Edwin L. Drake, who is linked inseparably with the first oil-well in Pennsylvania, was born on March eleventh, 1819, at Greenville, Greene county, New York. His father, a farmer, moved to Vermont in 1825. At eighteen Edwin left home to begin the struggle with the world. He was night-clerk of a boat running between Buffalo and Detroit, worked one year on a farm in the Wolverine state, clerked two years in a Michigan hotel, returned east and clerked in a dry-goods store at New Haven, clerked and married in New York, removed to Massachusetts, was express-agent on the Boston & Albany railroad and resigned in 1849 to become conductor on the New-York & New-Haven. His younger brother died in the west and his wife at New Haven, in 1854, leaving one child. While boarding at a hotel in New Haven he met James M. Townsend, who persuaded him to draw his savings of two-hundred dollars from the bank and buy stock of the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil-Company, his first connection with the business that was to make him famous. Early in 1857 he married Miss Laura Dow, sickness in the summer compelled him to cease punching tickets and his memorable visit to Titusville followed in December. In 1860 he was elected justice-of-the-peace, an office worth twenty-five-hundred dollars that year, because of the enormous number of property-transfers to prepare and acknowledge. Buying oil on commission for Shefflin Brothers, New York, swelled his income to five-thousand dollars for a year or two. He also bought twenty-five acres of land from Jonathan Watson, east of Martin street and through the center of which Drake street now runs, for two-thousand dollars. Unable to meet the mortgage given for part of the payment, he sold the block in 1863 to Dr. A. D. Atkinson for twelve-thousand dollars. Forty times this sum would not have bought it in 1867! With the profits of this transaction and his savings for five years, in all about sixteen-thousand dollars, in the summer of 1863 Colonel Drake left the oil-regions forever.