below their necks. The oil on the roads kept the mud from drying in summer and from freezing in winter.
Mudholes were four to eight feet deep. They were kept constantly liquid by barrels spilled from overturned wagons. If wagons upset, the barrels were abandoned because it was not worth the trouble of trying to reload them.
Much of the oil was shipped out by the pond freshet method. During low water on Oil Creek barges wouldn’t float. But agreements were made with sawmill and grist mill owners, to hold water in their dams for a week or so and at a certain time release it, creating a small flood that would float the barges. But they had to be dragged back and this was done by horses pulling them walking along the creek bank or creek bed.
This operation was plain murder. More horses were killed on Oil Creek than in the notorious Deadhorse Gulch, through the White Pass, in the Yukon Gold Rush 40 years later.
On this backhaul job, horses were up to their bellies in cold water in winter. Slush and ice shaved off their hair. Large chunks of ice hung on their tails.
The whips of the unmerciful teamsters took their toll of tufts of hair and even the lives of the poor brutes. It was cheaper to rawhide a horse or mule to death, than give it kind treatment. The teamsters were in waist-length rubber boots, ready to jump out of the barges to whip a horse to death if it balked at a difficult stretch of the river. A single trip realized a handsome profit and new horseflesh was easy and cheap to buy.
Father Samuel Anthony moved the family around several times, while applying his trade as a blacksmith in the oil field. He had married Anna Liza Disel, a farmer’s daughter from Titusville, in 1870. They moved to Oil city in 1873, where Tiny was born. The next year he formed a partnership with Anna Liza’s three brothers to drill oil wells. Later he went back to Norristown and formed a partnership with his two step-brothers to drill artesian wells.
This partnership was short-lived as, when Tiny was 10, his father died leaving the family destitute. Tiny went to live with his uncle, an optometrist. At age 12 he began serving an apprenticeship with his uncle. But at 14, he knew that prosaic trade wasn’t for him. He wanted to go for the excitement of oil drilling. He took off to join Anna Liza’s brother, Ami, to go into the drilling trade. However, Ami had moved to Findlay, Ohio, where a new oil and gas field had been brought in during 1884. It was promoted as “the largest gas belt of any now known in the world.”
Later the city public utility commission was the envy of the nation, by giving gas away to attract industry. Its slogan was: “Women Split No Wood In Findlay.”
Chapter 2
Apprenticeship in Findlay, Ohio
Gas wells had been brought in during the oil rush on Oil Creek but gas was treated as an unwanted byproduct. Most was flared off as there was no other use for it. A well at Murryville, Pa., blowing out 34 million cubic feet a day, burned out of control for 1½ years. This well proved production was large enough and constant enough, that users could depend on the supply for commercial use to replace manufactured gas.
Curiously, there was public resistance to switching to natural gas, as people had developed a healthy fear of it after several had been injured in explosions.
When Tiny arrived at Findlay the big excitement there was the Oesterlen gas well, which had touched off the oil and gas rush in that state. The drillers for the well were Brownmyer and Martin of Bradford, Pa. The Martin end of the team was Milton Martin.
Milton and his brother, James Gelot Martin, were both drillers, sometimes working together, sometimes independently or teamed with others. Frosty was the son of James and nothing could keep him in the old Taylor School after age 16 to stop him from becoming a driller.
The Martin brothers got into oil drilling in 1861 — earlier than the Phillips. They lived a rough, hard life, almost nomadic in character, following a schedule of moving around but part of a pioneering society that somehow stuck together.
Ticksford, Grease City, Crown Pulley, Glycerine Hollow, Karns City, Butler, Red Rock and Bradford were all Pennsylvania boom towns at which the Martins were employed during the first dozen frenetic years of the Keystone State’s new-found industry.
In 1873, the best home James Martin could find available for his wife, Hattie Jackson, was a shack near a well-drilling site in Grease City field. Frosty first saw the light of day in that shack Sept. 6. By his own accounting, he tried to drown out the noise from the hillside stripper wells with his squalling.
Grease City is not on the map today. Thus it was that an “obit” writer in the Long Beach Independent upgraded his humble birthplace to “Greece City.”
Another Grease City native was Maud Jamison. Neither child knew of the existence of the other, until 19 years later when they met at a ball game in Findlay. Maud was a young teacher in Findlay College — and she was going out with a speed-crazy young man, Barney Oldfield.
Barney and Frosty were members of the Findlay Bicycle Club, which had a quarter-mile dirt track with turns banked 10 feet high. Oldfield always beat Martin — but he was left out of the competition for Maud’s hand the day she met Frosty. They married that year. Oldfield continued racing and later became one of the stars at the Indianapolis Speedway 500-mile races.
The first quarter-century of the Martin marriage was one of constant moving and travel under varying conditions of poverty and affluence. There were periods of loneliness for Maud while Frosty was away in the field. There were several trips around the wourld.
In their later days of lavish living in Long Beach, California, the days of living in tents in the field were forgotten. Their 57 years of marriage were exciting and full of devotion and ended with Maud’s death a year before that of Frosty.
Their first child was John Walter, born in Medicine Hat, Alta., in 1912. He acquired the nickname of Spud almost from birth when the proud father, with his off-beat sense of humour, told some of the boys on the rig: “I spudded in — and look what I got.” (Spudding in was related to the necessity of digging a hole before setting up a cable tool rig.) They raised as a son, Harold J. Blythe, the infant son of a cousin who died. He, too, acquired from Frosty the nickname of Baldy and it stuck with him better than his Christian name, until he died in 1963, after following the drilling trade in his younger days.
A note in the Phillips’ scribbler on nicknames: “Frosty was bigger and huskier than me. His blond hair and light complexion earned him his name, Frosty. In the rough-and-tumble drilling fraternity, I would start fights and Frosty would step in and take over.
“No matter how far we drifted apart we never lost contact with each other. Sometimes he would be in California and I was in Pennsylvania. It made no difference: he would look me up or I would look him up. We were pardners and we helped each other finish many jobs.”
By 1884, the Martin brothers could see the end of oil drilling in the Pennsylvania fields. When the chance came to move to Findlay, to drill the Oesterlen gas well they seized it. The success in drilling this well resulted in them being given contracts for a series of good producers. Findlay became the Mecca for the biggest and best pool of drillers in the United States, for more than a quarter of a century.
Although only 11 when he moved to Findlay, Frosty had already begun an apprenticeship with his father. In his time, youngsters were initiated into family enterprises at an early age and it didn’t hurt them a damn bit. Parents didn’t believe in child labour; it was mostly that, to keep the kids from getting underfoot in the house. Mother often suggested the boys “go with Dad today.”
