The quintette drilled numerous wells, one of them the largest on Oil Creek, and prospered greatly. Phillips, Vanausdall and Kipp sold out to their partners, who organized as Lockhart & Frew. It was an ideal union of capacity and capital, not a mismating of cut-glass aspiration with tin-cup attainment, and its wheel of fortune did not travel with a punctured tire. The new firm shipped extensively, built the Brilliant Refinery in 1861 and speedily stepped to the front in handling the greasy staple. In May of 1860 Mr. Lockhart went to Europe with samples of crude and refined-distillate to establish a market in England. These were the first samples of crude-petroleum and its products ever carried across the Atlantic. The mission was most successful, a large foreign demand springing up quickly. Lockhart & Frew exerted vast influence in the petroleum-trade, opened branch-agencies throughout the oil-regions and eventually combined with the Standard Oil-Company. Major Frew, a man of rare sagacity and broad ideas, died in March of 1880. He disliked ostentation, was quiet in his tastes and habits, managed the accounts and office-work of the firm with scrupulous exactness, was always kindly and genial, helped the needy, served as treasurer of the Christian Commission and left a fine estate. Time has dealt gently with Mr. Lockhart, who is young in heart and sympathy and good-fellowship. His compliments have the juiciness of the peach, his pleasant jokes are spiced with originality, his years sit upon him lightly and his old friends are not forgotten. He is happy in his social and business relations, in recalling the past and awaiting the future, in wealth gained worthily and enjoyed wisely and in a life crowded with usefulness and blessing.
“A bough from an oak, not from a willow.”
The late Joseph Bates was closely associated with the early shippers of petroleum on the Allegheny River. He held the confidence of Lockhart & Frew and was esteemed everywhere for probity and enterprise. Coming to the oil-regions in the sixties, he resided at Oil City many years and operated in different sections of the field. With his friends he was ever jaunty, jolly and perfectly at home. Judging by the French standard, that a man is only as old as he feels, he had to the very end of his sixty years few juniors at Oil City, Parker, Petrolia or Pittsburg. He was never ill-natured nor uncompanionable, whether his wells proved unexpectedly large or disappointingly small. His sunny composition bore no “thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice” to repel and chill those with whom he came in contact. His steadfast friend, Samuel B. Harper, who has had charge of the books from about the commencement of Lockhart & Frew’s partnership, is in Mr. Lockhart’s office to-day. A record so honorable to all concerned, with its long performance of duty and unwavering appreciation, is deserving of special remark in these days of lightning-changes, impaired confidence and devil-may-care recklessness generally.
AN OLD OIL-SPRING IN OHIO.
On an old map of the United States, printed in England in 1787, the word “petroleum” is marked twice, indicating that the “surface-shows” of oil had attracted the notice of the earliest explorers of Southern Ohio and Northwestern Pennsylvania a century ago. In one instance it is placed at the mouth of the stream since famed the world over as Oil Creek, where Oil City is situated; in the other on a stream represented as emptying into the Ohio River, close to the site of what is now the village of Macksburg. When that section of Ohio was first settled, various symptoms of greasiness were detected, thin films of oil floating on the waters of Duck Creek and its tributaries, globules rising in different springs and seepings occurring frequently in the same manner as in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Thirty miles north of Marietta, on Duck Creek, a salt-well sunk by Mr. McKee, in 1814, to the depth of four-hundred-and-seventy-five feet, discharged “periodically, at intervals of from two to four days and from three to six hours’ duration, thirty to sixty gallons of petroleum at each inception.” Eighteen years afterwards the discharges were less frequent and the yield of oil diminished to one barrel a week, finally ceasing altogether. Once thirty or forty barrels stored in a cistern took fire from the gas at the well having been ignited by a workman carrying a light. The burning oil ran into the creek, blazed to the tops of the trees and exhibited for hours to the amazed settlers the novelty of a rivulet on fire. Ten miles above McConnellsville, on the Muskingum River, results almost identical attended the boring of salt-wells in 1819. Dr. S. P. Hildreth, of Marietta, in an account of the region, written that year, says of the borings for salt-water:
“They have sunk two wells more than four-hundred feet; one of them affords a strong and pure water, but not in great quantity; the other discharges such vast quantities of petroleum, or as it is vulgarly called “Seneca Oil,” and besides is subject to such tremendous explosions of gas * * * that they make little or no salt. Nevertheless, the petroleum affords considerable profit and is beginning to be in demand for workshops and manufactories. It affords a clear, brisk light, when burned in this way, and will be a valuable article for lighting the street-lamps in the future cities of Ohio.”
The last sentence bears the force of a prophecy. Writing about the year 1832 the same observant author directs attention to another peculiar feature:
“Since the first settlement of the regions west of the Appalachian range the hunters and pioneers have been acquainted with this oil. Rising in a hidden and mysterious manner from the bowels of the earth, it soon arrested their attention and acquired great value in the eyes of the simple sons of the forest. * * * From its success in rheumatism, burns, coughs, sprains etc., it was justly entitled to its celebrity. * * * It is also well adapted to prevent friction in machinery, for, being free of gluten, so common to animal and vegetable oils, it preserves the parts to which it is applied for a long time in free motion; where a heavy vertical shaft runs in a socket it is preferable to all or any other articles. This oil rises in greater or less abundance in most of the salt-wells and, collecting where it rises, is removed from time to time with a ladle.”
Is it not strange that, with the sources of supply thus pointed out in different counties and states and the useful applications of petroleum fairly understood, its real value should have remained unappreciated and unrecognized for more than thirty years and be at last determined through experiments upon the distillation of bituminous shales and coals? Wells sunk hundreds of feet for salt water produced oil in abundance, yet it occurred to no one that, if bored expressly for petroleum, it could be found in paying quantity! Hamilton McClintock, owner of the “oil-spring” famed in history and romance, when somebody ventured to suggest that he should dig into the rock a short distance, instead of skimming the petroleum with a flannel-cloth, retorted hotly: “I’m no blanked fool to dig a hole for the oil to get away through the bottom!”