Lamented and mourned dead.
Trains on the Lake-Shore Railroad thunder past the lower end of the quiet “God’s Acre,” close to the mounds of the McDowells, the Broadfoots, the Bowmans, the Hales and other early settlers, but the peaceful repose of the dead can be disturbed only by the blast of Gabriel’s trumpet on the resurrection morning.
The venerable William Whitman, familiarly called “Doctor,” over whose grave the snows of twenty-five long years have drifted, often told me how, when a youngster, he carried water to the masons building Colonel Alexander McDowell’s stone house, on Elk street. He hemmed in a pool on the edge of French Creek, soaked up the greasy scum with a piece of flannel, wrung out the cloth and filled several bottles with dark-looking oil. The masons would swallow doses of it, rub it on their bruised hands and declare it a sovereign internal and external remedy. In early manhood Mr. Whitman settled in Canal township, eleven miles northwest of Franklin, cultivated a farm and reared a large family. It was the dream of his old age to see oil taken from his own land. In 1866 two wells were drilled on the Williams tract, across the road from Whitman’s, with encouraging prospects. Depressed prices retarded operations and these wells remained idle. Four years later my uncle, George Buchanan, and myself drilled on the Whitman farm. The patriarch watched the progress of the work with feverish interest, spending hours daily about the rig. A string of driving-pipe, up to that time said to be the longest—153 feet—ever needed in an oil-well, had to be forced down. Three feet farther a vein of sparkling water, tinged with sulphur, spouted above the pipe and it has flowed uninterruptedly since. The heavy tools pierced the rock rapidly and the delight of the “Doctor” was unbounded. He felt confident a paying well would result and waited impatiently for the decisive test. A boy longing for Christmas or his first pair of boots could not be more keenly expectant. His fondest wish was not to be gratified. He took sick and died, after a very short illness, in 1870, four days before the well was through the sand and pumping at the rate of fifty barrels per diem!
GEORGE BUCHANAN.
This singular well merits a brief notice. From the first sand, not a trace of which was met in the two wells on the other side of the road, oil and gas arose through the water so freely that drilling was stopped and tubing inserted. In twenty-four hours the well yielded fifty-eight barrels of the blackest lubricant in America, 28° gravity, the hue of a stack of ebony cats and with plenty of gas to illuminate the neighborhood. Subsiding quickly, the tubing was drawn and the hole drilled in quest of the third sand, the rock which furnished the lighter petroleum on Oil Creek. Eight feet were found seven-hundred feet towards the antipodes, a torpedo was exploded, the tubing was put back and the well produced two barrels a day for a year, divided between the sands about equally, the green and black oils coming out of the pipe side-by-side and positively declining to merge into one. Other wells were drilled years afterwards close by, without finding the jugular. Mr. Whitman sleeps in the Baptist churchyard near Hannaville, the sleep that shall have no awakening until the Judgment Day. Mr. Buchanan, who operated at Rouseville, Scrubgrass, Franklin and Bradford, left the oil-regions nine years ago for the Black Hills and died in South Dakota on March twenty-eighth, 1897. He was a man of sterling attributes, nobly considerate and unselfish. No truer, braver heart e’er beat in human breast.
“Yes, we must follow soon, will glad obey
When a few suns have rolled their cares away;
Tired with vain life, will close the weary eye—
’Tis the great birthright of mankind to die.”