Bubbling crude! Black gold! Texas tea! Whatever you want to call it, oil is such an integral part of our modern economy that it’s almost impossible to imagine that for the majority of human existence it was more of a nuisance.

Oh, sure, humanity had managed to find practical uses for some naturally occurring forms of petroleum like tar, pitch, and bitumen. But crude oil? It didn’t really do anything other than burn and there are lots of things that do that. It was hard to find, hard to store, and consequently expensive as hell. All it really did was get in the way when you were trying to get to more valuable resources like salt and coal and shale.

That all changed in the Nineteenth Century as the Industrial Revolution created vast new demand for lubrication and illumination.

At first that demand was met by whale oil. Partly that was because whales seem to be nothing but oil (you can harvest more than 100 barrels each from the larger ones), and partly because whale oil was just so good. It burned brightly and cleanly without giving off noxious smoke, it burned for a long time, and all those Omega 3s made it a great lubricant.

White people being white people, it only took them a few short decades to hunt most of the whales to near-extinction and industry was forced to investigate alternative forms of oil.

They tried animal oils — like lard oil from pigs — but land-based animals just weren’t as oily as fish were and the oils went rancid pretty quickly. Vegetable oils would work but required a huge amount of time to grow and an equally huge amount of labor to extract, and they also tended to, uh, explode a lot.

When you’ve run out of animals and vegetables there’s nowhere to turn but minerals. In the 1840s chemists Abraham Gessner and James Young independently developed methods for extracting petroleum from coal or shale to create “coal oil” or “rock oil”, which was safer and slower-burning than the alternatives, but had trouble catching on because it gave off terrible-smelling fumes. In the 1850s Gessner developed new coal oil lamp designs which were more fuel-efficient and gave off less smoke, and also started marketing his product under the far catchier trademark of “kerosene.” The rebrand worked and demand for mineral oils skyrocketed.

The stage was set for the next phase of the Industrial Revolution, one powered entirely by petroleum. All the world really needed was a readily accessible source of the stuff.

And as all good Americans know, when you need oil there’s only one place to go…

Petrolia

…Western Pennsylvania.

You were expecting Texas, maybe? Well, tough. Pennsylvania is actually the birthplace of modern oil for one very simple reason: its reserves, while not large, are a lot closer to the surface and comparatively easier to get to.

In fact, Pennsylvania’s oil was so close to the surface it had been coming up on its own accord for centuries. Pre-Columbian Native Americans would use hides to skim it off the surface when it leaked in to lakes, ponds, and rivers. Not that they did anything with it. Dilute petroleum is too weak to burn, so mostly they used it as a sort of folk medicine. In the 1840s and 1850s white people also got in on the action, selling dilute petroleum as patent medicine.

So, when some geologists at the Seneca Oil Company figured out it might be possible to tap into underground oil deposits, they knew just where to start: near a Venango County waterway that was so famous for petroleum slicks that it had been called “Oil Creek” since the early 1700s.

Seneca Oil hired Edward L. Drake to set up a steam-powered drilling and pumping apparatus on the banks of the creek, just outside the tiny borough of Titusville. Drake spent more than a year drilling, and kept on going even after Seneca Oil begged him to stop because they were losing money hand over fist.

When Drake finally struck oil on August 27, 1859 the shareholders of Seneca Oil became millionaires. Drake, not so much — he didn’t patent his innovations because he thought there was obvious prior art, and lost his share of the bonanza in speculation. He stayed out of the poorhouse thanks only to the generosity of the Commonwealth, which awarded him an annuity in his declining years.

But the hard first step had been taken, and the Pennsylvania Oil Boom was on.

Okay, I say boom, but during those first few years oil production was pretty paltry. In that first year only 1200 barrels were pumped out of the ground, but that was still enough for everyone involved to become rich. That demand only increased after the Civil War started and affected the nation’s ability to acquire oil through other methods.

The real money, though, was in land speculation. It always is. Speculators scrambled to buy up every farm in Venango County and lease them to the poor suckers who were actually going to do the hard work. And they had no shortage of suckers.

Within a few years Pennsylvania was pumping tens of thousands of barrels of oil out of the ground annually. Most of the wells were short-lived, but as soon as one dried up another one started producing.

Fortunes were made by men like John D. Rockefeller. Fortunes were lost by men like Henry Hershey (father of Milton). Experiences in oil country shaped the lives of people like crusading journalist Ida Tarbell.

The region picked up new nicknames like Oil Country, Oildom, Oildorado, Petrolia, or “Sodden Gomorrah” if you were a moralistic type. (Sadly, “Oilysium” was right there and no one used it.)

Existing towns like Titusville, Tidioute, Tionesta, Franklin, and Cherrytree saw their way of life transformed overnight. New boom towns began to spring up across the landscape, like Rouseville, Oil City, Oleopolis, Petroleum Center, and…

Pithole

Well, technically, before there was Pithole there was tiny and almost completely uninhabited Cornplanter Township, about halfway between Titusville and Oil City and a bit to the east. It was part of a land grant that the Federal Government bestowed on the Seneca chief Cornplanter in 1796 though he doesn’t seem to have done anything with it, to be honest.

Due to his benign neglect the area became colonized by Scots-Irish immigrants, who discovered that the dominant life form was stinging insects and that the poor soil would not grow anything worth selling. Being hardy folk, they did not leave but instead resigned themselves to a life of subsistence farming, hunting, and genteel poverty. Which is where things stood for about seventy years, with the only real change being that, starting in 1860, when the locals had to leave town to find work they started going to neighboring oil fields instead of neighboring farms.

Somewhere in Cornplanter was the Pit Hole, or maybe just Pithole. The origin of the name is obscure. It may have come from the local waterway, Pithole Creek, which at some point may have bubbled out of an “immense pit” between some rocks, or just raced along the bottom of a relatively steep ravine. Maybe the name came from the Native American custom of digging “oil pits” along the creek bed to make skimming easier. Maybe it came from now-disappeared crevices along the ravine, from which emanated warm but sulfurous fumes that could spoil meat and cheeses.

In the most amusingly folksy etymology, three freezing hunters stumbled across one of these crevices and stopped for a moment to warm up. One of them took a deep breath of the fumes, passed out, and had to be grabbed suddenly before he fell in to his death. The hunters then decided that the “mephitic vapors” must have been marking an entrance to “the Pit” (i.e., Hell) and the name stuck.

Frankly, when you’re exploring for oil it seems pretty obvious that you should check out the seismically active area full of “mephitic fumes.” And that’s exactly what the oilmen did.

In January 1864 one Isaiah N. Frazier purchased a lease on 35 acres of land in Allegheny Township. In March, James Faulkner Jr. purchased a lease on 264 acres in Cornplanter, directly adjacent to Frazier’s tract. The two men knew each other — they had been employees of the nearby Humboldt Refinery, and made a good chunk of change in nearby Cherrytree — and decided to join forces.

They roped in two more buddies (Frederick W. Jones and J. Nelson Tappan) and formed the United States Petroleum Corporation on April 25, 1864. The new company leased even more acreage on the Thomas and Walter Holmden farms, then on half a dozen other nearby farms.

At the time, oilmen talked about digging down to “sands” — essentially, deeper and deeper strata trapping oil within in. None of the previous wells in Venango County had gone past the “third sand”, which usually contained a useless mixture of oil and water. United States Petroleum thought there were even deeper sands waiting to be tapped. They brought in a geologist, Henry Ramsey, to check on their hunch, and then a diviner, Thomas H. Brown, to pick the site for their first well. Brown’s witch hazel twig picked a spot on their Number 4 lease, on the Thomas Holmden farm.

Drilling began on July 1st and proceeded slowly. That was fine with the founders; as in a lot of booms and scams, they were less interested in producing a viable product than they were in selling stock to speculators. Finding and selling oil would have been a pleasant bonus.

I should say, finding oil was a pleasant bonus. On January 7, 1865 United States Well No. 1 had drilled more down more than 600 feet to the “sixth sand” and finally started producing about 250 barrels a day, eventually rising to 900 barrels. Which would sell for a good price, but also goosed the company’s stock, which rose from $6.25 a share to nearly $40 a share.

(They company also renamed Well No. 1 the “Frazier Well” in Frazier’s honor, because he passed away shortly before the big strike.)

A few weeks later a nearby competitor also struck oil and began producing at about the same rate. Within days the area was swamped with speculators . The United States Petroleum Company took advantage of the increased attention to sell off most their leases at an average price of $3,000 each, netting them a cool $180,000. Dozens of new companies formed in the rush, including the Garden City Petroleum & Mining Company; the Chicago & Allegheny Oil & Mining Company; the Chicago Petroleum Company; the Bummerl Well Company; the St. Louis & Pithole Petroleum Company; and the Pithole Creek Petroleum Company.

(Perhaps the most interesting, if not the most successful, was the Dramatic Oil Company, which was founded by one, uh, John Wilkes Booth. Booth never actually made any money from his oil ventures, but later used them to convince his co-conspirators that there was oil money backing their plot. When he left the area he signed over his real estate holdings to his brother, Junius Brutus Booth, who then completely forgot about them. A decade later when he realized a railroad had run right through the middle of the property, he had to sue to get reimbursed for the exercise of eminent domain.)

The oil business was a risky venture at best. Erecting a derrick was not cheap, and then you had to pay workers to operate it for months until it could drill down several hundred feet and begin producing. That could cost you a cool $15,000, or about $300,000 in modern money. Even then you only had about a 1:8 chance of actually finding oil, and only a 1:12 chance of finding enough oil to turn a profit.

Many companies were willing to take that chance. Within weeks every tract of land near the Frazier Well had been stripped bare of vegetation and the landscape was dotted with crude derricks and holding tanks.

Hundreds of wells were sunk and dozens of them began producing. Some even managed to turn a profit. The Homestead Wells No. 1 & 2 began producing in early June, and the Twin Wells No. 1 & 2 a few weeks later. The Grant Well (named after the president, who the well’s owner had supposedly shared a smoke with) and the Pool Well began producing in late August. By October 1865 the daily oil production of the region reached nearly 5,000 barrels per day.

Pit Hole City

The burgeoning industry attracted thousands of workers to the region, some of them local fortune-seekers, others itinerant Irish immigrants, others Union army troops mustering out at the end of the Civil War looking for easy money. There was, however, nowhere to put them. Workers on the derricks could usually rely on a shoddy tent or a crude shack for shelter, but for the most part the accommodations made Andersonville seem luxurious. There was a desperate need for housing.

And when there’s a desperate need, well, someone will step up to make money off of it.

In early May 1865 Col. A.P. Duncan and George C. Prather of Oil City purchased the Holmden farms outright for some $100,000 and announced their intention to lay out a new development, which they called “Holmdenville” but which everyone else took to calling “Pit Hole City” or just plain “Pithole.”

They had some pretty grandiose plans. The city would have beautiful wide boulevards (dirt boulevards, admittedly) on a regular grid, with uniform lots of 33’x100′. Of course, that was only on paper. The ground on the Holmden farm was hilly and uneven, which meant that most of the lots were irregular.

Lots in Pithole went up for sale on May 24. Well, I say sale, but Duncan and Prather were not selling the land title but instead offering long-term leases. You could lease a lot at a cost of $50 for six months or $100 for a year, renewable for up to three years, with the condition that at the end of the lease you either had to remove anything you built on the lot or hand it over to Duncan and Prather. Alternatively, you could lock in a five year lease at a lower rate and keep the buildings when the lease ended.

There was brisk demand for lots, though almost no one took them up on the longer lease. In less than a month some 400 lots had been sold, and many of them were then re-sold and re-sold and the price kept going up and up. Lots that were being flipped for $800 in June were being flipped for twice that in July.

Tents went up on those lots almost immediately, and by July newspapers reported that the new town had a population of “2000 men, 11 women, and 1 colored person,” and a temporary population of at least a thousand itinerant teamsters and laborers.

It was often joked that the first permanent structure in Pithole was a farobank — which is a joke, see, that’s the full name of the card game. In reality it was a simple board house slapped together by cooper Henry F. James in less than a day.

Eventually some 300 private residences would spring up, but most of the population lived in the city’s network of flophouses, bunkhouses and hotels. Accommodations ran the gamut from a heap of straw or a hammock to actual beds.

The first hotel in town was the Astor House, built in a single day and so shoddily constructed that at night light shone through the gaps between boards. It could handle sixty guests, but tended to attract a downscale crowd of drunks and gamblers. Still, it held the distinction of hosting Pithole’s first real social event, a grand ball, on July 28, 1865.

The second hotel in in town was the United States Hotel, hastily converted from a bunkhouse by the United States Petroleum Company when it realized it could make more money renting rooms to folks passing through than it could housing its own laborers. It could accommodate 100 lodgers packed into bunks that made capsule hotels seem luxurious, but also had a cafeteria that could feed a thousand workers a day. United States Petroleum quickly leased operations to a subcontractor who paid them $30,000 a year for the privilege, which seemed like a great deal during the first few months when they were making $300 a day, but turned out to be a turkey because as soon as alternatives became available everyone flocked to those. At least the Chase House had an actual French chef and not a cafeteria where you were getting yesterday’s warmed-over slop.

A post office opened up on July 25, and before long was handling almost 10,000 pieces of mail every day, making it the third largest post office by volume in the Commonwealth. The lines for people picking up mail were so long it became a custom to bribe your way to the head of the line.

The largest building in town was Murphy’s Theater, run by three real estate magnates from Cleveland. They spared no expense: the theater could seat 800 people in the orchestra, and another 300 more in the gallery and private boxes. Lighting was provided by Tiffany glass chandeliers, and the stage curtain was painted by top artisans from New York. The theater opened on September 17 and for the next four months nationally-known theater companies played nightly to packed houses. Their biggest attraction was one Mademoiselle Brignoli, who danced and sang the violin. When it was discovered that she had abandoned her husband and two children to pursue a career on the stage, the social stigma made her anathema to polite society. She gave a farewell recital on January 9, 1866 but while she was on stage taking her final bow some thieves were backstage looting her dressing room, making off with her purse, a gold watch, and some $60 in cash.

Meanwhile competitors were offering up Mademoiselle Forrestel “the female contortionist” at the Atheneum; or “noted cantatrice” Julia Mortan at the Pithole Opera House. There were countless other establishments hosting boxing and wrestling matches, vaudeville, and burlesque shows.

By October, Pithole had some 15,000 residents making it the fourth or fifth largest city in the Commonwealth, about the size of Lancaster or Harrisburg. The city had ten hotels, twenty mechanic’s shops, two banks, sixty-two groceries, fifteen meat markets, two slaughterhouses, fifteen bakeries, several newspapers, and countless theaters, oyster bars, billiard parlors, saloons, and houses of ill repute. The land the city stood on was valued at more than $10,000,000. In 1865 money.

Pithole was so big, in fact, that it even had its own suburbs. J.W. Bonta and James A. Bathes purchased a farm across the way and set up their own development of “Elwood” and “Prather City.” It wasn’t half as bustling as Pithole but had the Bonta House hotel, which was known for being the finest hotel in the area — though given the standards of the community, that’s just a fancy way of saying it was more of a Comfort Inn than a Motel 6.

Other suburbs included Balltown, Dawson Center, and Clarkton.

To Duncan and Prather this seemed like the perfect time to sell out. They inked a deal to sell to a group of investors from Titusville for $1,300,000. Except the consortium couldn’t quite raise the cash, so Duncan and Prather wound up holding on to a minority stake in their own community.

Hey, at least they made money on the deal, which was more than other real estate speculators could say. Local farmer Parcus Copeland held out to get the largest price he could for his farm but held out too long and missed the peak of the market. He eventually wound up selling to one A.G. Morey for $85,000. Of course, Morey then wrote down that he had spent $200,000 so that he could try and flip it for even more, but that backfired twice: first when the property taxes were assessed based on the phoney price, and then again when Copeland came around asking for the additional $115,000 the tax office was insisting he had received.

Pithole, Incorporated

With the population booming, somebody got the bright idea that Pithole had grown bigger than a mere development and should be properly incorporated. They began drawing up their incorporation papers at the end of July, submitted them at the beginning of September, and got them approved toward the end of November.

Elections were set for December 11, giving candidates only a few weeks to announce and campaign. The election was utter chaos, and further complicated by the fact that almost no one could actually vote in it.

Under the law at the time, only people who had lived in the Commonwealth for a year and in the borough for six months were eligible to vote. Anyone who wasn’t a Pennsylvanian or living in Pithole at the beginning of June was disqualified. Which meant that, given that most of the city’s population consisted of migrant laborers, only 150 people could actually cast a ballot. Most of the candidates for office couldn’t even vote for themselves.

The election was further complicated by the fact that there were two rival boards of elections. The first was a legitimate if corrupt one sanctioned by the Commonwealth and run largely by bankers and investors. The second one was a rogue populist operation run by oilmen that just wanted to let everyone vote regardless of residency.

The mayoral election was especially tight. Henry R. Kemp, the oilman’s candidate, received the majority of votes cast. But if you threw out all the illegitimate votes the bankers’ candidate, Alexander J. Keenan, was the winner.

The problem was that Keenan and his cronies on the newly-elected city council were massively unpopular, and hadn’t lived in the Commonwealth long enough to hold office. While the oilmen dickered about that the bankers set off their set of results to Harrisburg where they were quickly rubber-stamped and that was that.

The oilmen petitioned to get that overturned, but, uh, only six of the two hundred petitioners were actual residents of Venango County. Most weren’t Pennsylvanians, and a few of them were not even American citizens.

The new Pithole municipal government quickly got down to brass tacks, passing all the important laws like requiring residents to keep the their sidewalks clean of snow and other obstructions. They also immediately drew up plans to build a jail.

Mind you, they didn’t have enough money to build a jail. Ironically, they couldn’t raise money by taxing oil, since none of the actual oil production was being done inside the city limits. Instead they were forced to raise money through through the sale of liquor licenses and fines on public drunkenness. Which theoretically should have been very lucrative. If there hadn’t been a zillion ways to skirt the law.

In the end, Pithole’s government was an unpopular non-entity with no money to actually address Pithole’s problems. And, boy oh boy, did Pithole have a ton of problems.

Growing Pains

So, let’s start with the environment.

Extractive industries are rarely kind to it, and the early oil industry was outright disastrous for it. In her memoirs, Ida Tarbell remembered growing up in oil country…

No industry of man… has ever been more destructive of beauty, order, decency, than the production of petroleum. All about us rose derricks, squatted engine houses and tanks; the earth about them was streaked and damp with the dumpings of the pump, which brought up regularly the sand and clay and rock through which the drill had made its way. If oil was found, if the well flowed, every tree, every shrub, every bit of grass in the vicinity was coated with black grease and left to die. Tar and oil stained everything. If the well was dry a rickety derrick, piles of debris, oily holes were left, for nobody ever cleaned up in those days.

Removing all the vegetation had one major, immediate side effect: the soil turned to thick, thick mud — not just in Pithole but everywhere in oil country. Reporter Charles C. Leonard, who wrote for the Pithole Daily Record under the pen name of Crocus, described it vividly…

The mud in our streets! Words cannot describe or poles fathom it. Empty wagons are frequently stuck fast in the center of our main streets, and a day or two since a lady accidentally stepped from a crossing and became so hopelessly engulfed that it was only after the persevering and united efforts of three men that she was extricated from the mud and her dilemma.

The mud was so bad that everyone took off their shoes and stockings to cross the street, rinsed off their feet using buckets shops put out on the other side, then put their shoes back on. Ladies and horses got mired in the mud. The ladies were usually hauled out. The horses usually wound up breaking their legs and had to be put down.

It was hard to be a horse in Pithole. The toxic sludge they waded through on a daily basis made all of their hair fall off. When they weren’t being left mired in mud like Artax they were getting flogged to death on the side of the road. Their life expectancy could be measured in months, at best, and by the end of the Summer of 1865 no horses could be found for sale anywhere in the northwest of the Commonwealth — even people who did have horses for sale would refuse to sell one to you if they knew you were taking it to Pithole.

And yet the horses were utterly necessary. There were no railroads, no roads, and Pithole Creek was unnavigable. That meant everything, everything had to be brought in on horse-drawn wagons by teamsters. The markup was insane, with prices in Pithole being 20% higher than prices in Titusville, and the prices in Titusville were already inflated.

That was most keenly felt in the price of food. A typical day’s board might run to $5. For those looking for cheaper options they might go to Wiggins’ Restaurant, where a thin sandwich sold for 25¢ and a simple meal of meat and potatoes for $1. And if those prices sound reasonable to you, remember that there was a time when McDonald’s hamburgers sold for 15¢, and this was a good hundred years before that.

(And of course, not only was the food expensive, it was all bad. Meat was iffy at best, and fresh fruits and vegetables were almost impossible to find.)

Even the price of food paled next to the price of water. None of the surface water was potable, fouled as it was by industrial waste. As a result fresh water was worth more than the crude oil they were pumping out of the ground. Not that any of the water was fresh, mind you. It still sold for 10¢ a cup, 50¢ a pitcher, and $1 for a ten quart pail.

No fresh water also meant no real sanitation, coupled with a municipal failure to provide even basic services like garbage removal. Most homeowners and businesses just chucked their garbage out the back door onto neighboring properties. Dead animals were dragged to the edge of town to rot. Disease and sickness ran rampant.

As you might imagine, the whole town reeked. On various occasions Crocus described Pithole as smelling like new lumber, fresh paint, and oil; onions, dead cats, and brimstone; and most memorably, like a camp of soldiers with diarrhea.

Vice

It was enough to drive a man to drink, and many did. Pithole had more than twenty establishments serving hard liquor and they were all raking in money hand over fist. The Nation wrote that, “It is safe to assert that there is more vile liquor drunk in this town than any of its size in the world.”

With liquor came other forms of vice. Gambling was rampant, with faro being the most popular option. Brothels were also common, though many tried to pass themselves off as flophouses or bars.

Of course, with all the liquor and gambling and vice came more serious forms of crime. Robbery was so common that most men carried pistols and knives with them. You would think there would have been more assault, but in the whole history of town, there was only one straight-up murder. (There were plenty of felony murders but those don’t seem to count.)

In October 1865, two men, Matthew McEntee and John Simpson, got into a fight over Lizzie Mitchell. McEntee began beating Mitchell, so Simpson shot him. He fled the scene but was quickly located, though the sheriff had to pull together a posse and battle several lynch mobs to spirit Simpson out of town to the courthouse in Franklin. His defense was that Mitchell was his common-law wife and he was only defending her. Which worked, because he was acquitted.

Other crimes were perhaps slightly more amusing. When two prostitutes got into a catfight they were thrown into jail until they calmed down. Their johns decided instead to storm the jail and free them, but were driven off and chased out of town.

Col. Duncan rose to the occasion by organizing a secret vigilance committee and a kangaroo court. Problem was he got greedy. At one point he arrested Bruton Minor and Charles Rowland, then fined them $150 and a gold watch, which just happened to be all the valuables the two men had on them. Minor and Rowland swore out a formal complaint at the county courthouse, and Duncan was told to knock it off, which spelled an end to the kangaroo court.

In August John Burke and two other men helped themselves to the liquor behind the bar in the American Hotel and refused to pay. They were tossed out after a scuffle but Burke swore to return, kill the bartender, and burn down the building. Burke definitely meant it — he was known around town for randomly attacking people who were just minding their own business. But when he returned the following night with a sizable mob he found a group of civic-minded vigilantes waiting for him. A few warning shots scared the ruffians off.

In December 1865 the post office was broken into twice and the mail rifled through to steal cash remittances. In January the crooks tried again but were nabbed by three cops who had been watching them carefully.

The Wickedest Man in the World

None of these notorious criminals could hold a candle to Bully Ben Hogan, the self-professed “wickedest man in the world.”

He was born Benedict Hagan in Germany in 1841, but his family emigrated to Syracuse when he was still a boy. He was a young hoodlum from an early age and ran away in his early teens, then spent the next several years working as a cabin boy, a riverboat pirate, a professional gambler, and a circus roustabout. Eventually Hagan put his powerful and muscular physique to work by performing feats of strength, acrobatics, daredevil stunts, and boxing. He was often billed as “The Sailor Boy” or “Professor Hagan” and usually worked an act where he took on more established boxers by pretending to be an amateur. Eventually he changed his name to Hogan, to bolster his appeal with Irish-Americans.

During the Civil War Hogan became a bounty jumper (enlisting for the sign-up bonus and then deserting before he saw service) and later claimed to have spied for both sides. Eventually he pressed his luck too hard and fled to Canada, only returning as the war was winding down.

He was drawn to oil country by the promise of easy money. He toured the county with a troupe of like-minded acrobats, showing off feats of strength like having an 800 pound stone broken on his chest. The show was a hit, earning over $19,000 — and then he promptly lost it all playing faro. The rest of his troupe quit on the spot.

By February 1866 Hogan was in Pithole, boxing and gambling for money. One of his earliest fights pitted him against “the celebrated pedestrian” J.J. Holiday who had pushed a wheelbarrow from Rochester to Buffalo without stopping back in the days when people were a lot more easily entertained.

More notable were his fights against local bar owner Robert J. Vance, better known as “Stonehouse Jack, the notorious champion of all deviltry.” It was a title he had earned — he had killed a man in Cleveland, was known to roofie dancers, pick the pockets of his customers, and knock down anyone who got in his way. Their fights were not contained to the ring. At one point after a contested decision Hogan assaulted Stonehouse in his own tavern. On another occasion, after getting told that he could shoot someone and get away with it if his life was in danger, Hogan decided to be proactive about it and take a few potshots at Stonehouse while he was walking down the street.

Another boxer, Marsh Elliott declared he had a challenger who could ring Hogan’s bell, only the challenger never appeared, forcing Elliott to step into the ring himself where he got his bell rung. Elliott tried to get a measure of revenge by shooting at Hogan through an open window, but he proved to be an even worse shot than he was a boxer.

After a while Hogan tried to open a gym, but business was slow. So instead he became the “business manager” (i.e., pimp) for dance hall owner Em Fenton. Then after a few months he threw her over for an old acquaintance named French Kate. Kate was quite a bit of work herself. No one is sure what her real name was — it might have been Kate LeConte, or Katherine Grant, or Catherine Granger. Everyone knew was that she was a knockout, a voluptuous brunette with no morals to speak off. She was a known associate of John Wilkes Booth. She and Hogan had purportedly met during the Civil War, when they were both spies.

Hogan and Kate went into business together. Kate opened up a restaurant/brothel, and Hogan turned his gymnasium into a saloon. On Sundays they put their whores on horseback and paraded them up and down the streets to show off the goods. (Reports that the whores paraded naked were just salacious rumors.) Anyone who decided to check out the goods in person had to navigate a gauntlet of fixed dice games, spiked drinks, and thugs with blackjacks ready to rob them blind.

Their recruiting methods were deplorable: they lured women to town by placing classified ads for nannies in big city papers, then forced the isolated girls into prostitution. In one case a young woman refused and so Hogan and Kate locked her in a room without food and water. She was eventually able to smuggle out a letter to her mother, but when cornered Hogan claimed to not know who she was talking about. His memory was jogged when the mother returned with a local preacher and three armed hooligans, and the girl was promptly freed.

By the end of Summer 1866 the good people of Pithole had seen enough of Ben Hogan and French Kate. They drove the couple out of town, but they just set up a new brothel in nearby Tidioute, on a spot that became notorious as “Babylon Hill.” When they got chased out of Tidioute they tried putting themselves out of the law’s reach by operating a “joy boat” in the middle of the Allegheny River, though that didn’t last long.

The two eventually split up and went their separate ways. In 1878 Hogan found himself in New York where he walked into a temperance meeting and found God. He became a missionary, using his own conversion narrative as fodder for his sermons. The act played pretty well everywhere except Oil Country, where everyone knew what kind of an asshole he was. On a mission to Oil City he stepped off the train to be greeted by a lynch mob carrying a noose… and got right back on the train and left.

(Hogan eventually died in 1916 of “senility and chronic nephritis” which sounds like a hell of a combination.)

Preachers

Preachers, in general, did not have a ton of luck in Pithole.

Reverend Hughes, a traveling Presbyterian minister, gave a stirring sermon in August 1865 on a relevant topic: “What is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul.” One attendee was so moved he gave Hughes interest in one of his wells. Hughes promptly sold that interest for $10,000 of pure profit, abandoned the ministry, fled town, and became a lawyer. The Presbyterians never quite recovered.

Still, they did better than the itinerant minister from Oberlin, Ohio who arrived in town, then in rapid succession fell from grace and then, in a drunken stupor, from the top of a derrick. He eventually wound up opening a tavern.

The Catholics at least tried. The Reverend Joseph L. Finucane was sent to town and set up a church, St. Patrick’s, which opened in December 1865 but never saw significant attendance and was forced to close in May 1866. Finucane became a circuit rider, commuting back and forth between Pithole and Franklin.

Only the Methodists saw any success, most of that due to the tireless efforts of the Reverend Darius S. Steadman, the holiest man in Pithole. (Possibly the only holy man in Pithole.) He raised money by turning in unlicensed drinking establishments for a bounty, which eventually raised enough money to build a church on a hill. The first sermons were held on New Year’s Day 1866 and it was formally consecrated in May of that year. I’d love to say more about the Rev. Steadman, but he was just such a boring goody two-shoes there’s not much to add.

Transit

Okay. So we touched on it above, but the only way to get to Pithole was on foot. There were no roads into town, certainly no railroads, and Pithole creek was non-navigable.

While this meant that all supplies had to be trucked in at great expense, it also meant that all the oil also had to be trucked out, at an even greater expense. The thick mud also made all travel slow and extremely hazardous.

The locals knew that a high-quality road would help, so there were two big pushes to get one built. In May 1865 former army general used his organizational skills to start building a corduroy road out of town. In June some folks began building a plank road to connect Pithole to Titusville.

Unfortunately these were toll roads, and the teamsters just evaded the tolls by off-roading before they hit a toll plaza. Which meant the roads soon fell into disrepair, and the mud around them kept getting worse and worse.

Several plans were made to connect the area to the rail network by running a spur along the creek. But progress was slow and uneven, and only a handful of lines were actually built. The ones that did exist were constantly squabbling. When the Oil City and Pithole Railroad began grading the tracks below a depot for the Warren and Franklin Railroad, Warren and Franklin sent out work crews to tear up the fresh tracks. Jacob Shirk, director of the Oil City and Pithole, tried to stop the fracas but got rushed by one of the Warren and Franklin workers, David White (no relation). Shirk drew a pistol but was too scared to fire and fled back into town, pursued by sixty angry railroad workers. Then a huge riot promptly broke out between the workers and the drunks in the streets.

With no rail and no roads, other attempts were made to get the oil out of town through a method borrowed from the logging industry: pond freshets. The basic idea is simple and elegant: you dam up a creek to raise the level of the water, then smash the dam and hope the resulting floodwaters are enough to carry your barges down to a more navigable section of the waterway. While this worked well for logs, it did not work so great for barrels full of crude oil. Some barrels did make it through, but many more were smashed and spilled their contents into the already disgusting waters of Pithole Creek.

The complete lack of transportation options was fine with exactly one group: the teamsters. They had started off charging $1 a barrel to haul oil from Pithole to Titusville, but once they realized they were the only game in town they colluded to jack prices up to $4 a barrel. They were making more than most of the skilled laborers and oilmen, and frequently made more of a profit from hauling the oil than the producers were making from selling it.

Even so, they were the lifeblood of the city. They made up the majority of the residents and transient population and were the only real economic force, mostly because they were hoovering up all the free money.

Not everyone was happy with this state of affairs. One person who did something about it was Samuel van Syckel, who decided to bypass the teamsters entirely by laying a 2″ pipe that would allow him to pump oil from Pithole to a depot near the Oil Creek railroad to the west — the world’s first oil pipeline. Construction began in September 1865 and was finished in early October. The line was capable of moving 81 barrels of oil per hour, or 2,500 barrels per day. It worked so well that van Syckel ran a second pipeline beside it, which opened in early December. Competitors built a third pipeline than ran south to Oleopolis on the Allegheny River, which also opened in December. A fourth pipeline route opened in March of the following year.

The pipelines charged a very reasonable fee of $1 a barrel, which drastically undercut the teamsters and put hundreds of them out of work overnight. They did not take it lying down. They tried sabotage, once even setting fire to the holding tanks at the far end of the pipeline and holding firefighters at bay with pistols as they burned. When the pipeline companies hired armed guards to protect their investment, the teamsters attacked them and picked fights whenever they could, but they were fighting a losing battle.

Eventually, the teamsters responded by slashing their prices back to a more reasonable level of $1.25 per barrel. It didn’t work. Everyone else took that as proof that they had been colluding to jack up the price of transport, and continued to boycott their services.

The Wells Dry Up

The irony was that just as the pipelines were finally making it possible to get oil out of Pithole economically, its wells began drying up.

Several hundred new wells were sunk after the Frazier well began producing oil in January 1865, and a good number of them began producing. By the end of the year Pithole was the most productive oilfield in the Commonwealth, producing nearly 2/3 of all the oil being pumped out of the ground.

But there were signs the wheels were coming off.

For a while the fear was overproduction. At the beginning of 1865 the price of oil was $8 a barrel, but the amount of oil coming out of Pithole pushed supply past demand and the price was down to $2.50 by the end of September. Some production difficulties temporarily pushed it back up to $6.50 in October, but by the end of the year it was back down to $3.50.

And remember: the teamsters were charging up to $4 a barrel, so no one was making bank on actual oil here until the pipelines opened. And then, they were just barely making money.

So, yeah, this was dangerous territory. At a price of $3 operators were making a paltry 20¢ per barrel. Anything below that would be sold at a loss.

Then the fear became overexploitation. The Homestead Well stopped producing in late August, leading many to wonder if perhaps the area was being bled dry. Oil began flowing again a few days later, but never in the same quantities as before.

And then the Frazier well stopped producing in November. Just ahead of a sudden cold snap which closed the roads and brought production to a crashing halt.

The winter of 1865-1866 was bitterly cold, and many of the town’s permanent residents regretted cutting corners when building their drafty, uninsulated shacks. The teamsters, who were being put out of work by the new pipelines, began leaving in droves, and most of the city’s other transients decided to spend the winter in warmer climes. In a few short weeks the town’s population plummeted from 15,000 to only 4,000. That number would creep up after the spring thaw, but not by much.

Times were tough for everyone, but especially local business owners who saw 3/4 of their customers vanish overnight. Thankfully, they had been fleecing the hell out of the transients so they had cash reserves, but those began dwindling quickly.

Even the oil pipeline operators were feeling the pinch. Most of the time their pipes were idle, as production had fallen to less than half the capacity they were capable of transporting.

Fire

The collapse of oil production may have been Pithole’s undoing, but the final nail in the coffin was fire.

As you might imagine, fire was a huge problem for Pithole. The buildings were all wood and densely packed. The landscape was dotted with open-topped tanks full to brimming with crude oil. The air was filled with fumes, the water was filled with oil, and even the mud beneath their feet was impregnated with oil. A stray spark could set the entire town ablaze.

There was only one law in Pithole that anyone took seriously: no smoking. And it’s a sign of how lawless Pithole was that no one took it all that seriously. Even though the punishment was lynching.

In June 1865 two tanks at the Frazier well split open, sending oil cascading down the banks of Pithole Creek. Two dumb boys decided to hold a match to it to see what happened. What happened was the whole creek damn creek caught fire, and a hastily built earthworks was the only thing that stopped it from spreading back to the well and causing a huge explosion.

When the Grant well began producing 300 barrels a day in August 1865 the owners were taken completely by surprise. They had nowhere to put the oil, so it just started puddling everywhere. A crowd assembled to watch, when suddenly there was an explosion and flames began shooting a hundred feet into the air. Lucius Kinsley, who had been sitting on the derrick when it caught fire, dived into Pithole Creek and tried to flee but fell into a puddle of burning oil and was fried to a crisp. Twenty others suffered serious injuries.

The Grant Well caught fire again in early October when the steam engine overheated and started a small fire which spread to a holding tank which then exploded, showering flaming oil all over the worksite. The resulting fire spread quickly, destroying derricks and engine houses and causing more than $100,000 in damage. Crocus, at least, could be moved by the odd beauty of the scene:

A painter’s skill could scarce portray the beautiful scene which this well presented while burning. The elevated pipe which had poured the oil over the tops of the tanks had fallen with its support and lay prostrate upon the ground, the oil pouring from it all the while and burning as rapidly as it flowed. Nothing could surpass the beauty of this jet of burning oil. Every imaginable color was presented momentarily to the observer.

The first fire in Pithole proper broke out on December 4, 1865 when the Rochester House Hotel caught fire. It threw the city’s lack of infrastructure into stark relief: with no hydrants or running water or even a volunteer fire company there was little to be done other than forming a bucket brigade and praying that the creek water wasn’t full of oil. Only the bitter cold and damp stopped the fire from spreading too far.

It was the first of many. In December and January there was an average of one fire a week.

On December 19 the Tremont House hotel caught fire thanks to an exploding oil lamp. On December 21 the Cayuga House caught fire thanks to a defective fireplace flue.

Concerned citizens scheduled a meeting at Murphy’s Theater on January 3, 1866 to discuss what to do about all this, but so few people showed up it had to be rescheduled for the following night. No one could agree on a course of action, though, but they got additional motivation the following night when the Continental Hotel caught fire and an overheated chimney at Welch’s boarding house set fire to the roof. A petition was quickly thrown together asking the city council to spend $1,000 to purchase firefighting equipment. Which never happened, because the city council had no money.

The irony was that this was entirely a problem of Pithole’s own making. In September the Pithole City Water Company had tried to sink freshwater wells but could not convince anyone to sign up for their services. In the meantime the city had to make do with what they had on hand, namely, mud. Crocus reported that a graduate of the Berea Cheese Manufactory in Ohio had invented a “mud engine,” a sort of steam powered catapult that could sling sixty shovels of mud a second at fires. (It says something about Crocus’s tone that I am unable to decide whether this is a joke or deadly serious.)

On February 8 the Tremont Hotel burned to the ground. One of the causes may have been that when volunteer firefighters went to fetch water from the bathhouse of J.L. Shieve they discovered oil floating right on top of the water, and then other water wells began doing the same. (From context, it seems like all the drilling had started to contaminate the groundwater as well as the river.) The fire was quickly forgotten as everyone scrambled to fill their buckets with this new “surface oil.”

One resident with an affected well was widowed washerwoman Sally Ricketts; when word got out she quickly received marriage proposals from four or five “scheming Irishmen” and numerous offers to purchase her property. When she sold out for an exorbitant sum she was celebrated as “Cinderella Ricketts, the Oil Princess.” She used the funds to buy a nicer house, which burned down a month later. She still had the last laugh — oil stopped appearing in the contaminated wells just as suddenly as it had started, only a week later.

On March 8 the Star Bakery was burned down by a disgruntled ex-employee. That gave clothier Joseph Levi the idea to burn down his own store for the insurance money. On March 13 an exploding lamp set fire to the National Hotel, and the resulting fire destroyed it, a neighboring hotel, a stable, and six residences, including the one belonging to the Widow Ricketts.

Another fire on March 28 burned down eight buildings. An April 3 fire at Zinegan’s Hardware spread to other businesses, and was quickly followed by another. On April 30 some eighteen vacant buildings caught fire, wiping out the entire west side of town. Another twenty buildings burned down in June. On August 2 a massive fire swept through one of the United States Petroleum Company’s leases, causing $200,000 dollars in damage and destroying several dozen derricks.

Did the community pull together to battle this dreaded scourge? Nope. The community disbanded. Property owners just abandoned their leases, itinerant laborers picked up and left, and the volunteer fire company that had just been thrown together disbanded.

The municipal government remained as useless as ever, more concerned with factional infighting than actual civic improvements. It had been funding itself by selling business licenses, but that lifeline was starting to disappear as business after business shuttered forever.

At the same time the plummeting price of oil put the entire region’s finances in jeopardy. On March 27, 1866 the bank of Culver, Penn & Company failed and took the region’s economy with it. Bank president Charles Vernon Culver, who also happened to be the region’s representative in Congress and the president of the Reno-Pithole Railroad, was charged with fraud and embezzlement on May 16 and was just barely acquitted at trial.

On top of that, tax bills were finally coming due. The Commonwealth took a look at the dividends that United States Petroleum was paying to its investors, did some quick back-of-the-envelope math to extrapolate their profits, and demanded the company fork over $13,000 in back taxes. The company protested, claiming that the government’s figures were way off. They only caved when the Commonwealth seized their wells and prohibited them from bringing their product to market.

Eventually the unthinkable happened. By the end of the summer oil production was down to less than 1,200 barrels a day. By the end of the year the price of oil fell to $1.85 a barrel, well below the break-even point.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

The few permanent residents remaining in Pithole desperately fought to keep up their spirits by finding new distractions.

In the summer of 1866 a group of ne’er-do-wells founded the Swordsmen’s Club, with the singular goal of throwing lavish parties. The club’s motto was the mysterious “R.C.T” — only under duress would members reveal that it stood for “Rum, Cards, and Tobacco.” The organization threw Pithole’s first and only Promenade Concert and Ball on August 2, and held a few more eents in 1866 and 1867. When their favorite whore died unexpectedly of pneumonia, the members even threw a fabulous funeral for her. But eventually the members drifted out of the oil region, and the club shut down in 1868.

Just as notorious was the Forty Thieves, another social club comprised of shady operators who had to steal something small to join. They mostly loved pranks and drinking, though Ben Hogan claimed they were violent thugs who were conspiring against him. (Hogan, as usual, was talking out his ass to make himself sound tough.) They too disbanded after a year, but club president James Sheakley went on to become the Governor of Alaska.

The Swordsmen and the Forty Thieves were whistling past the graveyard. The city’s population fell to less than a thousand and its once-glorious businesses permanently closed. The Danforth House hotel, which had cost $40,000 to build, was auctioned off for firewood and fetched the princely sum of $16. (Not $16,000 mind you. Just $16.) The now-empty Bonta House in Prather City was raffled off at $10 a ticket; it was later purchased by Ida Tarbell’s father, who had it torn down and used the timbers to build the family home in Titusville.

In September 1867 the town’s second mayor, George W. Davis Jr., vanished in the dead of night with all of his money and property. Which was a problem, because he also ran the only bank remaining in town.

The biggest blow came on February 24, 1868 when an overturned kerosene lamp set fire to the home of a doctor on Holmden Street. The fire spread quickly and destroyed over half the town, including most of the remaining businesses. Horace Greeley, who was on a lecture tour in the area, gave a benefit in Titusville for the surviving townfolk, and raised a mere $75. To cover their losses of more than $100,000.

By the time of the 1870 census Pithole had only 281 residents remaining, huddled together in 44 buildings. There was no active oil production. By 1877 there were so few residents that the town disincorporated and the land was sold back to the county for a lump sum of $4.37.

That’s right. In less than a decade a once-booming town which once had more than 15,000 residents and land valued at $2,000,000 was reduced to a handful of residents and a net value of $4.37.

In 1883 Venango County auctioned the land off. There was only one bid, $175, from former resident Edward Twitchell.

Twitchell now owned the whole town lock, stock and barrel, though there was hardly anything left. The only buildings in halfway decent condition were the Methodist and Catholic churches. The Catholics eventually tore their church down and rebuilt it in Tionesta. The Methodist Church remained standing until the 1930s when it was condemned and torn down.

In the 1960s the land was donated to the Commonwealth and turned into a state park. You can go visit, though be warned there is literally nothing there — just an empty field with trails marking Pithole’s streets, next to depressions that used to be foundations and basements. (And also a visitor’s center that’s pretty informative, and some placards marking important sites around town.)

The city never quite faded from the popular imagination. It had become a thing just as oil fever gripped the nation, and the story of how it had gone from nothing to the fifth largest city in the Commonwealth and back to nothing was used as a cautionary tale. Even as late as 1914 Smith Dalyrmple, “The Oil Country Poet,” could title a collection of his works “From Pithole to California” and expect people to understand the reference.

Pithole may have been dead but the oil industry survived, churning out millions of barrels a year and exporting a good chunk of that. It soon became the country’s third most valuable export, after cotton and wheat.

Pennsylvania would not be part of the boom, though. The Commonwealth’s oil production peaked in 1891 and dropped to almost nothing by the end of the century. There’s almost no straight oil production left there, though you can still drive up to Venango County to see McClintock Well #1, the world’s oldest continually operating oil well. There is a lot of fracking, though that too is dying down.

Later in life Ida Tarbell and her brother visited Pithole, where they had lived while they were growing up. There was nothing left, and it made her philosophical.

Thirty years before, Pithole had been a city of perhaps twenty thousand men and women with all the equipment for a permanent life. Now here were only stripped fields where no outline of a town remained. We spent a long day trying to place the famous wells, to fix my father’s tank shops, so profitable while Pithole lasted, to trace the foundation of the Bonta House, which had furnished the makings of our home in Titusville. The day left us with a melancholy sense of the impermanence of human undertakings.