AMERICA - Joel Cook

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interest in it for $18,000, agreeing to pay the money next day. Turning away from the seller, he met a man seeking such an investment, and promptly resold his interest for $75,000, receiving immediate payment. The yield of this region was so prolific that railroads and pipe lines were soon constructed to carry the oil away. Pithole had its great boom in the autumn of 1866, wells being bored in every direction, and real estate fetching enormous prices. One old fellow who had a few acres of arid land in the centre of the excitement sold his farm and hovel for $800,000, paid him on the spot in $1000 notes; and then he sorrowfully bemoaned, as he took a last look at the hovel he had occupied all his life, "Now I haint got any home." The rise of this wonderful town was rapid, and its downfall came all too soon. The oil supply became exhausted, the speculators left, the inhabitants dwindled in number, and by 1870 Pithole had reverted almost to its original condition. The chief hotel, which had cost $31,000 to build, was afterwards sold for $100, and the population had declined in 1873 to nine families.

      The valley of Oil Creek is filled with derricks and oil tanks, having a few pumping engines at work, but most of the derricks are over abandoned wells. Eighteen miles up Oil Creek is Titusville, and when the oil yield was at its height, about 1865, this valley had a population of seventy-five thousand people. Titusville is pleasantly built in the broadened intervale, surrounded by hills, the streets being wide and straight, and the residences comfortable, each in its garden enclosure. There are oil refineries, and iron works which make engines, tubing and other supplies; and the town, which has eight thousand people, is a headquarters for the Standard Oil Company. Twenty-seven miles farther northward is Corry, a prominent railroad centre, at the northern entrance to the Pennsylvania "Oil Dorado," as the region has been popularly called. Its name of Corry was that of the farmer who originally cultivated the soil when the place became a railway station in 1861, and the location of oil refineries then began its prosperity. There are now about six thousand inhabitants. It is within a short distance of the New York State boundary, and marks the northern limit of the Pennsylvania oil region. This whole district, once the prominent petroleum field of Pennsylvania, has been eclipsed, however, by other and more prolific oil basins. Fortunes were made here, but most of the wealth passed away; and the history of the Pennsylvania petroleum trade and its vicissitudes, with the absorption of everything of value by the Standard Oil Company, has emphasized the truth so pointedly told by Robert Burns, that "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley." Its wonderful tide of prosperity and its subsequent ebb recall Shelley's lines "To Men of England":

      "The seed ye sow another reaps;

      The wealth ye find another keeps;

      The robes ye weave another wears;

      The arms ye forge another bears."

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