The Bradford Oil-Company—J. T. Jones, Wesley Chambers, L. G. Peck and L. F. Freeman were the principal stockholders—owned a good share of the land on which Greater Bradford was built and ten-thousand acres in the northern field. The company drilled three-hundred wells in McKean and Allegany, realized fifty-thousand dollars from city-lots and its stock rose to two-thousand dollars a share. In 1881 Captain Jones bought out his copartners. The Enterprise Transit-Company, managed by John Brown, achieved reputation and currency. The McCalmont Oil-Company—organized during the Bullion phantom by David Kirk, I. E. Dean, Tack Brothers and F. A. Dilworth—humped itself in the middle and northern fields, sometimes paying three-hundred-thousand dollars a year in dividends. Kirk & Dilworth founded Great Belt City, in Butler county, cutting up a farm and selling hundreds of lots. “Farmer” Dean, manager of the company, operated in the lower fields, lived two years at Richburg, toured the country to preach the gospel according to the Greenbackers and won laurels on the rostrum. Frank Tack—frank and trustworthy—was vice-president of the New-York Oil-Exchange and his brother is dead. The Emery Oil-Company, the Quintuple, Mitchell & Jones, Whitney & Wheeler, Melvin and Fuller, George H. Vanvleck, George V. Forman, John L. McKinney & Co., Isaac Willets and Peter T. Kennedy were shining lights in the McKean-Allegany firmament. Kennedy owned the saw-mill when Bradford was a lumber camp and his estate—he died at fifty—inventoried eleven-hundred-thousand dollars. Hundreds of small operators left Bradford happy as men should be with as much money as their wives could spend; other hundreds dumped their well-earnings into the insatiable maw of speculation. [Illustration: COL. JOHN J. CARTER.] The Bradford field was young when Col. John J. Carter, of Titusville, paid sixty-thousand dollars for the Whipple farm, on Kendall Creek. Friends shook their heads over the purchase, up to that time the largest by a private individual in the district, but the farm produced fifteen-hundred-thousand barrels of oil and demonstrated the wisdom of the deed. Other properties were developed by this indefatigable worker, until his production was among the largest in the northern region and he could have sold at a price to number him with the millionaires. Unanimously chosen president of the Bradford, Bordell & Kinzua Railroad-Company, he completed the line in ninety days from the issue of the charter and in eighteen months returned the stockholders eighty per cent. in dividends. President Carter’s ability in handling the property saved it to its owners, while every other narrow-gauge in the system fell into the clutches of receivers or sold as junk to meet court-charges for costly litigation.