Nervy men invaded the eastern portion of Cornplanter, picking up lands along Pithole Creek and its tributaries. I. N. Frazer, fresh from his triumph on Cherry Run as joint-owner of the Reed well, desired fresh laurels. He organized the United-States Oil-Company, leased part of the Holmden farm for twenty years and started a well in the fall of 1864. The primitive derrick was reared in the woods below the Holmden home. At six-hundred feet the “sixth sand”—generally called that at Pithole—was punctured. Ten feet farther the tools proceeded, the drillers watching intently for signs of oil. On January seventh, 1865, the torrent broke loose, the well flowing six-hundred-and-fifty barrels a day and ceasing finally on November tenth. A picture of the well, showing Frazer with his back to the tree beside his horse and a group of visitors standing around, was secured in May. Kilgore & Keenan’s Twin wells, good for eight-hundred barrels, were finished on January seventeenth and nineteenth. The unfathomable mud and disastrous floods of that memorable season retarded the hegira from other sections, only to intensify the excitement when it found vent. Duncan & Prather bought Holmden’s land for twenty-five-thousand dollars and divided the flats and slopes into half-acre leases. The first of May witnessed a small clearing in the forest, with three oil-wells, one drilling-well and three houses as its sole evidences of human handiwork. [Illustration: FRAZER WELL, ON HOLMDEN FARM, PITHOLE, IN MAY, 1865.] Ninety days later the world heard with unfeigned surprise of a “city” of sixteen-thousand inhabitants, possessing most of the conveniences and luxuries of the largest and oldest communities! Capitalists eager to invest their greenbacks thronged to the scene. Labor and produce commanded extravagant figures, every farm for miles was leased or bought at fabulous rates, money circulated like the measles and for weeks the furore surpassed the frantic ebullitions of Wall Street on Black Friday! New strikes perpetually inflated the mania. Speculators wandered far and wide in quest of the subterranean wealth that promised to outrival the golden measures of California or the silver-lodes of Nevada. The value of oil-lands was reckoned by millions. Small interests in single wells brought hundreds-of-thousands of dollars. New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago measured purses in the insane strife for territory. Hosts of adventurers sought the new Oil-Dorado and the stocks of countless “petroleum-companies” were scattered broadcast over Europe and America. An ambitious operator sold _seventeen_-sixteenths in one well and shares in leases were purchased ravenously. A half-acre lease on the Holmden farm realized bonuses of twenty-four-thousand dollars before a well was drilled on the property and the swarm of dealers resembled the plague of locusts in Egypt in number and persistence!