Sketches in Crude-oil: Some accidents and incidents of the petroleum development in all parts of the globeMcLaurin, John J. (John James)
History
Sketches in Crude-oil: Some accidents and incidents of the petroleum development in all parts of the globe
McLaurin, John J. (John James)
Petroleum -- History; Petroleum industry and trade -- North America -- History
frame-structures to hasten the advent of costly brick-blocks. Ten
churches, schools, five banks, stores, hotels, three newspapers,
street-cars, miles of residences and fifteen-thousand of the liveliest
people on earth attested the permanency of Bradford’s boom. Narrow-gauge
railroads circled the hills, traversed spider-web trestles and brought
tribute to the city from the outlying districts. The area of
oil-territory seemed interminable. It reached in every direction, until
from sixteen-thousand mouths seventy-five thousand acres poured their
liquid treasure. The daily production waltzed to one-hundred-thousand
barrels! Iron-tanks were built by the thousand to store the surplus
crude. Two, three or four-thousand-barrel gushers were lacking, but
wells that yielded twenty-five to two-hundred littered the slopes and
valleys. The field was a marvel, a phenomenon, a revelation. Bradford
passed the mushroom-stage safely and was not snuffed out when
developments receded and the floaters wandered south in quest of fresh
excitement. To-day it is a thriving railroad and manufacturing centre,
the home of ten-thousand intelligent, independent, go-ahead citizens,
proud of its past, pleased with its present and confident of its future.
To trace operations minutely would be an endless task. Crocker sold a
half-interest in his well and drilled on an adjacent farm. Gillespie,
Buchanan & Kelly came from Fagundas in 1874 and sank the two Fagundas
wells—twenty and twenty-five barrels—a half-mile west of Crocker, in the
fall and winter. Butts No. 1, a short distance north, actually flowed
sixty barrels in November of 1874. Jackson & Walker’s No. 1, on the
Kennedy farm, north edge of town, on July seventeenth, 1875, flowed
twenty barrels at eleven-hundred feet. The dark, pebbly sand, the best
tapped in McKean up to that date, encouraged the belief of better strata
down the Tuna. On December first, two months after Crocker’s strike, the
yield of the Bradford district was two-hundred-and-ten barrels. The
Crocker was doing fifty, the Olmsted twenty-five, the Butts fifteen, the
Jackson & Walker twenty and all others from one to six apiece. The oil,
dark-colored and forty-five gravity, was loaded on Erie cars direct from
the wells, most of which were beside the tracks. The Union Company
finished the first pipe-line and pumped oil to Olean the last week of
November. Prentice, Barbour & Co. were laying a line through the
district and 1875 closed with everything ripe for the millenium these
glimmerings foreshadowed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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