Bonta & Bates did not linger for “two blades of grass to grow where one grew before.” Within two months they disposed of ninety leases for four-hundred-thousand dollars and half the oil! They spent eighty-thousand on the Bonta House, a sumptuous hostlery. Duncan & Prather leased building-lots at a yearly rental of one-hundred to one-thousand dollars. First, Second and Holmden streets bristled with activity. The Danforth House stood on a lot subleased for fourteen-thousand dollars bonus. Sixty hotels could not accommodate the influx of guests. Beds, sofas and chairs were luxuries for the few. “First come, first served,” was the rule. The many had to seek the shaving-pile, the hay-cock or the tender side of a plank. Some mingled promiscuously in “field-beds”—rows of “shake-downs” on attic floors. Besides the Bonta and Danforth, the United States, Chase, Tremont, Buckley, Lincoln, Sherman, St. James, American, Northeast, Seneca, Metropolitan, Pomeroy and fifty hotels of minor note flourished. If palaces of sin, gorgeous bar-rooms, business-houses and places of amusement abounded, churches and schools marked the moral sentiment. Fire wiped out the Tremont and adjoining houses in February of 1866. Eighty buildings went up in smoke on May first and June thirteenth. Thirty wells and twenty-thousand barrels of oil went the same road in August. The best buildings were torn down, to bloom at Pleasantville or Oil City. The disappearance of Pithole astonished the world no less than its marvelous growth. The Danforth House sold for sixteen dollars, to make firewood! The railroads were abandoned and in 1876 only six voters remained. A ruined tenement, a deserted church and traces of streets alone survive. Troy or Nineveh is not more desolate.