“The gourd came up in a night and perished in a night.”—_Jonah, iv:10._ “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has.”—_Shakespeare._ “All things rise to fall and flourish to decay.”—_Sallust._ “A lively place in days of yore, but something ails it now.”—_Wordsworth._ “Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power?”—_Longfellow._ “Wealth flowed from wood and stream and soil, The rock poured forth its amber oil, And, lo! a magic city rose.”—_Marjorie Meade._ “It went up like a rocket and came down like a stick.”—_Thomas Paine._ “Yet golde all is not that doth golden seeme.”—_Spenser._ “Can it be that this is all remains of life.”—_Bryon._ “What it is to eat forbidden fruit and find it a turnip!”—_Flora Annie Steel._ “Old Rhinestein’s walls are crumbled now.”—_Birch Arnold._ “For this will never hold water again.”—_J. Fenimore Cooper._ “Of the vanished drama no image was there left.”—_William Morris._ ---------- Pithole, “the magic city,” had little in its antecedents to betoken the meteoric rise and fall of the most remarkable oil-town that ever “went up like a rocket and came down like a stick.” The unpoetic name of Pithole Creek was applied to the stream which flows through Allegheny township and bounds Cornplanter for several miles on the east. It empties into the Allegheny River eight miles above Oil City and was first mentioned by Rev. Alfred Brunson, an itinerant Methodist minister, in his “Western Pioneer” in 1819. Upheavals of rock left a series of deep pits or chasms on the hills near the mouth of the stream. From the largest of these holes a current of warm air repels leaves or pieces of paper. Snow melts around the cavity, which is of unknown depth, and the air is a mephitic vapor or gas. A story is told of three hunters who, finding the snow melted on a midwinter day, determined to investigate. One of them swore it was an entrance to the infernal regions and that he intended to warm himself. He sat on the edge of the hole, dangled his feet over the side, thanked the devil for the opportune heat, inhaled the gas and tumbled back insensible. His companions dragged him away and the investigation ended summarily. Seven miles up the creek, in the northeast corner of Cornplanter, Rev. Walter Holmden was a pioneer-settler. Choosing a tract of two-hundred acres, he built a log-house on the west bank of the creek, cleared a few acres, struggled with poverty and died in 1840. Mr. Holmden was a fervent Baptist preacher. Thomas Holmden occupied the farm after the good old man’s decease, with the Copelands and Blackmers and James Rooker as neighbors. Developments had covered the farms from the Drake well to Oil City. Operators ventured up the ravines, ascended the hills and began to take chances miles from either side of Oil Creek. Successful wells on the Allegheny River broadened opinions regarding the possibilities of petroleum.