Over the hills to the interior of the townships developments spread. Bredinsburg, Milton and Tarkiln loomed up in Cranberry, where Taylor & Torrey, S. P. McCalmont, Jacob Sheasley, B. W. Bredin and E. W. Echols have sugar-plums. In Sandycreek, between Franklin and Foster, Angell & Prentice brought Bully Hill and Mount Hope to the front. The biggest well in the package was a two-hundred barreler on Mount Hope, which created a mount of hopes that were not fully realized. George V. Forman counted out one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars for the Mount Hope corner. The territory lasted well and averaged fairly. Bully Hill merited its somewhat slangy title. Dr. C. D. Galbraith, George R. Sheasley and Mattern & Son are among its present operators. Angell and Prentice parted company, each to engage in opening up the Butler region. Prentice, Crawford, Barbour & Co. did not let the grass grow under their feet. They “knew a good thing at sight” and pumped tens-of-thousands of barrels of oil from the country south of Franklin. The firm was notable in the seventies. Considerable drilling was done at Polk, where the state is providing a half-million-dollar Home for Feeble-Minded Children, and in the latitude of Utica, with about enough oil to be an aggravation. The Shippen wells, a mile north of the county poor-house, have produced for thirty years. West of them, on the Russell farm, the Twin wells, joined as tightly as the derricks could be placed, pumped for years. This was the verge of productive territory, test wells on the lands of William Sanders, William Bean, A. Reynolds, John McKenzie, Alexander Frazier and W. Booth, clear to Cooperstown, finding a trifle of sand and scarcely a vestige of oil. The Raymonds, S. Ramage, John J. Doyle and Daniel Grimm had a very tidy offshoot at Raymilton. On this wise lubricating and second-sand oils were revealed for the benefit of mankind generally. The fly in the ointment was the clerical crank who wrote to President Lincoln to demand that the producing of heavy-oil be stopped peremptorily, as it had been stored in the ground to grease the axletree of the earth in its diurnal revolution! This communication reminded Lincoln of a “little story,” which he fired at the fellow with such effect that the candidate for a strait-jacket was perpetually squelched. [Illustration: ANGELL & PRENTICE’S WELLS BELOW FRANKLIN IN 1873.] [Illustration: JOHN P. CRAWFORD.]