To the indefatigable zeal and liberality of Rev. Thomas Carroll, for twenty-five years in charge of the parish, Oil City owes the erection of the finest church in Northwestern Pennsylvania. The beautiful edifice fitly crowns the summit of Cottage Hill. Its two lofty spires point heavenward and its altar is a marvel of exquisite taste and finish. An elegant parsonage stands on the adjacent lot, with the parochial school across the street. It is proposed to rebuild the schools, to supply a large hall and a convent and to provide every convenience for the various societies connected with the grand congregation. This idea is rendered possible by the splendid offer of Father Carroll to pay one-half the entire cost himself. The good work he has done for temperance, education, morality and religion cannot be estimated. He is distinguished by his catholic spirit, his broad charity, his unwearied philanthropy and his unswerving devotion to the right. No man has made a deeper, nobler impress upon any community in the oil-regions than the beloved pastor of St. Joseph’s. “Late may he return to Heaven!”
“Each man makes his own stature, builds himself;
Virtue alone outbuilds the Pyramids;
Her monuments shall last when Egypt’s fall.”
A host of changes, some pleasing and more unutterably sad, have the swift seasons brought. The scene of active operations has shifted often. The great Bradford region and the rich fields around Pittsburg and Butler have had their innings. Parker, Petrolia, St. Petersburg, Millerstown and Greece City have followed Plumer, Shaffer, Pioneer, Red-Hot and Oleopolis to the limbo of forsaken things. Petroleum Centre is a memory only. Rouseville is reduced to a skeleton. Not a trace of Antwerp, or Pickwick, or Triangle is left. Enterprise resembles Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” or Ossian’s “Balaclutha.” Tip-Top, Modoc, Troutman, Turkey City, St. Joe, Shamburg, Edenburg and Buena Vista have had their rise and fall. Fagundas has vanished. Pleasantville fails to draw an army of adventurous seekers for oleaginous wealth. Tidioute is an echo of the past and scores of minor towns have disappeared completely. For forms and faces once familiar one looks in vain. Where are the plucky operators who for a half-score years made Oil Creek the briskest, gayest, liveliest spot in America? Thousands are browsing in pastures elsewhere, while other thousands have crossed the bridgeless river which flows into the ocean of eternity.
Alas for sentiment! Nero proves to have been a humanitarian, a good man who was merely a bad fiddler. Henry the Eighth turns out to be a model husband, rather unfortunate in the loss of wives, but sweetly indulgent and only a trifle given to fall in love with pretty girls. William Tell had no son and shot no arrow at an apple on young Tell’s head. Now Charlotte Temple is a myth, the creation of an English novelist, with her name cut on a flat tombstone in Trinity Churchyard over a grave which originally bore a metal-plate supposed to commemorate a man! At this rate some historic sharp in the future may demonstrate that the oil-men were a race of green-tinted people governed by King Petroleum. Colonel Drake may be pronounced a figure of the imagination, the Standard a fiction, the South-Improvement Company a nightmare and the Producers’ Association a dream. Then some inquisitive antiquarian may come across a copy of “Sketches in Crude-Oil” stored in a forgotten corner of the Congressional library, and set them all right and keep the world running in the correct groove with regard to the grand industry of the nineteenth century.
“I stood upon Achilles’ tomb
And heard Troy doubted: time will doubt of Rome.”
A dry-joke tickles and a dry-hole scrunches. It’s a poor mule won’t work both ways, a poor spouter that can’t keep its owner from going up the spout, a poor boil in the pot that isn’t better than a boil on the neck, a poor chestnut on the tree that doesn’t beat a chestnut at a minstrel show and a poor seed that produces no root or herb or grain or fruit or flower. “Who made you?” the Sunday-school teacher asked a ragged urchin. “Made me? Well, God made me a foot long and I growed the rest!” And so the early operators on Oil Creek made the oil-development “a foot long” and it “growed the rest.” The tiny seed is a vigorous plant, the puling babe a lusty giant. Amid lights and shadows, clouds and sunshine, successes and failures, struggles and triumphs, starless nights and radiant days, petroleum has moved ahead steadily. Growth, “creation by law,” is ever going on in the healthy plant, the tree, the animal, the mind, the universe. We must go forward if the acorn is to become an oak, the infant a mature man, the feeble industry a sturdy development. Progress implies more of involution than of evolution, just as the oak contains much that was not in the acorn, and the oil-business in 1898 possesses elements unknown in 1859. Not to advance is to go backward in religion, in nature and in trade. “An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath, on the outside of the universe, and seeing it go,” is not a correct idea of the All-Wise Being, working actively in every point of space and moment of time. Stagnation means decay in the natural world and death in oil-affairs. The man who sits in the pasture waiting for the cow to come and be milked will never skim off the cream. The man who wants to figure as an oil-operator must bounce the drill and tap the sand and give the stuff a chance to get into the tanks. Still a youngster in years, the petroleum-colt has distanced the old nags. The sucker-rod is the pole that knocks the persimmons. The oil-well is the fountain of universal illumination. The walking-beam is the real balance of trade and of power. The derrick is the badge of enlightenment. Petroleum is the bright star that shines for all mankind and doesn’t propose to be snuffed out or shoved off the grass. Its past is known, its present may be estimated, but what Canute dare fence in its future and say: “Thus far shalt thou come and no farther?”
If there be friendly readers, as they reckon up the score,