The renowned “spring” which may have supplied these remarkable vats was located in the middle of Oil Creek, on the McClintock farm, three miles above Oil City and a short distance below Rouseville. Oil would escape from the rocks and gravel beneath the creek, appearing like air-bubbles until it reached the surface and spread a thin film reflecting all the colors of the rainbow. From shallow holes, dug and walled sometimes in the bed of the stream, the oil was skimmed and husbanded jealously. The demand was limited and the enterprise to meet it was correspondingly modest. Nathanael Cary, the first tailor in Franklin and owner of the tract adjoining the McClintock, peddled it about the townships early in the century, when the population was sparse and every good housewife laid by a bottle of “Seneca Oil” in case of accident or sickness. Cary would sling two jars or kegs across a faithful horse, belonging to the class of Don Quixote’s “Rosinante” and too sedate to scare at anything short of a knickerbockered feminine astride a rubber-tired wheel. Mounting this willing steed, which transported him steadily as “Jess” carried the self-denying physician of “Beside the Bonnie Brier-Bush.” the tailor-peddler went his rounds at irregular intervals. Occasionally he took a ten-gallon cargo to Pittsburg, riding with it eighty miles on horseback and trading the oil for cloth and groceries. His memory should be cherished as the first “shipper” of petroleum to “the Smoky City,” then a mere cluster of log and frame buildings in a patch of cleared ground surrounding Fort Pitt. “Things are different now.” The Augusts, a family living in Cherrytree township and remembered only by a handful of old residents, followed Cary’s example. Their stock was procured from springs farther up Oil Creek, especially one near Titusville, which achieved immortality as the real source of the petroleum-development that has astounded the civilized world. They sold the oil for “a quarter-dollar a gill” to the inhabitants of neighboring townships. The consumption was extremely moderate, a pint usually sufficing a household for a twelvemonth. Nature’s own remedy, it was absolutely pure and unadulterated, a panacea for “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” and positively refused to mix with water. If milk and water were equally unsocial, would not many a dispenser of the lacteal fluid train with Othello and “find his occupation gone?” Don’t “read the answer in the stars;” let the overworked pumps in thousands of barnyards reply!