theatrical productions.
At first there was work for hundreds of coopers making oak barrels that held 300 pounds of oil. The cooperage business was pinched off, when somebody got the bright idea of mounting two wooden tanks on a railway flatcar. Flatcars were later discarded, when somebody else got the idea for the industry’s first successful pipeline.
Blacksmiths were the kingpins in the years prior to S.A. Phillips’ arrival. “Uncle Billy” Smith, the man whom Drake hired to drill his well, was a blacksmith. Up to that time oil had been collected from seepage along the creek banks — and yielded about six gallons a day. But the Seneca company wanted a faster way of bringing more oil to the surface. Smith, with experience in drilling salt wells at Tarentum, Pa., was hired at $2.50 a day.
The ubiquitous scribbler recounts Tiny had visited bewhiskered Uncle Billy, when he had retired to his farm to hear him tell stories about drilling the Drake well. After he had begun the job, he had been offered a blacksmithing job at Franklin for $4 a day. Although he was tempted to take it because he liked blacksmithing better than drilling, he decided to stay with Drake and see the job through.
Tiny Phillips (foreground). Bearded man is Uncle Billy Smith, other individual unidentified. Moberly, Missouri, circa 1900.
This photo taken in 1900, shows A.P. Tiny Phillips (left), unidentified man (centre) and Uncle Billy Smith (right).
Drill rig at Moberly, Missouri, 1901.
Had he not stayed the first well might have been abandoned halfway to completion.
The drilling was blessed by a lucky break. It was drilled directly over a crevice in some rocks. A fair flow was struck at 69½ feet. Had it been drilled in another location oil would not have been struck at that shallow depth, because there was no similar formation anywhere else in the area.
Titusville got more press coverage than the California gold rush 10 years previously. This was possible because the Drake well was brought in within travelling distance of 31 million people. Nobody had to trek 2,000 miles; it was right there at the back door for them to visit.
When Tiny was a tad, the telephone hadn’t even been invented and oil refineries were just springing up. The only refineries available to handle the immense flow of oil were modified whale-oil refineries. Oil was refined chiefly for kerosene for lamps. There was to be no demand for gasoline for another 40 years.
But the industry built 23 refineries in Titusville by the time Tiny was born.
Whale oil was the chief lubricant of the day, but the whales were at the point of depletion. They would have become extinct had not the new oil source come along as an alternative.
Titusville was there before the oil boom and there afterward. It didn’t suffer the fate of places like Pithole City whose population was zero one day, 15,000 three months later and zero 500 days after that. During those 500 days it was the “sin city” of the U.S. That was because it had every other kind of civic service and business but no law and order. Only one other city had a worse reputation. That was Petroleum City, Pa., before a vigilante committee was organized of necessity. The Phillips’ scribbler has a note:
“Old-timers used to tell me with faintly nostalgic smiles, about the parade of 100 whores who rode sidesaddle on a tour of the main streets, as a preview of the night’s business.”
Slick practices, scams and thefts were part of the scene. Apocryphal or not, one of the favorite stories of Phillips is how one of the finest farms in Ontario was bought by a young Canadian, who got rich quick on the outskirts of Pithole City, merely by taking a rest by a pile of wood beside the road. He was approached by a man on horseback who mistook him for the owner and offered him $4,500, for the 300-cord wood pile.
Before he could demur, the man thrust $4,500 in cash into his hand and disappeared down the road. He was back in a few minutes with wagons and teams and began hauling away the wood.
There was hell to pay when the proper owner showed up and found half his wood pile gone. A search was made of the bars for the young Canadian but he was well on the way toward Lake Ontario.
It was poetic justice that Pithole City was able to make a valuable contribution to redeem itself: the first successful oil pipeline. This innovation came about because of the transportation monopoly held by teamsters. Anyone who visualizes that today’s Teamsters Union is composed of hard-bitten, arrogant men almost law unto themselves, should have been in Tiny Phillips’ territory to observe the anarchy of their unorganized predecessors who drove horses. There were thousands of them hauling three to seven barrels of oil in their wagons.
They started out charging $1 a barrel, but later began gouging producers for as much as $5 for the haul to the railroad. They were law unto themselves and when producers tried to haul oil in their own rigs, the teamsters hit back with violence.
Nobody lifted a finger against them until Samuel Van Syckel came along. Up to that time, the teamsters’ lobby was so strong the Pennsylvania Legislature refused to pass laws granting charters to pipeline companies. However, the producers became desperate and finally forced the politicians to grant a charter to construct a pipeline, from Pithole City to a railhead five miles distant.
Van Syckel was hired by a transportation company to build the line in 1865. He came in with a bunch of toughs determined to beat the teamsters at their own game. They put together a line of two-inch iron pipe and tested the joints, before burying it in a two-inch trench. The downfall of previous lines was the joints leaked; welding hadn’t been heard of yet.
Besides tight joints a new principle of pumping oil had been devised, to make the new line more efficient. A rotary booster pump was installed halfway along to maintain pressure.
When the Teamsters discovered Van Syckel had started pumping 800 gallons a day for $1 a barrel, they were furious. They attacked and engaged in mayhem.
The end came when one of Van Syckel’s men was shot and killed. Van Syckel found the teamster boss in a bar in Titusville and beat him to a pulp with his fists. The teamsters collapsed and pipelines became an established means of oil transportation.
This innovation brought to an end the murder of some of the horses. Up to the time pipelines were installed, every gallon of oil from the wells had to be hauled in barrles on drays to railhead or water through oil, grease, mud, clay, ooze, muck, filth, stench, grime and dirt three feet deep in most places.
Contributing largely to the mud and mire of the roads and streets were 12,000 horses and 12,000 mules. Although the need for horses diminished after the building of the Erie Railroad and the coming of pipelines in 1865, there were still thousands of horses and teamsters engaged in short hauls. During the height of oil hauling, it was not uncommon to see a solid line of teams a mile or more long heading north out of the valley to the railroad. These processions went on slowly from dawn to dusk seven days a week. One man, to win a bet, counted 2,000 teams crossing the bridge on the main road out of Titusville in one day.
A further note in the Phillips scribbler about the treatment of horses in the pre-Humane Society days:
It was said that mud and crude oil, one of the stickiest and most corrosive mixtures ever brewed, ate the hair right off the poor
