Chapter 38

PIPE LINE STATION.CAPT. J. J. VANDERGRIFT.OIL TANK CARS.GEO. V. FORMAN.

Born at Pittsburg in 1827, at fifteen Jacob Jay Vandergrift chose the pathway that naturally opened before him and entered the steamboat-service, then the chief medium of intercommunication between his native city and the west. In ten years he rose from cabin-boy to captain. He introduced the method of towing coal-barges that has since been employed in the river-traffic. The innovation attracted wide attention and gave a great impetus to mining in the Pittsburg coal-fields. Captain Vandergrift was steamboating on the Ohio when the war broke out and owned the staunch Red Fox, which the government chartered and lost near Cairo. He transported oil down the Allegheny,was concerned in West-Virginia wells—the Confederates destroyed them—and removed to Oil City in 1863 to oversee his shipping-business, with Daniel Bushnell as his first partner in producing oil. He organized the firms out of which grew the Union, the Forest, the Washington Oil-Company and the United Oil and Gas Trust. He was president of the Forest and the Washington and a leading promoter of the Anchor Oil-Company. The success of these great companies was owing largely to his peculiar ability as an organizer and manager of important enterprises. Other individuals and corporations produced oil profitably, but to Vandergrift & Forman the marvelous advance in modes of transportation is mainly attributable. They piped and railroaded oil from Pithole, extended their lines through the different fields, devised many improvements, perfected the methods of handling the product and developed the system that has eliminated jaded horses, wooden-barrels, mud-scows, slow freights and the thousand inconveniences of early transportation. Captain Vandergrift’s sturdy integrity and wise forethought planned the open, clear-cut manner in which his pipe-lines conducted business. Throughout their entire existence he was president of the United Pipe-Lines and of the United Division of the National-Transit after the consolidation in 1884. Their splendid record is an unqualified tribute to his business-skill and rare sagacity. He found the region hampered by an expensive, tedious method of moving oil and left it a transportation-system that serves the industry as no other on earth is served. He substituted the steam-pump for the wearied mule, the iron-artery for the roads of bottomless mire and the huge cistern of boiler-plate for the portable tank of wooden staves that leaked at every pore. To Oil City he was a munificent benefactor. He projected the Imperial Refinery, with a capacity of fifteen-thousand barrels a week, by the sale of which he became a stockholder and officer of the Standard Oil-Company. He aided in establishing the Boiler-Works, the Barrel-Works, river-bridges, manufactories, churches and public improvements. He paid his workmen the highest wages, befriended the humble toiler and assisted every worthy object. The poor blessed his beneficent hand and all classes revered the modest citizen whose unostentatious deeds of kindness no party, race, color or creed could for one moment restrict.

Very naturally, one thus interested in a special product and its industries must be identified with its finance. Captain Vandergrift founded the Oil-City Trust-Company, one of the leading banking institutions of the state, and was prominent in organizing the Oil-Exchange, the Seaboard-National Bank of New York and the Argyle Savings-Bank at Petrolia. Removing to Pittsburg in 1881, he founded the Keystone Bank and the Pittsburg Trust-Company—nine-hundred-thousand dollars paid-up capital and four-millions deposits—and was unanimously elected president of both. He provided spacious quarters for the Oil-Exchange and established it on a sound basis. He erected the massive Vandergrift Building on Fourth avenue, in which the National-Transit Company, the Forest, the South-Penn, the Pennsylvania, the Woodland and other oil-companies are commodiously housed. The owner occupies a suite of offices on the second floor and the Pittsburg Trust-Company has its bank on the ground floor of the granite structure. He also erected the Conestoga Building, which has seven-hundred elegant offices, and the Imperial Power-Building, with factory-construction and the latest electric-motors throughout. In 1882 he organized the Pennsylvania Tube-Works—eight-hundred-thousand dollars capital—to manufacture all kinds of wrought-iron pipe. The output was so excellent that the capital was increased to two-millions and the plantdoubled. The works turn out pipe from one-eighth inch to twenty-eight inches, the smallest and largest sizes in the world. The Apollo Steel-Company, which he also capitalized in 1885 at three-hundred-thousand dollars, has likewise trebled its plant and enlarged its capital to two-millions. The Penn Fuel-Company, the Bridgewater Gas Company, the Natural-Gas Company of West Virginia, the Chartiers Natural-Gas Company, the United Oil and Gas Trust, the Toledo Natural-Gas Company, the Fort-Pitt Natural-Gas Company and a number more were incorporated by Captain Vandergrift. They represent many millions of capital and have performed inestimable service in developing the fuel that proved a veritable philosopher’s stone to the iron-industries of Western-Pennsylvania. As in petroleum, from the days of spring-poles and bulk-barges and pond-freshets down through all the changes of the most remarkable industrial development the world has ever seen, so Captain Vandergrift has been a pioneer, a guide and a leader in natural-gas. His hand has never been off the helm, nor has he ever grudged an atom of the energy bestowed upon the cherished pursuits of his busy life.

Forty miles north-east of Pittsburg, on a beautiful bend of the Kiskiminetas River, the new town of Vandergrift has been laid out, under the direction of Frederick Law Olmsted. It is located on a plot one mile square, two miles below Apollo, the gentle slope overlooking the valley and the river for leagues. Its residents will have within easy reach of simple thrift what luxurious people enjoy in large cities at great expense. They will have clean air and water and breathing-room, green leaves and flowers and grass, paved streets and sewers and electricity, parks and walks and drives, shade-trees and lawns and pleasant homes, for Vandergrift will be the model town of Pennsylvania. The company is paying sixty-thousand dollars a month at Apollo in wages and the big works at Vandergrift will employ thrice as many men. At first the bulk of the town will be the habitations of those employed by and associated with the company. After a little others will note its advantages and desire to share them. Provision will be made this year for an immediate population of several thousand, with the means of living comfortably, families owning their homes and controlling their own pursuits. The town is not to be a fad, a hobby, or a visionary Utopia, but a good place for men to live in, for the founder to use his money, for the world to look at and learn from. These banks and business-blocks, pipe-lines and refineries, mills and factories and the town that bears his name are enduring monuments to the enterprise and wisdom of a man who recognizes the responsibilities of wealth in his investments, in his works of philanthropy and in his gifts to the children of misfortune.

Captain Vandergrift’s home in Allegheny City is a center of good cheer and genial hospitality. The host is the same kindly, companionable gentleman by his own hearth, in his office or on the street. He casts the lead of memory into the stream of the past and talks entertainingly of the old days on the Ohio, the Allegheny and Oil Creek. He is never too much engaged to welcome a comrade of his early years. He has not lost touch with men or the spirit of sympathy with the struggling and unsuccessful. His trials and vicissitudes, equally with his triumphs and successes, have strengthened his moral fiber, his manly courage and his nobility of character. Doubtful plans and purposes have had no place in his policy. Strict honesty and fairness have governed his conduct and respected the rights and privileges of his fellows. He has been quick to discover and reward talent, to grasp the details and possibilities of business and to mature plans for any emergency. Money has not shriveled hissoul and narrowed him to the prayer of selfishness: “Givemethis daymydaily bread.” He prefers straightforwardness to a pedigree running back to the Mayflower. He realizes that golden opportunities for good are not traveling by a time-table and that men will not journey this way again to repair omissions and rectify mistakes. He knows that he who does right will be right and feel right. He does not lay aside his sense of justice, his love of fair-play, his earnest convictions and his desire to benefit mankind with his Sunday clothes. He believes that principle which is not exercised every day will not keep sweet a week. The story of J. J. Vandergrift’s life and labor is told wherever the flame of natural-gas glows in the white heat of a furnace or the gleam of an oil-lamp brightens a happy home.

Somehow we all feel sure, boys, that when the game is o’er—When the last inning’s play’d, boys, this side the other shore—We’ll hear the Umpire say, boys: “The Captain’s made a score.”

Somehow we all feel sure, boys, that when the game is o’er—

When the last inning’s play’d, boys, this side the other shore—

We’ll hear the Umpire say, boys: “The Captain’s made a score.”

Few persons have any conception of the labor and capital involved in storing and transporting petroleum. Only those familiar with the early methods can appreciate fully the convenience and economy of the pipe-line system. It puts the producer in direct communication with the carrier and a market at all seasons, regardless of high or low water, rain or storm, mud or dust. The tanks at his wells are connected with the pipe-line by one or more of the two-inch feeders that spider-web the producing-country. Small pumps force the crude, when the location of the well prevents running it by gravity, from these tanks into a receiving-tank of the line, whence it can be piped into the trunk-lines or a storage-tank as desired. The producer who wishes his oil run notifies the nearest office or agent of the company—usually this requires about two minutes by wire—a gauger measures the feet and inches of fluid in the tank, opens the stop-cock, turns the stream into the line and, presto, change! the job is done. The gauger measures the oil left at the bottom of the tank, gives the producer a receipt for the difference between the two gauges and reports the result to the central station of that section of the field. There tables of the measurements of every tank in the locality are at hand, properly labeled and numbered. The right table shows at a glance the amount of oil in barrels corresponding to the feet and inches the gauger reports having run and the producer is credited accordingly, just like a depositor in a bank. These reports are summed up at a certain hour and the company learns precisely how much oil has been received each day. By a similar process the shipments are recorded and the exact quantity in the custody of the company is known at the close of the day’s business. Runs and shipments are published daily and a monthly synopsis is posted, in compliance with the laws of Pennsylvania. The producer can leave his oil in the line, subject to a slight charge for storage after thirty days, or sell it immediately. He can take certificates or acceptances of one thousand barrels each, payable on demand in crude-oil at any shipping-point in the oil-region. These certificates, good as gold and negotiable as certified checks, the holder can use as collateral to borrow money, sell at sight or stow away if he looks for an advance in prices. It is not Hobson’s choice with him. In an hour from the time of notifying the office his oil may be run, the amount figured up, the sale made and the currency in the owner’s pocket. He has not tugged and perspired loading it in wagons or on cars, worn out his patience and his team and his profanity driving it through an ocean of mud, or risked the chances of a jam and a wreck ferrying it on the bosom of a pond-freshet. Nor has he put up one penny for the service of the pipe-line, whichcollects twenty cents a barrel when the oil is delivered to the purchaser. The company is not a holder of oil on its own account, except what it necessarily keeps to offset evaporation and sediment, acting merely as a common-carrier between the producer and the refiner. The system is the perfection of simplicity, accuracy and cheapness.

Pipe-lines are the natural outgrowth of the petroleum-business, which could no more get along without them than could the commerce of the world without railroads and steamships. The movement of a thousand barrels of crude in early times was a task of great magnitude, costly, time-consuming and perplexing. Sometimes barrels were not to be had, the water was too shallow for boating or the mud too deep for teaming. Often a big well wasted half its product and gorged transportation, harassing the soul and depleting the purse of the luckless owner. Fancy attempting to handle a hundred-thousand barrels a day with the primitive appliances! Whew! You might as well try to cart off Niagara in kegs. Butler and McKean rushed wells by the hundred every week, swelling the production extravagantly. The supply was enormously in excess of the demand. Operators wouldn’t stop drilling and the surplus oil had to be cared for in some way. The United Lines and the National-Transit Company spent millions of dollars to provide adequate facilities. Not only was the vast output to be taken from the wells, but a large percentage must be stored. To pipe a hundred-and-forty-thousand barrels a day was a grand achievement, even without the burden of husbanding much of the stuff for weeks, months and years. A wilderness of iron-tanks—thirty to forty thousand barrels each—went up at Olean, Oil City, Raymilton, Parker and distributing points. Stocks increased and tanks multiplied until forty-million barrels were piled up! Think of the mountains of pipe, the acres of iron-plates, the legions of workmen and the stacks of cash all this required. Six pipes were laid to New York and the Tidewater Company built a six-inch line to New Jersey. The trunk-lines of the National-Transit alone are five-thousand miles in length, besides which the Tidewater and the United-States pipe oil eastward. Fifty-thousand barrels of crude a day flow through these underground arteries to the refineries at Hunter’s Point, Bayonne and Philadelphia. Other thousands are piped to Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburg and refineries in the oil-region. The pipe used in transporting crude would girdle the earth twice and leave a long string for extra-measure. Truly “these be piping times.”

McDonald gushers poured out their floods, but the National-Transit and Mellon Lines were on deck with pumps and pipes that snatched the contents of the tanks and whirled them to the sea. John McKeown’s leviathan at Washington electrified the neighborhood by starting at three-hundred barrels an hour, with only three small tanks to hold the product. It filled the first in forty minutes. Superintendent Glenn Braden set up a pump in thirty minutes more that would empty the tank in a half-hour. All night it was nip and tuck between the spouter and the pump, big Goliath and puny David. The pump won, the oil was safe in the line and not a drop spilled! West-Virginia’s geysers burst forth and the Southern Trunk-Line—three-hundred miles of eight-inch and six-inch pipe—linked Morgantown to Philadelphia. Lima tried to drown Ohio in crude and an eight-inch line quietly dumped the deluge into Chicago. Part of it fired the half-mile row of boilers at the Columbian Exposition, with not a cinder, a speck of ashes or a whiff of smoke to dim the lustrous flame of fuel-oil. Indiana, the home of some pretty big statesmen, some pretty big oil-territory and “the Hoosier Schoolmaster,” had a surfeit of crudewhich the pipe-lines bore to the huge refinery at Whiting, to Cleveland and the Windy City. Thus the development of new fields, remote from railroads, has been rendered possible.

Trunk-lines require pipe of extra weight, manufactured expressly for the purpose from wrought-iron, lap-welded, cut into lengths of eighteen feet and tested to a pressure of two-thousand pounds to the square inch. Pumping-stations, supplied with powerful machinery, are located at suitable points, generally twenty-five to thirty miles apart. The stations on the National-Transit trunk-lines usually comprise a boiler-house forty feet square, built of brick and roofed with corrugated iron, lighted by electricity and containing seven or eight tubular boilers of eighty to one-hundred horse-power. For greater safety from fire the immense pumps are in a separate brick-building. The largest pumps are triple-expansion crank and fly-wheel engines, the invention of John S. Klein, superintendent of the company’s machine-shops at Oil City. Each of these giants can force twenty-five-thousand barrels of oil a day through three six-inch pipes from one station to the next. A low-duty engine is run when the main-pump is stopped for repairs or any cause. At each station two or more storage-tanks—thirty to thirty-five thousand barrels apiece—are provided. One receives the oil from the preceding station while the pump is emptying the other into the receiver at the station beyond. The movement is incessant. Night and day, never tiring and never resting, the iron-arteries throb and pulsate with the greasy liquid that rushes swiftly a yard beneath the surface, duplicate machinery obviating the necessity of delay or interruption. Five or six boilers are fired at once and two are held in reserve, in case of accident. Loops are laid around some of the stations, that a pump may send the oil two or three times the average distance and the total disability of a station not blockade the line. When lofty hills are surmounted the pressure on the pump reaches twelve to fifteen-hundred pounds. Independent telegraph-lines connect the stations with one another and the main-offices. The engineers handle the key and click messages expertly. The lines are patrolled regularly to detect leaks, although the system of checking from tank to tank makes it impossible for a serious break to pass unnoticed. To clear the incrustations of paraffine, especially in cold weather, a scraper or “go-devil” is sent through the pipes. The best of these instruments—a spindle with a ball-and-socket-joint near its center to follow the bends of the pipe, fitted with steel-blades set radially and kept in position by three arms in front and rear—was devised by Mr. Klein. Oblique vanes, put in motion by the running oil, rotate the spindle and the blades scrape the pipe as the “go-devil” is propelled forward. A catch-box is placed at the end of each division and the queer traveler can be closely timed. The great battery of boilers, the huge engine-pumps—one on the Lima-Chicago line weighs a hundred tons—the electric-plants and the intricate maze of steam-pipes and water-pipes suggest the machinery of an ocean-steamship.

If the railroad is “the missionary of punctuality,” as Robert Burdette concisely expresses it, surely the pipe-line is the messenger of efficiency. With wondrous speed and unfailing certainty it conveys crude-oil from the wells to the refineries in or out of the region, climbing hills, descending ravines, fathoming rivers and traversing plains and forests. Methods of refining have kept pace with progress in transportation. The smoky, dangerous, inconvenient kettle-still of the pioneer on Oil Creek has given place to the mammoth refinery of to-day, with its labor-saving appliances, its hundreds of skilled employés andits improved processes. Instead of the ill-smelling, sputtering, explosive mixture of earlier years, the world now receives the water-white kerosene that burns as steadily and safely as a wax-taper. Seventy tank-vessels carry it over the seas to Europe, Asia and Africa. It is delivered at your house in neat cans, or the grocer will sell it by the pint, quart, gallon or barrel. The light is pure as heaven’s own sunshine, grateful to the eye and beautifying to the home. No other substance approaches petroleum in the number and utility of its products. Long years of patient research and experiment have extracted from it one-hundred-and-fifty articles of value in art, science, mechanics and domestic economy. It supplies healing-salves, ointments, cosmetics, soaps, dainty toilet-accessories and—oh, girly Vassar girls—chewing-gum! Refuse tar and scum are converted into lamp-black and coarse lubricants. Scarcely a particle of it goes to waste. Noxious gases and poisonous acids no longer pollute the air and the streams around refineries, offending human nostrils and killing helpless fish. The amazing vastness of its development is equalled only by the marvelous variety of petroleum’s commercial uses.

At every stage of its journey from the hole in the ground to the abode of the purchaser of kerosene, oil is handled with a view to the best results. The pipe-line relieves the producer from worry and fatigue and a large outlay, furnishing him prompt service and a cash market at his own door every business-day in the year. It enables the refiner to fill the consumer’s lamp at a trifling margin above the price of crude. For seventy cents a barrel—less than half it cost formerly to haul it a mile—the line collects oil from the wells, pumps it into the trunk-lines and delivers it in New York. Contrast this charge with the four, five, eight or ten dollars exacted in the days of boats and wagons, barrels and tank-cars and endeavor to figure the saving to the public wrought by the pipe-lines, to say nothing of greater convenience and expedition. The existing transportation-system may be a monopoly, but the country is hungry for more monopolies of the same sort. If it be monopoly to bring order out of chaos, to build one strong enterprise from a dozen weaklings, to consolidate into a grand corporation a score of feeble lines and reduce freight-rates seventy-five to ninety-five per cent., the National-Transit Company is the rankest monopoly of the century. It practices the kind of monopoly that converts a row of tottering shanties into a stately business-block. It is guilty of furnishing storage solid as the Rock of Gibraltar to the men who drilled oil down to forty cents a barrel and tiding them over the period of excessive production. This is the brand of monopoly that keeps industry alive, that supplies foreign nations with an American product and benefits humanity. If Van Syckle, Abbott and Harley were plucky and courageous in braving the wrath of four-thousand teamsters, how much more brain and brawn, muscle and money, dollars and sense were needed to lay trunk-lines that sent ten-thousand tank-cars to the junk-pile and diminished the revenues of railroads millions of dollars annually! The owners of these lines have grown rich, as they ought to do, because for every dollar of their winnings they have saved producers and consumers of petroleum ten.

Pipe-line certificates afforded an excellent medium for speculation. The commodity they represented was subject to fluctuations of five to fifty per cent., which made it particularly fascinating to speculators in stocks. Oil-exchanges were established at Oil City, Titusville, Parker, Bradford, Pittsburg, New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere. In a single year the clearances exceeded eleven-billion barrels. Bulls and bears reveled in excitement and brokers had customers from every quarter of the country. The forerunner of these institutionswas “the Curbstone Exchange” at Oil City in 1870. The bulk of the buying and selling was done in front of Lockhart, Frew & Co.’s office, Centre street, near the railroad track. Producers, dealers and spectators would congregate on the sidewalk, discuss the situation, tell stories and buy or sell oil. The group in the illustration includes a number of well-known citizens. Most of them have left Oil City and not a few have gone from earth. Acquaintances will recognize Dr. Knox, John Mawhinney, James Mawhinney, John D. Archbold, Dr. Baldwin, A. H. Bronson, P. H. Judd, L. D. Kellogg, A. E. Fay, George Porter, Edward Higbee, William M. Williams, John W. Austin, J. M. Butters, Joseph Bates, George W. Parker, William H. Porterfield, Charles W. Frazer, Edward Simmons, Samuel H. Lamberton, James H. Magee, Isaac Lloyd and William Elliott. Charles Lockhart and William Frew were pioneer refiners at Pittsburg and heavy buyers of crude at Oil City. William G. Warden entered into partnership with them and established the great Atlantic Refinery at Point Breeze. In 1874 the refineries controlled by Warden, Frew & Co. consolidated with the Standard Oil-Company of Ohio, forming the nucleus of the Standard Oil-Trust. Mr. Warden built the Gladstone, the first large apartment-house in Philadelphia, and died in April of 1895. He married a daughter of Daniel Bushnell and was one of the most enterprising and charitable citizens of Pennsylvania. His surviving contemporaries are old in reminiscences of Oil Creek and the days when pipe-lines and oil-certificates were unguessed probabilities.

OIL CITY “CURBSTONE EXCHANGE” IN 1870.

Trades were made in offices, at wells, on streets, anywhere and everywhere. Purchasers for Pittsburg, Baltimore and Philadelphia refiners started brokerage in 1868, on a commission of ten cents a barrel from buyers and five from sellers. The Farmers’ Railroad, completed to Oil City in 1867, broughtso many operators to town that a car was assigned them, in which they bought and sold “spot,” “regular” and “future oil.” There were no certificates, no written obligations, no margins to bind a bargain, but everything was done on honor and no man’s word was broken. “Spot oil” was to be moved and paid for at once, “regular” allowed the buyer ten days to put the oil on the cars and “future” was taken as agreed upon mutually. Large lots frequently changed hands in this passenger-car, really the first oil-exchange. The business increased, an exchange on wheels had manifest disadvantages and in December of 1869 it was decided to effect a permanent organization. Officers were elected and a room was rented on Centre street. It removed to the Sands Block in 1871, to the Opera-House Block in January of 1872 and to a temporary shed next the Empire-Line office in the fall, when South-Improvement complications dissolved the organization. For about fifteen months hotels, streets, or offices sufficed for accommodations. In February of 1864 the exchange was reorganized, with George V. Forman as president, and occupied quarters in the Collins House four years. Gradually rules were adopted and methods introduced that brought about the system afterwards in vogue. In April of 1878 the formal opening of the splendid Oil-Exchange Building took place. The structure contained offices, committee-rooms, telegraph-lines, reading-rooms and all conveniences for its four-hundred members. H. L. Foster, now of Chicago, was president term after term. The late H. L. McCance, secretary for years, was a first-class artist, with a skill for caricature worthy of Thomas Nast. Some of the most striking cartoons pertaining to oil were the work of his ready pencil. F. W. Mitchell & Co. inaugurated the advancing of money on certificates, their bank’s transactions in this line ranging from one to four-million dollars a day. The application of the clearing-house system in 1882 simplified the routine and facilitated deliveries. The volume of business was immense, the clearances often amounting to ten or fifteen-million barrels a day. Only the New York and the San Francisco stock-exchanges surpassed it. If speculation were piety, everybody who inhaled the air of Oil City would have been saved and the devil might have put up his shutters. During rapid fluctuations the galleries would be packed with men and women who had “taken a flyer” and watched the antics of the bulls and bears intently. Fortunes were gained and lost. Many a “lamb” was shorn and many a “duck” lamed. It was a raging fever, a delirium of excitement, compressing years of ordinary anxiety and haste into a week. Now the exchange is deserted and speculative trade in oil is dead. Part of the big building is a clothier’s store and offices are rented for sleeping-apartments. Myer Lowentritt, Stewart Simpson, “Eddie” Selden, Samuel Justus and a half-dozen others are seen occasionally, but days pass without a solitary transaction, the surging crowds have vanished and activity is a dream of bygone years.

Parker had a lively oil-exchange when the Armstrong and Butler fields were at their height. The most prominent men in speculative trade lived in the town or were represented in the exchange. Thomas B. Simpson was a large operator. George Darr was agent of Daniel Goettel, who once engineered the greatest bull-movement in the history of oil and was supposed to have “cornered” the market. Charles Ball and Henry Loomis earned sixty-thousand dollars brokerage a year and died within a month of each other. Trade slackened and expired. The boys shifted to Bradford and Pittsburg and a constable sold the building to satisfy Mrs. W. H. Spain’s claim for ground-rent! The five-thousand-dollar library and the costly pictures, dust-coveredand neglected, sold for a trifle and went to South Oil City. A jollier, bigger-hearted crowd of fellows than the members of the Parker Exchange never played a practical joke or helped a poor sufferer out of “a deuce of a fix.”

The Bradford Oil-Exchange started on January first, 1883, with five-hundred members and a forty-thousand-dollar building. Five-hundred others, with Hon. David Kirk as president, organized the Producers’ Petroleum-Exchange and erected a spacious brick-block, occupying it on January second, 1884. Both exchanges whooped it up briskly, both have subsided and the buildings are stores and offices. Titusville’s handsome exchange, on the site of the American Hotel, has gone the same road. Captain Vandergrift built the Pittsburg Oil-Exchange, the finest of them all, fitting it up superbly. A bank and offices have succeeded the festive dealers in crude. From the Mining-Stock Exchange, the Miscellaneous Security Board and several more of similar types the New-York Consolidated Stock and Petroleum Exchange developed a huge concern, with twenty-four-hundred members and a lordly building—erected in 1887—on Broadway and Exchange Place. The membership was the largest in the country, with the exception of the Produce Exchange, and the business in oil at times exceeded the transactions of the Stock Exchange. Seats sold as high as three-thousand dollars. Charles G. Wilson has been president since the organization of the Petroleum and Stock Board, which absorbed the National Petroleum Exchange—L. H. Smith was its president—and in 1885 adopted the elongated name that has burdened it eleven years. Oil is not mentioned once a week, because the stocks have declined to a skeleton and the certificates represent scarcely a half-million barrels. Philadelphia had an exchange of lesser degree and a score of oil-region towns sharpened their appetite for speculation by establishing branch-concerns and bucket-shops. The almost entire disappearance of the speculative trade is not the least remarkable feature of the petroleum-development.

JOSEPH SEEP.

Since the elimination of exchanges producers generally sell their oil in the shape of credit-balances. For their convenience the Standard Oil-Company has established purchasing-agencies throughout the region. The quantity of crude to the credit of the seller on the pipe-line books is ascertained from the National-Transit office, a check is given and all the trouble the producer has is to draw his money from the bank. It is handier than a pocket in a shirt, easier than rolling off a log in a mill-pond, and the happy “victim of monopoly” goes on his way rejoicing after the manner of Philip’s converted eunuch. If he reside at a distance, be sojourning at Squedunk or in London, traveling with the Czar or showing the Prince of Wales a good time, a message to the agency will deliver his oil to Harry Lewis and the cash to his own order in a twinkling. The whole chain of purchasing-agencies is managed by Joseph Seep, whose headquarters are at Oil City. The Standard has the knack of selecting A-1 men for responsible positions—men who are not misfits, square pegs in round holes or small potatoes in the hill. Among the capable thousands who represent the great corporation none is betteradapted to his important place than the head of the purchasing-agencies. He has the tact, the experience, the knowledge of human-nature and the strength of character the position demands. For twenty-five years he has purchased crude for the company, up Oil Creek, at Oil City and down the Allegheny. You may not belong to his church or his party, you may differ from him on silver and woman-suffrage, you may even call the Standard an “octopus”—Col. J. A. Vera first did this at a meeting near St. Petersburg in 1874—and wish to turn its picture to the wall, but you like “Joe” Seep for his candor, his manliness, his admirable blending of suavity and firmness. He hails from the succulent blue-grass of Kentucky, combines Southern ease and Northern vigor, lives at Titusville and enjoys his wealth. It would strain Chicago’s convention-hall to hold his legions of friends. His heart and his purse are alike generous. He produces oil, buys oil, ships oil and “pays the freight” on three-fourths of the oil handled in Oildom. He and George Lewis and Harry Lewis—“match ’em if you can”—have bought enough oil to fill a sea on which the navies of the world might race and leave room for the Yale crew that crew too soon. Seep and the Lewises are the gilt-edged stripe of men who don’t drop banana-skins on the sidewalk to trip up a neighbor or squirm with envy because somebody else has a streak of good-luck. When Seep’s last shipment has been made, the account is closed and the Recording Angel’s ledger shows his big credit-balance, St. Peter will “throw the gates wide open,” bid him welcome and never think of springing the old gag: “Not for Joseph, not for Joe!”

Sudden shifts in the market brought queer experiences in the days of wild oil-speculation, enriching some dabblers and impoverishing others. Stories of gains and losses were printed in newspapers, repeated in Europe and exaggerated at home and abroad. A bull-clique at Bradford, acting upon “tips from the inside,” dropped four-hundred-thousand dollars in six months. An Oil-City producer cleared three-hundred-thousand one spring, loaded for a further rise and was bankrupted by the frightful collapse Cherry Grove ushered in. A Warren minister risked three-thousand dollars, the savings of his lifetime, which vanished in a style that must have taught him not to lay up treasures on earth. A Pittsburg cashier margined his own and his grandmother’s hundred-thousand dollars. The money went into the whirlpool and the old lady went to the poor-house. A young Warrenite put up five-hundred dollars to margin a block of certificates, kept doubling as the price advanced and quit fifty-thousand ahead. He looked about for a chance to invest, but the craze had seized him and he hazarded his pile in oil. Cherry Grove swept away his fortune in a day. A Bradford hotel-keeper’s first plunge netted him a hundred dollars one forenoon. He thought that beat attending bar and haunted the Producers’ Exchange persistently. He mortgaged his property in hope of calling the turn, but the sheriff raked in the pot and the poor landlord was glad to drive a beer-wagon. Such instances could be multiplied indefinitely. Hundreds of producers lost in the maelstrom all the earnings of their wells, while the small losers would be like the crowd John beheld in his vision on Patmos, “a great company whom no man can number.” Wages of drivers, pumpers, drillers, laborers and servant-girls were swallowed in the quicksands of the treacherous sea.

Of course there were many winners and many happy strokes of fortune. In 1876 Peter Swenk, of Ithaca, N. Y., purchased through a Parker broker ten-thousand barrels at two dollars and left orders to buy five-thousand moreshould the market break to one-seventy-five. Returning home, he was taken violently ill and the market suddenly fell forty cents, five cents below his margins. The day was stormy and Swenk could obtain no reports except from Oil City, where the break was eight cents greater than at Parker. The storm saved Swenk, although he did not know it for months, by crippling the wires and shutting off communication between Oil City and Parker the last hour of business. Concluding the margins were exhausted and the broker had sold the oil to save himself, Swenk went west to start anew. Weeks after his departure his Ithaca friends received urgent telegrams from the broker at Parker. They forwarded the messages, which informed him that, as the market stood, he was worth nineteen-thousand dollars and would be wise to sell. Swenk wired to close the whole matter and started for Parker. The market jumped another peg just before the order to sell arrived and Swenk received twenty-two-thousand dollars profits. He paid the broker double commission, returned home and bought a splendid farm. The faithful broker who managed this singular deal is now virtually a pauper at Bradford and a slave of rum. Last time we met he staggered up to me, his eyes bleared and his clothing in tatters, pressed my hand and said: “Gimme ten cents; I’m dying for a drink!”

A big spurt in April of 1895 temporarily revived interest in oil-speculations. Again the exchange at Oil City was thronged. Exciting scenes of former years were renewed as the price climbed ten cents a clip. It was refreshing after the long stagnation to see the pool once more stirred to its depths. From one-ten on April fourth the price strode to two-eighty on April seventeenth. Certificates were scarce and credit-balances were snapped up eagerly. A few big winnings resulted, then the reaction set in, the spasm subsided and matters resumed their customary quietude. Connected with this phenomenal episode the papers in May told this breezy tale of “Bailey’s Jag Investment:”

“C. J. Bailey, of Parkersburg, drew seventy-five-hundred dollars out of the Commercial Bank of Wheeling as the earnings of a three-hundred-dollar investment, made involuntarily and unknowingly. Bailey is a traveling salesman. A little less than a month ago he made a trip through the West-Virginia oil-fields. At Sistersville he got in with a crowd of oil-men, with the result that next day he had a big head, a very poor recollection of what had happened and was three-hundred dollars short, according to his memorandum-book. He wisely decided that the less publicity he gave his loss the better it would be and kept still. On Friday he was coming to Wheeling on the Ohio River Railroad, when a stranger approached him with:

“‘You are J. C. Bailey,I believe.’I believe.’

“‘Yes,’ replied Bailey.

“‘Well, you will find seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars to your credit in the Commercial Bank at Wheeling,’ replied the stranger. ‘I put it there day before yesterday and was about to advertise foryou.’you.’

“Bunco was the first thought of Bailey; but as the stranger did not ask for any show of money and talked all right, he asked for an explanation. It turned out that the stranger was one of the men with whom Bailey had been out in Sistersville. He was also secretary and treasurer of an oil-company, which had struck a rich well in the back-country pool two weeks before. Bailey, while irresponsible, had put three-hundred dollars into the company’s capital-stock, on the advice of his friends. Meantime the well had been drilled, coming in a gusher of three-thousand barrels a day, one-tenth of which belonged to Bailey on his three-hundred-dollar investment. Bailey came to Wheeling, went to the bank and found the money awaiting him. He drew five-thousand dollars to send to his wife. Bailey’s good fortune is not over yet, for the well is a good producer and the company holds large leases, on which several more good wells are sure to be drilled.”

What of the brokers and speculators? They are scattered like chaff. A thousand have “gone and left no sign.” President Foster, of the Oil City Exchange, an accomplished musician, traveler and orator, is a Chicagoan. John Mawhinney, John S. Rich—the fire at Rouseville’s burning-well nearly destroyed his sight—H. L. McCance, George Cornwall, Wesley Chambers, Dr. Cooper,A. D. Cotton, T. B. Porteous, Isaac Reineman, I. S. Gibson, Charles J. Fraser, W. K. Vandergrift, B. W. Vandergrift, B. F. Hulseman, Charles Haines, Michael Geary, Patrick Tiernan, “Shep” Moorhead, Melville, McCutcheon, Fullerton Parker, George Harley, Marcus Brownson and a host of other familiar figures will nevermore be seen in any earthly exchange. “Jimmy” Lowe—he was a telegrapher at first—Arthur Lewis, M. K. Bettis, George Thumm, I. M. Sowers and a dozen more drifted to Chicago. “Dick” Conn, “Sam” Blakeley, Wade Hampton, “Rod” Collins, Major Evans, Col. Preston and Charles W. Owston are residents of New York. “Tom” McLaughlin buys oil for the Standard at Lima. “Ajax” Kline is dissecting the Tennessee field for the Forest Oil-Company. “Cal” Payne is Oil-City manager of the Standard’s gas-interests. “Tom” Blackwell is in Seep’s purchasing-agency. John J. Fisher is flourishing at Pittsburg. “Charley” Goodwin holds the fort at Kane. Daniel Goettel and W. S. McMullan are running a large lumber-plant in Missouri. O. C. Sherman is a Baptist preacher and Jacob Goettel fills a Methodist pulpit. Frank Ripley and “Fin” Frisbee are heavy-weights in Duluth real-estate. C. P. Stevenson, the leading Bradford broker, dwells at his ease on a plantation in North Carolina. B. F. Blackmarr lives at Meadville and “Billy” Nicholas is a citizen of Minneapolis. Some are in California, some in Alaska, some in Florida, some in Europe and two or three in India. Go whither you may, it will be a cold day if you don’t stumble across somebody who belonged to an oil-exchange or had a cousin whose husband’s brother-in-law knew a man who was acquainted with another man who once saw a man who met an oil-broker. It is sad to think how the capital fellows who juggled certificates at Oil City, Parker and Bradford have thinned out and the pall of obliteration has been spread over the exchanges.

“So fallen! So lost! the light withdrawnWhich once they wore,The glory of their past has goneForevermore!”

“So fallen! So lost! the light withdrawn

Which once they wore,

The glory of their past has gone

Forevermore!”

FIRST STEEL OIL-TANK STRUCK BY LIGHTNING, AT TITUSVILLE, JUNE 11, 1880.

A pretty girl might as well expect to escape admiring glances as petroleum to escape a fire occasionally. “Uncle Billy” Smith’s lantern ignited the first tank at the Drake well and a long procession has followed in its smoky trail. The lantern-fiend has been a prolific cause of oil-conflagrations, boiling-over refinery-stills have not been slack in this particular, the cigarette with a fool at one end and a spark at the other has done something in the same line, but lightning is the champion tank-destroyer. The result of an electric-bolt and a tank of inflammable oil engaging in a debate may be imagined. At first tanks were covered loosely with boards or wooden roofs. The gas formed a vapor which attracted lightning and kept up a large production of fires each season. One vicious stroke cremated sixty tanks of oil at the Atlantic Refinery in 1883. In July and August of 1880, a quarter-million barrels of McKean crude went up by the lightning-route. On June eleventh, 1880, a flash collided with the firststeel-tankon which lightning had ever experimented and set the oil blazing. The tank was on a hill-side three-hundred feet from the west bank of Oil Creek, at Titusville. Several houses and the Acme Refinery, located between it and the stream, were consumed. While the burning oil flowed down the hill a sheet of solid flame covered ten acres. Bursting tanks, exploding stills and burning oils were an unpleasantpremonitionpremonitionof the red-hot hereafter prepared for the wicked. The fire raged three days with the fury of the furnace heated sevenfold to give Shadrack, Meshach and Abed-nego a roast. The Titusville Battery checked it somewhat by cannonading the tanks with solid shot, which madeholes that let the oil run into the creek. This plan was tried successfully in Butler and McKean. The old log-house that sheltered the generations of Campbells on the site of Petrolia met its fate by the firing of Taylor & Satterfield’s twenty-thousand-barrel tank on the hill above, which fell a prey to lightning. Three tanks opposite the mouth of Bear Creek, below Parker, stood together and burned together, the one singed by Jupiter’s shaft setting off its mates. The scene at night was of the grandest, multitudes gathering to watch the huge waves of flame and dense clouds of smoke. As the oil burned down—just as it would consume in a lamp—the tank-plates would collapse and the blazing crude would overflow. Thousands of barrels would pour into the Allegheny, covering the water for a mile with flame and painting a picture beside which a volcanic eruption resembled the pyrotechnics of a lucifer-match. Many tanks were burned prior to the use of close iron-roofs, which confine the gas and do not offer special inducements to “the artillery of heaven” to score a hit. Of late years such fires have been rarities. All oil in the pipe-line to which the burned tank belonged was assessed to meet the amount lost. This was known as General Average, as unwelcome in oil as General Apathy in politics, General Depression in business, General Dislike in society or General Weyler in Cuba.

George B. Harris, a pioneer refiner, died at Franklin in January of 1892, aged sixty years. A member of the firm of Sims & Co., he built the first or second refinery in Venango county, near the lower end of Franklin. He prosperedfor years, but reverses swept away his fortune and he was poor when death closed the scene.

A party of young men from New England started a refinery on Oil Creek in the sixties. Their industry, correct habits and attention to business attracted favorable notice. Mr. Trefts, of machinery fame, one day observed to a friend: “You mark my words; some day these young men will be rich and their names shall be a power in the land. I know it will be so from their industry and good habits.” This assertion was prophetic. The young man at the head of that modest firm of young men was H. H. Rogers, now president of the National-Transit Company. Speaking of his election as supervisor of streets and highways at Fair Haven, a New-York paper indulged in this facetious pleasantry regarding Mr. Rogers:

“The people of Fair Haven have done well. No man in New York or Massachusetts has had more experience with bad roads than Mr. Rogers, or has met with more success in subduing them. When he first engaged in the petroleum-business on Oil Creek the highways there were rarely navigable for anything on wheels, but were open to navigation by flat-boats most of the year. There was something in the mud of the oil-country at that time which was sure death to the capillary glands. Hairless horses and mules were in the height of fashion. When Mr. Rogers arrived on the strange scene, poling his way up to the hotel on a sawlog, he was at once chosen road-supervisor. In a neat speech, which is still extant, Mr. Rogers thanked the oil-citizens for the confidence reposed in him and then went to work. In the first place, he refined the mud of the highways, taking from it all the merchantable petroleum and converting the residue into stove-polish of an excellent quality. In the next place, he constructed pipe-lines, through which the oil was conveyed, thus keeping it out of the middle of the road, and to-day there is a boulevard along Oil Creek that is hardly surpassed by the Appian Way. Horses are again covered with hair and happiness sits smiling at every hearthstone. The people of Fair Haven have a superintendent of streets to whom they can point with pride.”

Dr. J. W. James, of Brady’s Bend, who drilled some of the first wells around Oil City and was largely interested in the Armstrong and Bradford fields, in 1858 had a plant near Freeport for extracting coal-oil from shale. At a cost of twelve cents a gallon it produced crude-petroleum, which the company refined partially and sold at a dollar to one-twenty-five. The oil obtained from the rocks by drilling and that distilled from the shale were the same chemically. Dr. James read medicine with Dr. F. J. Alter, who constructed a telegraph Morse journeyed from the east to see before perfecting his own device. Dr. Alter’s line extended only from the house about the small yard and back to his study. Full of enthusiasm over its first performance, he cried out to his student, young James: “I believe I could make this thing work a distance of six miles!” Bell’s first telephone—a cord stretched between two apple-trees in an orchard at Brantford, Canada—was equally simple and its results have been scarcely less important.

John J. Fisher bought the first thousand barrels of oil in the new exchange at Oil City, on April twenty-third, 1878. Probably the largest purchase was by George Lewis, who took from a syndicate of brokers a block of two-hundred-thousand barrels. The first offer was fifty-thousand, increasing ten-thousand until it quadrupled, with the object of having Lewis cry: “Hold! Enough!” Lewis wasn’t to be bluffed and he merely nodded at each addition to the lot until the other fellow weakened, the crowd watching the pair breathlessly. “Sam” Blakeley, the most eccentric genius in the aggregation, once bid at Parker for a million barrels. Nobody had that quantity to sell and he advanced the bid five cents above the quotations. There was not a response and he offered a million barrels five cents below the ruling price, toying with the market an hour as if it were a foot-ball. He played for big stakes, but none knew who backed him. Coming to Oil City, he reported the market for theDerrickand cut up lots of shines. One morning he looked glum, oil had tumbled and “Sam” hired an engine to whirl him to Corry. By nightfall he landed in Canada and his oil was sold to square his account in the clearing-house. An hour after his flight William Brough came up from Franklin to take the oil and carry “Sam” over the drop. In the afternoon a sudden rise set in, which would have left Blakeley twenty-thousand dollars profit had he stayed at his post! That was the time “Sam” didn’t do “the great kibosh,” as he phrased it. For years he has been hanging around New York. He was one of the boys distinguished as high-rollers and extinguished before the shuffle ended.

Telegraph-operators and messenger-boys at the oil-exchanges learned to note the movements of leading speculators and profit thereby. Some of them, with more hope of gain than fear of loss, beginning in a small way by risking a few dollars in margins, coined money and entered the ring on their own account. “Jimmy” Lowe, one of the biggest brokers at Parker and Oil City, slung lightning for the Western-Union when the Oil-City Exchange needed the services of twenty operators and scores of messenger-boys. Among the latter was “Jim” Keene, the Franklin broker. He and John Bleakley often received fifty cents or a dollar for delivering a message to “Johnnie” Steele, who stopped at the Jones House and flew high during his visits to Oil City. Steele and Seth Slocum would dash through the mud on their black chargers, dressed in the loudest style and sporting big diamonds. These halcyon times have passed away and the oil-exchanges have departed. “The glories of our mortal state are shadows.”

In January of 1894 the Producers’ and Refiners’ Oil-Company erected an iron-tank on the hill south-east of Titusville. Lightning destroyed the tank and its contents in May. The second tank was built on the spot in October and on June twelfth, 1895, lightning struck a tree beside it. The burning tree fired the gas and the tank and oil perished. The site is still vacant, the company deciding not to give the electric fluid a chance for a third strike.

George W. N. Yost, who died in New York last year, was once the largest oil-buyer and shipper in the region. He lived at Titusville and removed to Corry, where he built the Climax Mower and Reaper Works, a church, a handsome residence and blocks of dwellings. Patents of different kinds recouped losses in manufacturing. With Mr. Densmore, of Meadville, he brought out the caligraph. Yost sold to his partner and developed the Yost Typewriter, organized the American Writing-Machine Company and fitted up the shops at Bridgeport, Connecticut, used to manufacture Sharp’s rifles during the border-troubles in Kansas. Mr. Yost was a man of striking personality and unflagging energy. He became a strong spiritualist and believed a medium, to whom he submitted completely, put him in communication with his dead relatives and recorded their thoughts on his typewriter.

The men of the oil-region have ever been noted for their commercial honor. It passed into a proverb—“honor of oil.“ The spirit of the saying, “his word is as good as his bond,” has always been lived up to more closely in Oildom than in any other section of the country. The force of business-obligation ran high in the exchanges and among the early dealers in crude. Transactions involving hundreds-of-thousands of dollars occurred every day, without a written bond or a scrap of paper save a pencil-entry in a memorandum-book. Certificates were borrowed and loaned in this way and the idea of shirking a verbal contract was never thought of. The celerity with which property thuspassed from man to man was one of the striking features of business in the bustling world of petroleum. And the record is something to be proud of in these days of embezzlements, defalcations, breaches of trust and commercial deviltry generally.

The average tank-steamer carries about two-million gallons of oil in bulk across the Atlantic. In addition to this fleet of steamers, scores of sailing vessels, under charter of the Orient, France, Italy and foreign countries, load cases and barrels of refined-oil for transport to European ports. American wooden-ships are chartered sometimes to convey oil to Japan. Thus Russian competition is met through the instrumentality of pipe-lines to the coast and transportation by water to points many thousand miles away from the wells that produced the oil.

The production of crude-petroleum in the United States in 1895, according to the statistics compiled for the Geological Survey by Joseph D. Weeks, was fifty-three-million barrels, valued at fifty-eight-million dollars. For 1894 the figures were fifty-million barrels and thirty-five-million dollars respectively. All districts except West Virginia and New York shared in the increase. The total production from the striking of the Drake well in 1859 to the end of 1895 was seven-hundred-and-ten-million barrels. Five-hundred-and-seventeen-million barrels of this enormous aggregate represent the yield of the Pennsylvania and New-York oil-fields. Who says petroleum isn’t a big thing?

At Pittsburg you can easily gather a little group of men, such as Charles Lockhart and Captain Vandergrift, who recall the time when the Tarentum petroleum was termed “a mysterious grease.” They had a hand in handling it when the oil had no commercial name. They watched Samuel M. Kier’s efforts to give it a commercial name and a marketable value. They saw it run to waste at first, they remember paying a dollar a gallon for it and can tell all about Drake’s visit to Tarentum. They hold their breath when they think of the gold that changed hands in Venango county after “Uncle Billy” Smith bored the seventy-foot hole below Titusville, of the wonderful spread of operations and the dazzling progress of the commodity once despised. They noted the flow of petroleum toward Europe—how forty casks were sent to France in 1860 as a curiosity and thirty-nine-hundred in 1863 as a commercial venture. They have seen this “mysterious grease,” that used to flow into the Pennsylvania Canal, light the world from the Pyramids of Egypt to the salons of Paris, from the shores of Palestine to the Chinese Wall. They have seen the four salt-and-oil wells at Tarentum and the solitary oil-well at Titusville multiplied into a hundred-thousand holes drilled for petroleum and a production almost beyond calculation. Do the gentlemen composing this little group occupy a position dramatic in the marvelous events they review? Is petroleum freighted with interest and a touch of romance at every step of its passage from the well to the lamp?

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