Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/51

 Company owned practically the entire system of oil-gathering pipe-lines—that is, the lines carrying oil from the wells to the storing or shipping points. These lines were organised under the name of the United Pipe Lines, and the organisation was magnificent in both extent and in character of service rendered. Never, indeed, has the ability of the men Mr. Rockefeller gathered into his machine shone to better advantage than in the building up and management of the pipe-line business. At the end of 1883, when the alliance was made with the Tidewater, the United Pipe Lines were taking from the wells of Pennsylvania fully a million and a half barrels of oil a month. Their pipes, of an aggregate length of 3,000 miles, connected with thousands of wells scattered all over the wide Oil Regions.

Whenever the oil men opened a new field, no matter how remote from those already developed, the United Pipe Lines immediately went there to care for the oil. In more than one case, in these years of rapid and excessive development of oil territory, the pipe-line company invested great sums in preparing to take care of oil fields whose yield never paid the cost of the pipe laid. Thus, in 1882, there was a tremendous excitement over the opening of the Cherry Grove field. The Standard spent $2,000,000 getting ready to take care of a great outpouring of oil which came, but did not stay. In 1882 Cherry Grove produced 2,345,400 barrels; in 1883, 755,512! It cost the company forty-six cents a barrel to take care of the production of one short-lived group of wells in this field, on which they never realised more than twenty cents pipage.

The Standard not only gathered this oil; it stored it, to wait its owner's demand. At this date it controlled 40,000,000 barrels of iron tankage, in which it stored the enormous stocks, over 35,000,000 barrels, which had accumulated in the five previous years. When the oil passed to the pipe-line, the owner received his money for it at once, if he wished, or the line