Cherry Run, once the ripest cherry in the orchard, had a satisfactory run. A spice of romance flavored its actual realities. Not two miles up the stream William Reed, in 1863, drilled a dry-hole six-hundred feet deep. Two miles farther, in the vicinity of Plumer, a test well was sunk seven-hundred feet, with no better result. Wells near the mouth of the ravine produced very lightly. Fifty-thousand dollars would have been an extreme price for all the land from Rouseville to Plumer, the tasteful village Henry McCalmont named in honor of Arnold Plumer. In May of 1864 Taylor & Rockwell opened a fresh vein on the run. At two-hundred feet their well threw oil above the derrick and flowed sixty barrels a day regularly. Operators reversed their opinion of the territory. To the surprise of his acquaintances, who deemed him demented, Reed started another well four rods below his failure of the previous year. It was on the right bank of the run, on a five-acre patch bought from John Rynd in 1861 by Thomas Duff, who sold two acres to Robert Criswell. Reed was not over-stocked with cash and Criswell joined forces with him to sink the second well. I. N. Frazer took one-third interest. At the proper depth the outlook was gloomy. The sand appeared good, but days of pumping failed to bring oil. On July eighteenth, 1864, the well commenced flowing three-hundred barrels a day, holding out at this rate for months. Criswell realized thirty-thousand dollars from his share of the oil and then sold his one-fourth interest in the land and well for two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand to the Mingo Oil-Company. He operated in the Butler field, lived at Monterey, removed to Ohio and died near Cincinnati. One son, David S., a well-known producer, resides at Oil City; another, Robert W., is on the editorial staff of a New-York daily. Frazer sold for one-hundred-thousand dollars and next loomed up as “the discoverer of Pithole.” Reed sold to Bishop & Bissell for two-hundred-thousand dollars, after pocketing seventy-five-thousand from oil. Coming to Venango county with Frederic Prentice in 1859, he drilled wells by contract, sometimes “a solid Muldoon” and sometimes “a broken Reed.” He returned east—his birthplace—with the proceeds of the world-famed well bearing his name. An idea haunted him that Captain Kidd’s treasure was buried at a certain part of the Atlantic coast. He boarded at a house on the shore and hunted land and sea for the hidden deposit. He would dig in the sand, sail out some distance and peer into the water. One day he went off in his skiff, a storm arose, the boat drifted away and that was the last ever seen of William Reed. He was a liberal supporter of the United-Presbyterian church and his nearest relatives live in the vicinity of Pittsburg.