Time cannot wash away.”
Parker has been called “the graveyard of newspapers,” yet G. A. Needle has run his popular Phœnix twenty-three years, accumulating sufficient wealth to own a book-store and oil-wells and let the paper canter along under charge of his son, the youngest editor in Pennsylvania.
FULTON PHILLIPS.
The Washington Reporter, established in 1892 as a daily and semi-weekly, owes its abundant success largely to the wide-awake editor, William Christman. His practical knowledge and ready pen keeps the Reporter right in the swim. Fulton Phillips in 1888 launched the Outlook at McDonald, then merely a flag-station on the Panhandle Railway, with no great outlook in prospect. His editorials are essentially independent and vigorous, the man dominating the paper. It is Fulton Phillips, rather than the paper, who is read and quoted by the thousands of Outlook readers. He was born within a mile of McDonald and the boom following oil-operations did not catch the tall editor—he is considerably above six feet—napping. The Outlook was the first to put a reporter in the field and write up the wells in picturesque style. Phillips served through the war, taught school at Pittsburg, ran a paper at Canonsburg, drifted westward, did editorial work in Missouri and California and returned to start the only failure in his pilgrimage, a temperance-organ at Washington. It went the way of former temperance-sheets in the local-option town where they take theirs in jugs. In other portions of the oil-world journalism holds up its end creditably, newspapers and developments marching neck and neck on their grand errand of enlightenment. The Sistersville Review and Parkersburg Sentinel do the West-Virginia field proud, the Toledo Journal is always primed with Ohio oil-news, nor is there a spot in which oil plays trump that literature does not hold a royal flush. Intelligence and petroleum are a good pair to tie to, to bet on and to rake in the jack-pot.
REV. S. J. M. EATON, D.D.
The Rev. S. J. M. Eaton—his name is ever spoken with reverence—thirty-three years pastor of the Presbyterian church at Franklin, filled a large place in the literary guild. He loved especially to delve into old books and papers and letters pertaining to the pioneers of Northwestern Pennsylvania. His faithful labors in this neglected nook unearthed a troop of traditions and facts which “the world will not willingly let die.” For the “History of Venango County” he furnished a number of leading chapters. His published works include “Petroleum,” an epitome of oil-affairs down to 1866, “Lakeside,” a tale based upon his father’s ministerial experiences in the wilds of Erie county, biographies of eminent divines, sketches of the Erie Presbytery, pamphlets and sermons. “The Holy City” and “Palestine,” embodying his observations in the orient, were issued as text-books by the Chautauqua Circle. Dr. Eaton was my near neighbor for years and hours in his well-stocked library, enriched by his “affluence of discursive talk,” are recalled with deep satisfaction. On the sixteenth of July, 1889, while walking along the street, he raised his hands suddenly and fell to the pavement, struck down by heart-failure. “He was not, for God took him” to wear the victor’s crown. Farewell, “until the day dawn and the shadows flee away.”
In the Franklin office of the Galena Oil-Works are three successful weavers of rich textures in the literary loom—Dr. Frank H. Johnston, E. H. Sibley and Samuel H. Gray. Dr. Johnston was born in Canal township, reared on a farm, severely wounded in battling for the Union, studied medicine, practiced at Cochranton and in 1872 located at Petrolia. There “he first essayed to write” for the Oil-City Derrick. From the very outset his articles were up to concert-pitch. Abandoning medicine for letters, he acquired a thorough knowledge of stenography, read the choicest books and wrote in his best vein for the press. He represented the Derrick as its Franklin correspondent with credit to himself and the paper. For sixteen years he has been connected with the Galena Oil-Works as secretary of Hon. Charles Miller, a place demanding the superior qualifications with which the doctor is unstintingly endowed.
Edwin Henry Sibley, born at Bath, N. Y., in 1857, is a brother of Hon. Joseph C. Sibley and has resided in Franklin twenty-three years. He was graduated from Cornell University in 1880. For several years he has been treasurer of the Galena Oil-Works and manager of Miller & Sibley’s famous Prospect-Hill Stock-Farm, positions of responsibility to which his personal address, his training and his business-methods adapt him pre-eminently. Three years in succession he has been unanimously elected President of the Pennsylvania Jersey-Cattle Club. He has been active and efficient in promoting the laudable work of the University Extension Society. Under guise of “Polybius Crusoe Smith, Sage of Cranberry Cross-Roads”—the Smiths are big folks since the by-play of Pocahontas—he contributes to Puck and other well-known publications humorous articles and short, quaint, pithy sayings. These display a keen insight into human nature and rare gift of happy, accurate expression. One of his recent effusions—an address welcoming the delegates to an agricultural convention—is a bit of burlesque that deserves to rank with Artemus Ward’s brightest efforts or the richest paragraphs in the Biglow Papers. A few buds plucked at random from the flowery mead will serve to illustrate the high-class stamp of Mr. Sibley’s work in the field his genius adorns. They are literary nosegays from his terse observations as a philosophic “looker-on in Vienna:”