Sketches in Crude-oil: Some accidents and incidents of the petroleum development in all parts of the globeMcLaurin, John J. (John James)
History
Sketches in Crude-oil: Some accidents and incidents of the petroleum development in all parts of the globe
McLaurin, John J. (John James)
Petroleum -- History; Petroleum industry and trade -- North America -- History
South of the Story and Tarr farms, on both sides of Oil Creek, were John
Blood’s four-hundred-and-forty acres. The owner lived in an unpainted,
weatherbeaten frame house. On five acres of the flats the Ocean
Petroleum-Company had twelve flowing wells in 1861. The Maple-Tree
Company’s burning well spouted twenty-five-hundred barrels for several
months, declined to three-hundred in a year and was destroyed by fire in
October of 1862. The flames devastated twenty acres, consuming ten wells
and a hundred tanks of oil, the loss aggregating a million dollars. A
sheet of fire, terribly grand and up to that date the most extensive and
destructive in Oildom, wrapped the flats and the stream. Blood Well No.
1, flowing a thousand barrels, Blood No. 2, flowing six hundred, and
five other gushers never yielded after the conflagration, prior to which
the farm was producing more oil than the balance of the region. Brewer &
Watson, Ballard & Trax, Edward Filkins, Henry Collins, Reuben Painter,
James Burrows and J. H. Duncan were pioneer operators on the tract.
Blood sold in 1863 for five-hundred-and-sixty-thousand dollars and
removed to New York. Buying a brownstone residence on Fifth avenue, he
splurged around Gotham two or three years, quit the city for the country
and died long since. The Blood farm was notably prolific, but its glory
has departed. Stripped bare of derricks, houses, wells and tanks, naught
is left save the rugged hills and sandy banks. “It is no matter, the cat
will mew, the dog will have his day.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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