Comrades in business and good-fellowship, William Phillips and John Vanausdall removed to South Oil-City, lived neighbors and died twenty years ago. They resembled each other in appearance and temper, in charitable impulse and kindness to the poor. Phillips drilled dozens of wells—none of them dry—aided Oil-City enterprises and was a member of the shipping firm of Munhall & Co. until its dissolution in 1876. He was the first man to ship oil by steamer, the Venango taking the first load to Pittsburg, and the first to run crude in bulk down the creek. One son, John C. Phillips, and a married daughter live at Oil City and two sons at Freeport. [Illustration: HEMAN JANES.] Heman Janes, of Erie, the first purchaser of the Tarr farm, from 1850 to 1861 shipped large quantities of lumber to the eastern market. Passing through Canada in 1858, he heard oil was obtained from gum-beds in Lambton county, south of Lake Huron, and visited the place. John Williams was dipping five barrels a day from a hole ten feet square and twenty feet deep. The best gum-beds spread over two-hundred acres of timbered land, which Mr. Janes bought at nine dollars an acre, the owner selling because “the stinking oil smelled five miles off.” Leasing four-hundred acres more, in 1860 he sold a half-interest in both tracts for fifteen-thousand dollars and retired from lumbering to devote his attention to oil. Large wells on his Canadian lands enabled him to sell the second half of the property in 1865 for fifty-five-thousand dollars. In February, 1861, he secured a thirty-day option on the J. Buchanan farm, the site of Rouseville, and tendered the price at the stipulated time, but the transaction fell through. In March of that year he went to West Virginia and leased one-thousand acres on the Kanawha River, including the famous “Burning Spring.” U. E. Everett & Co. agreed to pay fifty-thousand dollars for one-half interest in the property, at Parkersburg, on April twelfth. All parties met, a certified check was laid on the table and Attorney J. B. Blair started to draw the papers. At that moment a boy ran past, shouting: “Fort Sumpter’s fired on!” The gentlemen hurried out to learn the particulars. “The cat came back,” but Everett didn’t. A message told him to “hold off,” and he is holding off still. Janes stayed as long as a Northerner dared and was thankful to sell the batch of leases for seventy-five-hundred dollars. In 1862 he sued the owners of the Phillips well for his royalty _in barrels_. They refused to furnish the barrels, which were scarce and expensive, and the well was shut down for months pending the litigation. The suit was for one-hundred-and-twelve-thousand dollars, up to that time the largest amount ever involved in a case before the Venango court. Edwin M. Stanton, soon to be known as the illustrious War-Secretary, was one of the attorneys engaged by the plaintiff, for a fee of twenty-five-thousand dollars. A compromise was arranged for half the oil.