Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/270

Rh foremost they resolved to stand by all efforts to secure an outlet to the seaboard independent of the Standard and the allied railroads. Two enterprises were put before them at once. The first was what was known as the Equitable Petroleum Company, an organisation started by one of the most resourceful and active independent men in the oil country, one of whom we are to hear more, Lewis Emery, Jr. This company, in which some 200 oil producers in the Bradford field had taken stock, proposed to lay a pipe-line to Buffalo and to ship their oil thence by the Erie Canal. They had acquired a right of way to Buffalo and had capital pledged to carry out the project. The second enterprise to come before the newly formed union was much more ambitious. It was nothing less than a revival of Mr. Harley's enterprise which had attracted so much attention in 1876. It was revived now by the three men who had been operating the Columbia Conduit Line under a lease—Messrs. Benson, McKelvy and Hopkins, who had been set free by the sale of that property to the Standard. Their experience with the pipe-line business had convinced them it was one of the most lucrative departments of the oil industry. They believed too that oil could be pumped over the mountains, and no sooner were they free than they took up Mr. Harley's old idea and engaged the same engineer he had brought into the enterprise, General Herman Haupt, to survey a route from Brady's Bend on the Allegheny River to Baltimore, Maryland—a distance of 235 miles. To both of these projects the General Council of the Union gave promise of support.

The demand for interstate commerce legislation was renewed at once by the Union, and in December E. G. Patterson, the head of the committee having the matter in hand, prepared the first draft of an act which was put in formal shape by George B. Hibbard, of Buffalo, counsel employed by the Union for this purpose. Mr. Hibbard also prepared a memo