Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/209

 We have oil in tanks at Coraopolis, said the producers, plenty of it, but we have no market. If we build a pipe-line from our tanks to Oil City and Titusville and give you pipage at fifteen cents a barrel, five cents less than the Standard charges, will you enter into an agreement with us to take our oil for five years? The refiners saw at once the possible future in such an arrangement, and in a short time they had gone individually into a company to be called the Producers' and Refiners' Company, with a capital of $250,000, of which the Producers' Oil Company held $160,000, and whose object was the laying of a pipe-line from the fields in which the producers were interested to the refineries at Oil City and Titusville. The new plan was carried out with the greatest secrecy and promptness. Before the Standard men in the region realised what was going on, a right of way was secured and the pipe was going down. On January 8, 1893, the first oil was run. Here, then, was the first link in a practical co-operative enterprise—independent producers and refiners of oil joined by a pipe-line of which they were the owners.

While this enterprise was being carried out in Western Pennsylvania, in the northern part of the state a still more ambitious, independent project was under way, nothing less than a double pipe-line, one for refined and the other for crude oil, from the Oil Regions to the sea. This plan had originated with Lewis Emery, Jr., one of the most implacable and intelligent opponents Mr. Rockefeller's pretensions have ever met. Mr. Emery sympathised with the idea that there was no way for the producer to get his share of the profits in the oil business except by handling the product entirely himself. In his judgment a pipe-line to the seaboard was the first important link in such an attempt, and in 1891, on his own responsibility, he set out to see what hopes there were of securing a right of way. The Columbia Oil Company, through whom the Producers and Refiners