fool at one end and a spark at the other has done something in the same line, but lightning is the champion tank-destroyer. The result of an electric-bolt and a tank of inflammable oil engaging in a debate may be imagined. At first tanks were covered loosely with boards or wooden roofs. The gas formed a vapor which attracted lightning and kept up a large production of fires each season. One vicious stroke cremated sixty tanks of oil at the Atlantic Refinery in 1883. In July and August of 1880, a quarter-million barrels of McKean crude went up by the lightning-route. On June eleventh, 1880, a flash collided with the first steel-tank on which lightning had ever experimented and set the oil blazing. The tank was on a hill-side three-hundred feet from the west bank of Oil Creek, at Titusville. Several houses and the Acme Refinery, located between it and the stream, were consumed. While the burning oil flowed down the hill a sheet of solid flame covered ten acres. Bursting tanks, exploding stills and burning oils were an unpleasant premonition[premonition] of the red-hot hereafter prepared for the wicked. The fire raged three days with the fury of the furnace heated sevenfold to give Shadrack, Meshach and Abed-nego a roast. The Titusville Battery checked it somewhat by cannonading the tanks with solid shot, which made holes that let the oil run into the creek. This plan was tried successfully in Butler and McKean. The old log-house that sheltered the generations of Campbells on the site of Petrolia met its fate by the firing of Taylor & Satterfield’s twenty-thousand-barrel tank on the hill above, which fell a prey to lightning. Three tanks opposite the mouth of Bear Creek, below Parker, stood together and burned together, the one singed by Jupiter’s shaft setting off its mates. The scene at night was of the grandest, multitudes gathering to watch the huge waves of flame and dense clouds of smoke. As the oil burned down—just as it would consume in a lamp—the tank-plates would collapse and the blazing crude would overflow. Thousands of barrels would pour into the Allegheny, covering the water for a mile with flame and painting a picture beside which a volcanic eruption resembled the pyrotechnics of a lucifer-match. Many tanks were burned prior to the use of close iron-roofs, which confine the gas and do not offer special inducements to “the artillery of heaven” to score a hit. Of late years such fires have been rarities. All oil in the pipe-line to which the burned tank belonged was assessed to meet the amount lost. This was known as General Average, as unwelcome in oil as General Apathy in politics, General Depression in business, General Dislike in society or General Weyler in Cuba.
George B. Harris, a pioneer refiner, died at Franklin in January of 1892, aged sixty years. A member of the firm of Sims & Co., he built the first or second refinery in Venango county, near the lower end of Franklin. He prospered for years, but reverses swept away his fortune and he was poor when death closed the scene.
A party of young men from New England started a refinery on Oil Creek in the sixties. Their industry, correct habits and attention to business attracted favorable notice. Mr. Trefts, of machinery fame, one day observed to a friend: “You mark my words; some day these young men will be rich and their names shall be a power in the land. I know it will be so from their industry and good habits.” This assertion was prophetic. The young man at the head of that modest firm of young men was H. H. Rogers, now president of the National-Transit Company. Speaking of his election as supervisor of streets and highways at Fair Haven, a New-York paper indulged in this facetious pleasantry regarding Mr. Rogers:
“The people of Fair Haven have done well. No man in New York or Massachusetts has had more experience with bad roads than Mr. Rogers, or has met with more success in subduing them. When he first engaged in the petroleum-business on Oil Creek the highways there were rarely navigable for anything on wheels, but were open to navigation by flat-boats most of the year. There was something in the mud of the oil-country at that time which was sure death to the capillary glands. Hairless horses and mules were in the height of fashion. When Mr. Rogers arrived on the strange scene, poling his way up to the hotel on a sawlog, he was at once chosen road-supervisor. In a neat speech, which is still extant, Mr. Rogers thanked the oil-citizens for the confidence reposed in him and then went to work. In the first place, he refined the mud of the highways, taking from it all the merchantable petroleum and converting the residue into stove-polish of an excellent quality. In the next place, he constructed pipe-lines, through which the oil was conveyed, thus keeping it out of the middle of the road, and to-day there is a boulevard along Oil Creek that is hardly surpassed by the Appian Way. Horses are again covered with hair and happiness sits smiling at every hearthstone. The people of Fair Haven have a superintendent of streets to whom they can point with pride.”
Dr. J. W. James, of Brady’s Bend, who drilled some of the first wells around Oil City and was largely interested in the Armstrong and Bradford fields, in 1858 had a plant near Freeport for extracting coal-oil from shale. At a cost of twelve cents a gallon it produced crude-petroleum, which the company refined partially and sold at a dollar to one-twenty-five. The oil obtained from the rocks by drilling and that distilled from the shale were the same chemically. Dr. James read medicine with Dr. F. J. Alter, who constructed a telegraph Morse journeyed from the east to see before perfecting his own device. Dr. Alter’s line extended only from the house about the small yard and back to his study. Full of enthusiasm over its first performance, he cried out to his student, young James: “I believe I could make this thing work a distance of six miles!” Bell’s first telephone—a cord stretched between two apple-trees in an orchard at Brantford, Canada—was equally simple and its results have been scarcely less important.
John J. Fisher bought the first thousand barrels of oil in the new exchange at Oil City, on April twenty-third, 1878. Probably the largest purchase was by George Lewis, who took from a syndicate of brokers a block of two-hundred-thousand barrels. The first offer was fifty-thousand, increasing ten-thousand until it quadrupled, with the object of having Lewis cry: “Hold! Enough!” Lewis wasn’t to be bluffed and he merely nodded at each addition to the lot until the other fellow weakened, the crowd watching the pair breathlessly. “Sam” Blakeley, the most eccentric genius in the aggregation, once bid at Parker for a million barrels. Nobody had that quantity to sell and he advanced the bid five cents above the quotations. There was not a response and he offered a million barrels five cents below the ruling price, toying with the market an hour as if it were a foot-ball. He played for big stakes, but none knew who backed him. Coming to Oil City, he reported the market for the Derrick and cut up lots of shines. One morning he looked glum, oil had tumbled and “Sam” hired an engine to whirl him to Corry. By nightfall he landed in Canada and his oil was sold to square his account in the clearing-house. An hour after his flight William Brough came up from Franklin to take the oil and carry “Sam” over the drop. In the afternoon a sudden rise set in, which would have left Blakeley twenty-thousand dollars profit had he stayed at his post! That was the time “Sam” didn’t do “the great kibosh,” as he phrased it. For years he has been hanging around New York. He was one of the boys distinguished as high-rollers and extinguished before the shuffle ended.
Telegraph-operators and messenger-boys at the oil-exchanges learned to note the movements of leading speculators and profit thereby. Some of them, with more hope of gain than fear of loss, beginning in a small way by risking a few dollars in margins, coined money and entered the ring on their own account. “Jimmy” Lowe, one of the biggest brokers at Parker and Oil City, slung lightning for the Western-Union when the Oil-City Exchange needed the services of twenty operators and scores of messenger-boys. Among the latter was “Jim” Keene, the Franklin broker. He and John Bleakley often received fifty cents or a dollar for delivering a message to “Johnnie” Steele, who stopped at the Jones House and flew high during his visits to Oil City. Steele and Seth Slocum would dash through the mud on their black chargers, dressed in the loudest style and sporting big diamonds. These halcyon times have passed away and the oil-exchanges have departed. “The glories of our mortal state are shadows.”
In January of 1894 the Producers’ and Refiners’ Oil-Company erected an iron-tank on the hill south-east of Titusville. Lightning destroyed the tank and its contents in May. The second tank was built on the spot in October and on June twelfth, 1895, lightning struck a tree beside it. The burning tree fired the gas and the tank and oil perished. The site is still vacant, the company deciding not to give the electric fluid a chance for a third strike.
George W. N. Yost, who died in New York last year, was once the largest oil-buyer and shipper in the region. He lived at Titusville and removed to Corry, where he built the Climax Mower and Reaper Works, a church, a handsome residence and blocks of dwellings. Patents of different kinds recouped losses in manufacturing. With Mr. Densmore, of Meadville, he brought out the caligraph. Yost sold to his partner and developed the Yost Typewriter, organized the American Writing-Machine Company and fitted up the shops at Bridgeport, Connecticut, used to manufacture Sharp’s rifles during the border-troubles in Kansas. Mr. Yost was a man of striking personality and unflagging energy. He became a strong spiritualist and believed a medium, to whom he submitted completely, put him in communication with his dead relatives and recorded their thoughts on his typewriter.
The men of the oil-region have ever been noted for their commercial honor. It passed into a proverb—“honor of oil.“ The spirit of the saying, “his word is as good as his bond,” has always been lived up to more closely in Oildom than in any other section of the country. The force of business-obligation ran high in the exchanges and among the early dealers in crude. Transactions involving hundreds-of-thousands of dollars occurred every day, without a written bond or a scrap of paper save a pencil-entry in a memorandum-book. Certificates were borrowed and loaned in this way and the idea of shirking a verbal contract was never thought of. The celerity with which property thus passed from man to man was one of the striking features of business in the bustling world of petroleum. And the record is something to be proud of in these days of embezzlements, defalcations, breaches of trust and commercial deviltry generally.