Thomas Moran built the Moran House—it still lingers—in 1845 and died in 1857. Dr. John Nevins arrived in 1850 and in the fall of 1852 John P. Hopewell started a general store. Hiram Gordon opened the “Red Lion Inn,” Samuel Thomas shod horses and three or four families occupied small habitations. And this was the place, when 1860 dawned, that was to become the petroleum-metropolis and be known wherever men have heard a word of “English as she is spoke.” Cornplanter was the handle of the humble settlement, towards which a stampede began with the first glimmer of spring. To trace the uprising of dwellings, stores, wharves and boarding-houses would be as difficult as perpetual motion. People huddled in shanties and lived on barges moored to the bank. Derricks peered up behind the houses, thronged the marshy flats, congregated on the slopes, climbed the precipitous bluffs and established a foothold on every ledge of rock. Pumping-wells and flowing-wells scented the atmosphere with gas and the smell of crude. Smoke from hundreds of engine-houses, black, sooty and defiling, discolored the grass and foliage. Mud was everywhere, deep, unlimited, universal—yellow mud from the newer territory—dark, repulsive, oily mud around the wells—sticky, tricky, spattering mud on the streets and in the yards. J. B. Reynolds, of Clarion county, and Calvin and William J. McComb, of Pittsburg, opened the first store under the new order of things in March of 1860. T. H. and William M. Williams joined the firm. They withdrew to open the Pittsburg store next door. Robson’s hardware-store was farther up the main street, on the east side, which ended abruptly at Cottage Hill. William P. Baillee—he lives in Detroit—and William Janes built the first refinery, on the same street, in 1861, a year of unexampled activity. The plant, which attracted people from all parts of the country—Mr. Baillee called it a “pocket-still”—was enlarged into a refinery of five stills, with an output of two-hundred barrels of refined oil every twenty-four hours. Fire destroyed it and the firm built another on the flats near by. On the west side, at the foot of a steep cliff, Dr. S. S. Christy opened a drug-store. Houses, shops, offices, hotels and saloons hung against the side of the hill or sat loosely on heaps of earth by the creek and river. One evening a half-dozen congenial spirits met in Williams & Brother’s store. J. B. Reynolds, afterwards a banker, who died several years since, thought Cornplanter ought to be discarded and a new name given the growing town. He suggested one which was heartily approved. Liquid refreshments were ordered and the infant was appropriately baptized OIL CITY. [Illustration: MAIN STREET, EAST SIDE OF OIL CREEK, OIL CITY, IN 1861.]