Sufficient oil to pay for an engine was soon pumped. Steam-power increased the yield to seventy barrels! Franklin became the Mecca of speculators, traders, dealers and monied men. Frederic Prentice, a leader in aggressive enterprises, offered forty-thousand dollars for the well and lot. Evans rejected the bid and kept the well, which declined to ten or twelve barrels within six months. The price of oil shrank like a flannel-shirt, but the lucky disciple of Vulcan realized a nice competence. He enjoyed his good fortune some years before journeying to “that bourne from which no traveler e’er returns.” Mrs. Evans long survived, dying at eighty-six. The son removed to Kansas, three daughters died and one resides at Franklin. The old well experienced its complement of fluctuations. Mosely & Co., of Philadelphia, leased it. It stood idle, the engine was taken away, the rig tumbled and the hole filled up partially with dirt and wreckage. Prices spurted and the well was hitched to a pumping-rig operating others around it. Captain S. A. Hull ran a group of the wells on the flats and a dozen three miles down the Allegheny. He was a man of generous impulses, finely educated and exceedingly companionable. His death, in 1893, resulted in dismantling most of these wells, hardly a vestige remaining to tell that the Evans and its neighbors ever existed. James Evans was not “left blooming alone” in the search for oily worlds to conquer. Companies were organized while he was yanking the tools in the well that “set ’em crazy.” The first of these—The Franklin Oil-and-Mining-Company—started work on October fifth, twenty rods below Evans, finding oil at two-hundred-and-forty-one feet on January twelfth, 1860. The well pumped about one-half as much as the Evans for several months, but did not die of old age. The forty-two shares of stock advanced ten-fold in one week, selling at a thousand dollars each. Three or four wells were put down, the company dissolving and members operating on their own hook. It was strongly officered, with Arnold Plumer as president; J. P. Hoover, vice-president; Aaron W. Raymond, secretary; James Bleakley, Robert Lamberton, R. A. Brashear, J. L. Hanna and Thomas Hoge, executive committee. Mr. Plumer was a dominant factor in Democratic politics, largely instrumental in the nomination of James Buchanan for President, twice a member of Congress, twice State-Treasurer, Canal-Commissioner and founder of the First-National Bank. At his death, in 1869, he devised his family an estate that appraised several million dollars, making it the largest in Venango county. Judge Lamberton opened the first bank in the oil-regions, owned hundreds of houses and in 1885 bequeathed each of his eight children a handsome fortune. Colonel Bleakley rose by his own exertions, keen foresight and skillful management. He invested in productive realty, drilled scores of wells around Franklin, built iron-tanks and