Oliver Ames, the future governor, invited the party to lunch at the Parker House, Boston’s noted hostelry. An hour sped quickly. My return-trip had been arranged by way of Buffalo and the Lake-Shore Road to Franklin. The time to start arrived, the sleigh to take me to the depot was at the door, the good-byes were said, the driver tucked in the robes and grasped the lines. At that instant Oliver Ames, Sen., called: “Please come into the hotel one moment; I want to jot down something you told us about the American Well.” The other gentlemen looked on, the explanation was penciled rapidly, my seat in the sleigh was resumed and Mr. Dexter jokingly said to the Jehu: “You’ll have to hustle, or your fare will miss his train!”
Through the narrow, twisted, crowded streets the horses trotted briskly. Rushing into the station, the train was pulling out and the ticket-examiner was shutting the iron-gates. He refused to let me attempt to catch the rear car and my disappointment was extreme. A train for New York and Pittsburg left in fifteen minutes. It bore me, an unwilling passenger, safely and satisfactorily to the “Smoky City.” There the news reached me of the frightful railway-disaster at Ashtabula, in which P. P. Bliss and fourscore fellow-mortals, filled with fond anticipations of New-Year reunions, perished in the icy waters ninety feet beneath the treacherous bridge that dropped them into the yawning chasm! The doomed train was the same that would have borne me to Ashtabula and—to death, had not Mr. Ames detained me to make the entry in his memorandum-book! Call it Providence, Luck, Chance, what you will, an incident of this stamp is apt to beget “a heap of tall thinking.”
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.”
GIRL CLIMBING A DERRICK.
Returning to Burksville in January, the work of leasing went ahead merrily. The lands around the American Well were taken at one-eighth royalty. Forty rods northeast of the American, in a small ravine, a well was drilled eight-hundred feet. At two-hundred feet some gas and oil appeared, but the well proved a failure. While it was under way the gas in a deserted salt-well twenty rods northwest of the American burst forth violently, sending frozen earth, water and pieces of rock high into the air. The derrick at the Boston Well, rising to the height of seventy-two feet, was a perennial delight to the natives. Youths, boys and old men ascended the ladder to the topmost round to enjoy the beautiful view. Pretty girls longed to try the experiment and it was whispered that six of them, one night when only the man in the moon was peeping, performed the perilous feat. Certain it is that a winsome teacher at the college, who climbed the celestial stair years ago, succeeded in the effort and wrecked her dress on the way back to solid ground. A dining-room girl at Petrolia, in 1873, stood on top of a derrick, to win a pair of shoes banteringly offered by a jovial oilman to the first fair maiden entitled to the prize. Lovely woman and Banquo’s ghost will not “down!”[“down!”]
Three miles northeast of the American Well, at the mouth of Crocus Creek, C. H. English drilled eight shallow wells in 1865. They were bunched closely and one flowed nine-hundred barrels a day. Transportation was lacking, the product could not be marketed and the promising field was deserted. Twelve years later the Boston Oil-Company drilled in the midst of English’s cluster, to discover the quality of the strata, and could not exhaust the surface-water by the most incessant pumping. The company also drilled on the Gilreath farm, across the Cumberland from Burksville, where Captain Phelps found heavy oil in paying quantity back in the sixties. The well produced nicely and would have paid handsomely had a railroad or a pipe-line been within reach. A well two miles west of the American, drilled in 1891, had plenty of sand and showed for a fifty-barreler.
Six miles south-west of Burksville, at Cloyd’s Landing, J. W. Sherman, of Oil-Creek celebrity, drilled a well in 1865 which spouted a thousand barrels of 40° gravity oil in twenty-four hours. He loaded a barge with oil in bulk, intending to ship it to Nashville. The ill-fated craft struck a rock in the river and the oil floated off on its own hook. Sherman threw up the sponge and returned to Pennsylvania. Three others on the Cloyd tract started finely, but the wonderful excitement at Pithole was breaking out and operations elsewhere received a cold chill. Dr. Hunter purchased the Cloyd farm and leased it in 1877 to Peter Christie, of Petrolia, who did not operate on any of the lands he secured in Kentucky and Tennessee. Micawber-like, Cumberland county is “waiting for something to turn up” in the shape of facilities for handling oil. When these are assured the music of the walking-beam will tickle the ears of expectant believers in Kentucky as the coming oil-field.
Wayne and Cumberland had been heard from and Clinton county was the third to have its inning. On the west bank of Otter Creek, a sparkling tributary of Beaver Creek, a well bored for salt fifty or more years ago yielded considerable oil. Instead of giving up the job, the owners pumped the water and oil into a tank, over the side of which the lighter fluid was permitted to empty at its leisure. The salt-works came to a full stop eventually and the well relapsed into “innocuous desuetude.” L. D. Carter, of Aurora, Ill., sojourning temporarily in Clinton for his health, saw the old well in 1864. He dipped a jugful of oil, took it to Aurora, tested it on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, found it a good lubricant and concluded to give the well a square trial. The railroad-company agreed to buy the oil at a fair price. Carter pumped six or eight barrels a day, hauled it in wagons over the hills to the Cumberland River and saved money. He granted Mr. Prentice an option on the property in 1877. The day the option expired J. O. Marshall bought the well, farm and ten-thousand acres of leases conditionally, for a Butler operator who “didn’t have the price,” and the deal fell through.
The well stood idle until 1892, when J. Hovey, an ex-broker from New York and relative of a late Governor of Indiana, drilled a short distance down the creek. The result was a strike which produced twenty-four hundred barrels of dark, heavy, lubricating oil in fifty days. It was shut down for want of tankage and means to transport the product to market. The Carter again yielded nicely, as did three more wells in this neighborhood. In 1895 the Standard Oil-Company was given a refusal of the Hovey and surrounding interests, in order to test the territory fully and lay a pipe-line to Glasgow or Louisville, should the production warrant the expenditure. Wells have been sunk east of the Carter nearly to Monticello, eighteen miles off, finding gas and indications of oil. Every true Clintonite is positive an ocean of petroleum underlies his particular neck of woods, impatient to be relieved and burden landholders and operators alike with excessive wealth!