Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/440

Rh board, and the New York, Lake Erie and Western, and Atlantic and Great Western Railways reach Oil City by way of Meadville, 550 miles to the seaboard.

At that time the lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the Oil Region were dotted with refineries located at Tidioute, Henry's Bend, Oleopolis, Oil City, Corry, Titusville, Miller Farm, Rouseville, and other points on the Oil Creek Railroad, at various points on the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad, and on the Allegheny Valley Railroad, these roads being tributaries of and controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad, while upon its main line extensive refineries were located at Pittsburg and Philadelphia. The refineries at Cleveland, Ohio, confined themselves in a measure to the Western domestic trade, and those of Portland, Boston and New York had generally specialties in the trade.

The markets were filled with buyers of crude and refined; information as to stocks, production and consumption was open and obtainable, and values were regulated by the law of supply and demand.

In its relation to this trade, Western Pennsylvania almost exclusively possessing this product, with ample refineries in its midst, with its great state railroad penetrating the producing region, and by it, having the shortest route to the seaboard, with the Allegheny River as an additional means of transportation to Pittsburg, the Western terminus of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and with Philadelphia, its Eastern terminus as an exporting point, Pennsylvania had, and was entitled to, the control of the refining and transportation of its own product.

Now, this is all changed! The refineries on the lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad have been demolished, excepting where reached by rival railroads, and this business has been transferred to Cleveland and New York, the refineries remaining in this state having passed into the ownership and control of a foreign organisation, as has also the local transportation from the wells, by means of pipe-lines to the lines of the railways.

The transportation of every nature is subject to its dictation; it possesses every avenue of information; it affixes its own value to the crude product when purchasing and the refined products when selling; it establishes its own rates of compensation to be paid the railways, and the laws of commerce which govern values in other products are in this a part of the history of the past. So far as the petroleum trade is concerned an enterprise or investment therein is only a wager as to what step the Standard Oil combination will next take. With the world consuming double the amount of