Five miles above, Oil Creek flows into the Allegheny, and here is Oil City, the petroleum headquarters. It has had a varying history, being once almost destroyed by flood and twice by fire, but maintains its supremacy and is a complete oil town--the air filled with petroleum odors, and the lower streets saturated with the fluid. On the Allegheny, nine miles from Oil City, is Oleopolis, and a short distance inland is Pithole City, which was one of the famous oil towns whose rise and decline were so phenomenal. A few farmers here tried to get a scanty subsistence from the rocky and almost barren soil, where, on a hill, there was a fissure two to four feet wide, called the "pithole," from which came out at intervals hot air and bad smells. This was on the Holmden farm, which had been nominally valued at five dollars an acre. Somebody thought he detected the smell of oil among the odors coming up, and a well was bored. It struck oil in the winter of 1864-65, and was the greatest strike made down to that time--the United States Well yielding seven thousand barrels daily. Multitudes flocked thither, and in six months Pithole City arose in the wilderness with fifteen thousand inhabitants, two theatres, an opera house, a daily newspaper, and seventy-two hotels of various degrees. Numerous wells were sunk, and the oil sold at $5 to $8 per barrel, being readily sent to the seaboard. The Holmden farm was soon sold for $4,000,000. There were some amazing speculative trades made. The story is told of a well striking oil and a speculative bystander at once buying a three-fourths interest in it for $18,000, agreeing to pay the money next day. Turning away from the seller, he met a man seeking such an investment, and promptly resold his interest for $75,000, receiving immediate payment. The yield of this region was so prolific that railroads and pipe lines were soon constructed to carry the oil away. Pithole had its great boom in the autumn of 1866, wells being bored in every direction, and real estate fetching enormous prices. One old fellow who had a few acres of arid land in the centre of the excitement sold his farm and hovel for $800,000, paid him on the spot in $1000 notes; and then he sorrowfully bemoaned, as he took a last look at the hovel he had occupied all his life, "Now I haint got any home." The rise of this wonderful town was rapid, and its downfall came all too soon. The oil supply became exhausted, the speculators left, the inhabitants dwindled in number, and by 1870 Pithole had reverted almost to its original condition. The chief hotel, which had cost $31,000 to build, was afterwards sold for $100, and the population had declined in 1873 to nine families.