Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/57

Rh rapid succession. In less than ten months the field was doing over 10,000 barrels a day. This sudden flood of oil caused a tremendous excitement. Crowds of speculators and investors rushed to Pithole from all over the country. The Civil War had just closed, soldiers were disbanding, and hundreds of them found their way to the new oil field. In six weeks after the first well was struck Pithole was a town of 6,000 inhabitants. In less than a year it had fifty hotels and boarding-houses; five of these hotels cost $50,000 or more each. In six months after the first well the post-office of Pithole was receiving upwards of 10,000 letters per day and was counted third in size in the state—Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Pithole being the order of rank. It had a daily paper, churches, all the appliances of a town.

The handling of the great output of oil from the Pithole field was a serious question. There seemed not enough cars in the country to carry it and shippers resorted to every imaginable trick to get accommodations. When the agent of the Empire Transportation Company opened his office in June, 1865, and demonstrated his ability to furnish cars regularly and in large numbers, trade rapidly flowed to him. Now the Empire agency had hardly been established when the Van Syckel pipe-line began to carry oil from Pithole to the railroad. Lines began to multiply. The railroads saw at once that they were destined speedily to do all the gathering and hastened to secure control of them. Colonel Potts's first pipe-line purchase was a line running from Pithole to Titusville, which as yet had not been wet.

When the Empire Transportation Company took over this line nothing had been demonstrated but that oil could be driven, by relay pumps, five miles through a two-inch pipe. The Empire's first effort was to get a longer run by fewer pumps. The agent in charge, C. P. Hatch, believed that oil could be brought the entire ten and one-half miles from Pit