Oil mill

“ Bulk-boats, leaky barrels and long hauls through fathomless mud are superseded by pipe-lines, which pump oil from the wells to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland and Chicago. The rickety stills and dangerous devices of former times have yielded to the splendid refineries that utilize every vestige of crude and furnish two-hundred merchantable commodities. For much of this important advance in tools, appliances and machinery the great Oil-Well Supply-Company is directly responsible. From small beginnings it has grown to dazzling proportions. ”

“ It is the only concern on earth with the facilities and capacity to manufacture everything needed to drill and operate oil-wells and artesian-wells and equip refineries. Its nine enormous plants at convenient points employ thousands of skilled workmen and acres of the latest machinery. They turn out every conceivable requisite in steel, iron, brass or wood, from engines and complete rigs to the smallest fittings. John Eaton, the founder and president of the company, may fairly claim to be the father of the well-supply trade. ”

“ Generally speaking, about one-third of the oil actually present in the rocks can be pumped before the well becomes uneconomical to operate. This is called primary production. Oil operators have learned that by pumping water or gas down some wells into the oil-bearing formation, another third of the oil may be forced out through neighboring wells. This is called secondary production. Experiments that use steam or that burn some of the oil underground in an oil-bearing formation are attempts to recover the remaining third. ”

“ A short stop at Miller Farm, a whiff of refinery-smells and in five minutes Shaffer is reached. The board-station is on the right hand, landings on the left form a semi-circle hundreds of feet in length, freight-cars jam the double track and warehouses dot the bank. The flat-about thirty rods wide-contains the mushroom-town, bristling with the undiluted essence of petroleum-activity. Three-hundred teamsters are unloading barrels of oil from wagons dragged by patient, abused horses and mules through miles of greasy, clayey mud. Everything reeks with oil. ”

“ Rigs multiplied like rabbits in Australia. Train-loads of lively delegates from every nook and cranny of Oildom crowded the streets, overran the hotels and taxed the commissary of the village to the utmost. Town-lots sold at New-York prices and buildings spread into the fields. At B. C. Mitchell’s Bradford House, headquarters of the oil-fraternity, operators and land-holders met and drillers “off tour” solaced their craving for “the good things of this life” playing billiards and practising at the hotel-bar. ”

“ Probable changes in practice that may be expected to affect the petroleum industry within the next ten years include an increased dependence by oil producers on geologic investigations in advance of drilling, the development of methods for deeper drilling than is now practicable, and the more efficient handling of individual wells and of entire properties, with a view to the ultimate recovery, at minimum cost, of a higher percentage of the oil originally present. ”

“ And so the early operators on Oil Creek made the oil-development “a foot long” and it “growed the rest.” The tiny seed is a vigorous plant, the puling babe a lusty giant. Amid lights and shadows, clouds and sunshine, successes and failures, struggles and triumphs, starless nights and radiant days, petroleum has moved ahead steadily. Growth, “creation by law,” is ever going on in the healthy plant, the tree, the animal, the mind, the universe. We must go forward if the acorn is to become an oak, the infant a mature man, the feeble industry a sturdy development. ”

“ And now what resources have we for our industrial economy? We have some of the world's biggest iron deposits and abundant coal and manganese to provide the raw materials for the basic steel industry rightly called the mother of 101 other industries. To complement this, it is definitely known that the bosom of our Earth contains unlimited mineral oil deposits to turn the wheels of industry and the propellers of prosperity. We have the natural hydroelectric resources which can be harnessed, as a number of them already are, to supply cheap industrial power. ”

“ The enormous yield of these wells had the effect of bringing down the price of petroleum to so low a figure that pumping wells were at once closed. They could not be worked with profit. Hence almost the entire oil business has, for the present at least, been confined to the valley of Oil Creek. The yield from the flowing wells varies from fifty to two thousand barrels per day. ”

“ As the business grew it organized corporations under the laws of these states, to carry on the industry under corporate agencies. Manufactories were located at the seaboard for the export-trade. It was easier and cheaper to pipe crude to the coast than to refine it at the sources of supply and ship the varied products. Thus the refining of export-oil was done at the seaboard, just as iron is manufactured at Pittsburg instead of at the ore-beds on Lake Superior. The company aimed to open markets for petroleum by reducing the cost of its transportation and manufacture and bettering its quality. ”

“ To develop the oil shale industry to a point where it could supply anything like the amount of oil now derived from oil pools would mean the building of great plants, including towns, railroads, and other equipment, equivalent to the plants of the coal mining industry. ”

“ It was robbery, cried the newspapers all over the land. "Under the thin guise of assisting in the development of oil-refining in Pittsburg and Cleveland," said the New York Tribune, "this corporation has simply laid its hand upon the throat of the oil traffic with a demand to 'stand and deliver.'" And if this could be done in the oil business, what was to prevent its being done in any other industry? Why should not a company be formed to control wheat or beef or iron or steel, as well as oil? If the railroads would do this for one company, why not for another? ”

“ The labor of the man who made the tools which drilled the well, that of the sawyer who cut the wood incidentally used, that of him who mined the iron of which the tools were made, are all just as necessary to the ultimate extraction of oil as the labor of respondents. Each is an antecedent of the consequent,-the production of the goods for commerce. Indeed, if respondents were not fed, they could not have drilled the well, and the oil would not have gone into commerce. Is the cook's work 'necessary' to the production of the oil, and within the Act? ”

“ They have seen the four salt-and-oil wells at Tarentum and the solitary oil-well at Titusville multiplied into a hundred-thousand holes drilled for petroleum and a production almost beyond calculation. Do the gentlemen composing this little group occupy a position dramatic in the marvelous events they review? Is petroleum freighted with interest and a touch of romance at every step of its passage from the well to the lamp? ”

“ The petroleum industry in the United States may be considered to date from the year 1859, when the first well avowedly drilled for the production of oil was completed by E. L. Drake. The present method of drilling as been evolved from the artesian well system previously adopted for obtaining brine and water. The drilling of petroleum wells is carried on The United States. ”

“ Rig-builders, carpenters, teamsters, tool-dressers, laborers, shop-keepers, saloonists and speculators crowded the busy spot in quest of jobs, locations or easy victims. Mecca seemed too far off, so a genuine “oil-town,” lacking none of the earmarks of such creations, was established on the James Cowdey farm and labeled Oil Diggings. It soon sported a post-office, which distributed stacks of mail, machine-shops, groceries and boarding-houses galore; nor were groggeries, gambling-dens and the usual incidentals difficult to discover. ”

“ We live in a mechanical age, and without oil our bearings would run hot and civilization, as we know it, would stop. It is the very blood of the earth.
Oil production is a highly specialized industry, and it has developed a type of man with a type of mind quite as characteristic as the type of machinery employed in the drilling of wells. The latter, for instance, appears at first glance to be crude and awkward, but as a matter of fact it is amazingly ingenious and extremely efficient, and your oil-field operator is pretty much the same. ”

“ The ever-expanding uses of petroleum, which in their train have called for a continually increasing demand for crude oil, have given an impetus to the search for commercially productive oil-fields, which, in mining history, has no parallel. On the one hand, we have those important oil-producing regions which embrace enormous regions of the United States, Mexico, Russia, Roumania, the Dutch Indies, India, and Galicia ”

“ CHAPTER IX No industry can boast a history more dramatic, more exciting, than that of oil. From the discovery of petroleum, on through the development of its usefulness and the vast expansion of its production, the story is one of intense human interest, and not even the story of mining has chapters more stirring or more spectacular. ”

“ At the start the difficulty of getting the apparatus for a refinery to the creek had been so enormous that the bulk of the crude had been driven to the nearest manufacturing cities—Erie, Pittsburgh, Cleveland. Much had gone to the seaboard, too, and Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore were all doing considerable refining. There was always a strong feeling in the Oil Regions that the refining should be done at home. Before the railroads came the most heroic efforts were made again and again to get in the necessary machinery. ”

“ Operators realized in the autumn of 1861 that the territory was declining rapidly and the wiser ones departed. Some held on a year or two longer, drilled their wells five-hundred feet in hope of hitting other sands and quit at last. George Moral, a one-eyed veteran of the war, has stuck to the Shaeffer farm, at the southern end of the district, and he is still getting a morsel of oil from a nest of shallow wells. The forest of derricks and engine-houses has disappeared. Oil Diggings is a tradition and “Ichabod” is written over the once stirring district. ”

“ They eliminated the jaded horses, oil-boats, wooden tankage, and slow freights, tedious methods, and questionable practices of handling petroleum, and substituted therefor the stem pump, the iron conduit, the steel tank storage, and systematic and businesslike methods which soon commanded the confidence and respect of all oil-producers. They extended their pipe-lines to practically every producing well and established a transportation system which serves the industry to-day as no other on earth is served. The advantages of the modern pipe-line to the oil-producer are obvious. ”

“ Bradford, Tarport, Limestone, Sawyer, Gillmor, Derrick, Red Rock, State Line, Four-Mile, Duke Centre, Rexford, Bordell, Rew City, Coleville, Custer and De Golia, with their thousands of wells, their hosts of live people, their boundless activity, their crowded railways, their endless procession of teams and their unlimited energy, were for the nonce the brightest galaxy of oil-towns that ever flourished in the busy realm of petroleum. ”

“ When the wells cease spouting and it is not deemed advisable to bore deeper, pumping is employed. Generally the oil coming from the wells is conducted into large, carefully tamped excavations in the ground forming ponds or lakes. In these huge reservoirs the sand and heavier parts soon sink, making the bottom impervious. After the settling the petroleum is either pumped into large iron tanks or sent directly to the refinery by pipe-lines. ”

“ Since 1895, however, a new stimulus was given to the industry by the modification of the mining laws, and from that date the oil industry has been gradually increasing, and only awaits the introduction of British capital to develop the enormous oil-fields. ”

“ So conservative an authority as the Geological Survey estimates that the oil shales of the Western States alone contain many times over the quantity of oil that will be recovered from our oil wells. The retorting of oil from oil shale has been a commercial industry for many years in Scotland and France; in fact, oil was obtained from oil shale here in the United States before the first oil well was drilled. ”

“ The history of petroleum in America commences with the use the pioneer settlers found the red-men made of it for medicine and for painting their dusky bodies. The settlers adopted its medicinal use and retained for various affluents of the Allegheny the Indian name of Oil Creek. Both natives and whites collected the oil by spreading blankets on the marshy pools along the edges of the bottom-lands at the foot of steep hill-sides or of mountain-walls that hem in the valleys supporting coal-measures above. ”

“ None imagined the unproductive valley would become the cradle of an industry before which cotton and 118coal and iron must “hide their diminished heads.” No prophet had proclaimed that lands on Oil Creek would sell for more than corner-lots in London or New York. Who could have conceived that these bold cliffs and patches of clearing would enlist ambitious mortals from every quarter of the globe in a mad race to secure a foothold on the coveted acres? What seventh son of a seventh son could foresee that a thousand dollars spent on the Willard farm would yield innumerable millions? ”

“ At every stage of its journey from the hole in the ground to the abode of the purchaser of kerosene, oil is handled with a view to the best results. The pipe-line relieves the producer from worry and fatigue and a large outlay, furnishing him prompt service and a cash market at his own door every business-day in the year. It enables the refiner to fill the consumer’s lamp at a trifling margin above the price of crude. For seventy cents a barrel—less than half it cost formerly to haul it a mile—the line collects oil from the wells, pumps it into the trunk-lines and delivers it in New York. ”