Five townships six miles square—Independence, Willing, Alma, Bolivar and Genesee, with Andover, Wellsville, Scio, Wirt and Clarksville north—form the southern border of Allegany county, New York. The first well bored for oil in the county—the Honeyoe—was the Wellsville & Alma Oil Company’s duster in Independence township, drilled eighteen-hundred feet in September, 1877. Gas at five-hundred feet caught fire and burned the rig, and signs of oil were found at one-thousand feet. The second was O. P. Taylor’s Pikeville well, Alma township, finished in November, 1878. Taylor, the father of the Allegany field, decided to try north of Alma, and in July of 1879 completed the Triangle No. 1, in Scio township, the first in Allegany to produce oil. It originated the Wellsville excitement and first diverted public attention from Bradford. Triangle No. 2, drilled early in 1880, pumped twelve barrels a day. S. S. Longabaugh, of Duke Centre, sank a dry-hole, the second well in Scio, three miles north-east of Triangle No. 1. Operations followed rapidly. Richburg No. 1, Wirt township, in which Taylor enlisted three associates, responded at a sixty barrel gait in May of 1881 to a huge charge of glycerine. Samuel Boyle, who had struck the first big well at Sawyer City, completed the second well at Richburg in June, manipulated it as a “mystery” and torpedoed it on July thirteenth. It flowed three-hundred barrels of blue-black oil, forty-two gravity, from fifty feet of porous sand and slate. Taylor’s exertions and perseverance showed indomitable will, bravery and pluck. He was a Virginian by birth, a Confederate soldier and a cigar-manufacturer at Wellsville. It is related that while drilling his first Triangle well the tools needed repairs and he had not money to send them to Bradford. His Wellsville acquaintances seemed amazingly “short” when he attempted a loan. His wife had sold her watch to procure food and she gave him the cash. The tools were fixed, the well was completed and it started Taylor on the road to the fortune he and his helpmeet richly earned. The pioneer died in the fall of 1883. The record of his adventures, trials and tribulations in opening a new oil-district would fill a volume. He was prepared for the message: “Child of Earth, thy labors and sorrows are done.”