It Happened Here -- The Oil Driller

(Corner of NY 32 and NY81, Greenville)

We expect large towns and cities to be the homes of, and stages for, important and famous people, but for small hamlets and little rural villages their connections with the famous can often be short lived and tenuous. Often even a brief association can be a sufficient reason for an historic sign.

Edwin Laurentine Drake's encounter with history occurred when he he drilled the first oil well in the United States in 1859. His connection with Greenville, New York, in northern Greene County was that he was born there in 1819 and lived there the first six years of his life until his family moved to Castleton. Vermont. (A Vermont State historic marker at Castleton Corners commemoratives his youth and boyhood growing up in that state, as well.)

Drake left home at age 19, after a basic one room school education, apparently without any clear intentions of what he wanted to do with his life. He traveled west to Buffalo and landed a job as a night clerk on a lake steamer shuttling between Buffalo and Detroit. After a short while he joined his uncle on his farm outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. But farm life didn't suite him any better in Michigan, than it did in Vermont. He soon left the farm for the nearby town of Tecumseh, Michigan where he clerked in a hotel for two years. Eventually, he tired of clerking. He missed his friends and family, and a scant three years after leaving he was back in Vermont. But Drake did not stay long. Sensing his restlessness, his family and friends suggested he pursue his fortune in New Haven, Connecticut.

In New Haven, the tall, relatively handsome, personable young man soon landed a job in a dry goods store. After three years Drake was ready to try his considerable people skills in the larger marketplace of New York City. In short order he had a job in a large dry goods emporium on Broadway. About this time he met a woman who would become his wife. He married Philena Adams of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1845. But Philena was in frail health and they moved back to Springfield where Philena's family could be with her. Edwin went to work as an express agent on the Boston and Albany Railroad.  They had two children, in 1847 and 1849 but both died before they were two years old. The Drakes moved back to New Haven, and Edwin took a job as a conductor on the New York and New Haven Railroad. A third son was born in 1850 but in 1854 while they lived in Port Chester, New York, Philena died in childbirth, with an infant daughter. Edwin and his young son, George returned to New Haven where he could be with friends. Father and son, took up residence in the Tontine Hotel and Drake continued his job as a railroad conductor. Within two years little Georgie would also die. While illness and early death were common in the 19th century, such a string of misfortunes must have been devastating for Drake, but his ability to keep going in the face of such tragedy suggests a degree of inner strength that would soon serve him well.

In 1857 he married Laura Clarisssa Dowd and the couple moved in together in the Tontine Hotel. Just when it looked like Edwin was beginning to get his life back on track, however, Drake came down with a “malarial fever” followed by “muscular neuralgia” that resulted in varying degrees of numbness in his limbs. Drake, unable to work on moving trains, was forced to take a leave of absence from his conductor job.

With little else to do, the former railroad man began to hang out in the lobby of the Tontine Hotel. There he met James Townsend, a New Haven banker who also lived at the Tontine and other local businessmen who frequented the lobby, to exchange news, talk about business prospects and entertain each other with stories. Drake fit right in, and with his varied background, easy manner and ability to tell stories he made an interesting and affable companion. Townsend had a friend, from New York, James Bissel, who was trying to get together a group of investors to form a company to collect, refine and market a strange smelly substance that oozed from the ground in northwestern Pennsylvania known as “rock oil” or “Seneca oil,” named for the Indian tribe that once gathered it for medicinal purposes.

For some time Eastern Europeans had been digging wells for “rock oil” (petroleum) in Galicia and Rumania and using fractional distillation to produce an oil suitable for lighting purposes. But this lighting fluid remained a smokey and smelly light source until almost the mid-1800's when a pharmacist from Lvov and a local plumber created a lamp with a chimney that largely eliminated the problems. For many years North Americans and the British ignored these developments relying on whale oil, as their primary source of illumination. With the decimation of the world 's whale population, however, top quality whale oil began approaching $25.00/ gallon, (over $200 in today's money), and demand for a cheaper lamp oil grew. An ex-British Admiral, Thomas Cochrane and a Canadian geologist, Dr. Abraham Gesner, refined an oil from asphalt, naming the product Kero-elaion (Greek--'wax-oil'), and then changed the name to Kero-sene, so it would resemble another recognized lighting fuel, camphene, which was refined from turpentine. Camphene, though a good lighting fuel was highly flammable and often caused fires in people's homes. In England, Scottish chemist James Young set up an industry refining Kerosene (called Coal-oil in Britain) using cannel coal as a base, while in some U.S. cities coal was converted to a gas and piped to city street lights and the homes of well-to-do subscribers.
 
 

 (Corner of Jefferson St. and Fifth Ave., Troy) The telescoping iron tank enclosed in this brick shell kept the
 gas at a constant pressure. Other buildings, now gone, included coal sheds, a retort house that converted the coal to a gas, a condenser building, an exhauster building (pump house) and a purifying house where sulphur was removed from the gas.

Another early experimenter with petroleum was Samuel Kier. Kier operated two salt water wells in Tarentum, a town about twenty miles northwest of Pittsburgh. In an age before refrigeration, salt and brine solution were important products in food preservation. In central NewYork and western Pennsylvania wells were drilled to reach underground pools of highly saline water which could be pumped up and evaporated to form fine crystalline salt, highly desired for preserving meat and fish. But Keir's wells became contaminated with “rock oil” – a common misfortune in Pennsylvania salt wells. Rather than skimming off and discarding the oil, as most salt well drillers did, or shutting down the well, in disgust if the flow of oil became too troublesome, as some producers did, Keir experimented to see if he could find any use for the substance. First he collected a large number of folk remedies that extolled the virtues of “rock oil” and he took his well skimmings and bottled the stuff as a patent medicine, selling it for $0.50 a half pint bottle. Next, he hired a chemist and with him developed a method of distilling the oil into several products, including petroleum jelly and kerosene.

In New Haven, Edwin Drake bought $200 worth of shares in the new “Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company” and for a time was elected its president. Eventually Drake would have to relinquish the shares and the office. But Townsend and the other investors thought enough of Drake and his enthusiasm for the project to hire him as their company agent in Titusville, Pennsylvania.   In fact, enthusiasm, an engaging personality, and the fact he was out of work and had nothing better to do may have been Drake's most outstanding qualifications for the job.  Drake also held a pass from his former employment as a conductor that allowed him to travel on any railroad for free – an additional plus for a cash strapped start-up company, that had to watch every penny.

In December 1857 Drake visited Titusville Taking the railroad to Erie, Pennsylvania, he stopped first at Syracuse and observed the salt works there. In Titusville Drake explored the “seeps” along Oil Creek and observed how oil was traditionally gathered. Wool blankets were used to soak up oil and water that collected in shallow collection trenches. The water was allowed to evaporate from the blankets, then the oil was wrung out into barrels. It was obvious to Drake that this method could never produce a sufficient quantity of crude oil, so Drake turned to drilling. Accounts differ about who first thought of drilling for oil. Two stories, set in different locations have George Bissel coming upon a display of bottles or an advertising poster in a pharmacy for Kier's rock oil patent medicine. Both featured a picture of a salt well derrick, the source of Bissel's panacea. Other historians point to early documents authored by Drake which described his intentions to “bore” for oil.

The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, originally chartered in New York, was reorganized as the Seneca Oil Company of Connecticut¹. The new company bolstered by a report from a noted Yale chemist, Benjamin Silliman, who they had hired to research the feasibility of distilling Kerosene from petroleum, announced itself ready to begin the business of extracting oil. The former New Haven railroad conductor was dispatched back to Titusville. But before he departed, James Townsend began to mail him instructions and important looking packets addressed to “Colonel Edwin Drake – Titusville, PA. “ By the time Drake arrived, thanks to the efforts of the local postmaster, trying find him, the whole town was buzzing about the mysterious “Colonel Drake” and his new enterprise. Though Drake had never served a day in the military, Townsend figured the title and the publicity would help him command respect, make contacts and attract employees for this unusual and highly speculative venture.

When Drake arrived he leased an island in Oil Creek, hired laborers and began digging his well. He did not get far before it became obvious that a hand dug well was impractical, as it quickly filled with groundwater from the Oil Creek valley. Drake went to Tarentum to recruit salt well drillers. Salt well drillers, however, had a reputation for being rowdy and heavy drinkers. The first drillers Drake hired failed to show up for work. A second crew showed up drunk and showed little enthusiasm for the crazy idea of drilling for a “worthless commodity” like rock oil. Finally Drake approached a blacksmith familiar with making equipment for the salt well industry, William A.“Uncle Billy” Smith, and his son. The pair could do the work, knew the technology and could make any modifications Drake might need for oil well drilling. Drake's crew brought in a steam engine, built a drilling tower and set up for drilling. Drake began drilling, but again he was beset by the problem of ground water contamination and debris clogging the well, as he drilled toward bedrock. After being forced to suspend drilling, Drake came up with a solution. As he drilled, he would drive down an iron pipe which would encase the well and the top of the drill bit.²

Drilling proceeded slowly. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months. The Seneca Oil Company ran out of money. For several weeks James Townsend kept the operation going by advancing Drake monies from his own account. Finally, Thompson sent Drake a last bank draft with instructions to shut down the operation, pay off his creditors and come home. Luckily, Townsend's letter took several days to arrive. On August 27, 1859, at 69.5 feet, the drill bit at the well suddenly dropped into a subterranean crevasse. “Uncle Billy” decided to shut down for the day while he went home and pondered what this meant, and what he should do next. The following morning the blacksmith returned to find the well flooded with a rich mixture of oil and water. When Townsend's letter arrived later that day Drake could telegraph Townsend back with the news he had struck oil! and with the money he sent him, he would begin buying up whiskey barrels all over the county to store it in. With a well producing twenty barrels a day, he would soon exhaust his existing supply of barrels.

What had seemed like a crazy idea and had been called by the local residents “Drake's Folly” began to attract competition after only a few short months of successful operation. Up and down the flood plain of Oil Creek competitors derricks began springing up, copying innovations Drake and Smith had adapted from salt well drilling operations or pioneered themselves. Then disaster struck. On October 6, 1859 “Uncle Billy” was checking on a storage tank, while carrying a lantern. Volatile fumes from the open tank ignited, setting the tank on fire. Smith escaped with his life but the derrick, the pump house with its expensive steam engine, several vats of oil and Smith's cabin were destroyed in the fierce oil fed fire. It took several more months to get back in production, but by then the world's first oil boom was in full swing³and over-production was starting to collapse the price for oil. Soon competitors' wells were out-producing Drake's well and with falling oil prices the Seneca Oil Company was in trouble. Drake was let go and a year later became Justice of the Peace in Titusville, while supplementing his salary by buying and selling oil leases.  

In 1863,  Drake returned to New York City intending to continue the business of buying and selling oil leases. Within a year a combination of bad luck, bad business decisions, and failing health left Drake destitute. He returned to his kinfolk in Vermont, but the cold and dampness of the northeast aggravated his condition. In 1869, while looking for work in New York City, he happened to run into an old associate from Titusville who was shocked and saddened by his condition. His friend returned home and helped raise $4000 from towns people who had benefited and even made fortunes from Drake's discovery in their home town. With the money he was able to resettle in Bethlehem, PA, near a famous “hydropathic institute” where Drake was able to find some relief from his illness. In 1873 the State of Pennsylvania awarded him a $1500 a year annuity for himself and his wife, for his perseverance in discovering a resource in their state that had created large amounts of tax dollars for the state and made wealth for many of their citizens.

1New York laws at that time made investors liable for all debts their companies incurred while in Connecticut, investors were liable only for the amount of their investment, and no one knew if this enterprise would be a fantastic success or an expensive boondoggle.

2Drake's innovation became standard in the industry. If he had patented and protected his patent, this idea alone might have made him a wealthy man but unfortunately he did not and wealth would elude him.

3The oil boom greatly changed northwestern Pennsylvania. Titusville had been a small community that owed its existence to the lumber industry. Many believed after the big trees had been lumbered off Titusville would disappear. But oil changed that

Marker of the Week -- Marker for Melon

Charles Bender must have been something of a perfectionist. In 1900, after seventeen years of "persistent experimentation" he traveled to New York city to market his "Golden Queen" muskmelons.  Starting with a melon variety introduced in 1876 by a local Albany seed company,  year after year Bender saved and planted the the seeds of his "best" melons, gradually improving their sweetness, aroma, flavor and size.  The melons he sold to the Waldorf Astoria's Restaurant, the Savoy, the Lambs and other top restaurants averaged over 7 lbs., with thin rinds whose flesh could be eaten right down to the rind.  For the restauranteurs an important feature was their durability. "Benders," as they came to be known, didn't reach peak sweetness until three days after they had been picked, and if picked before fully ripe could last a week or more. In one month the Belmont Hotel would buy $2,200 of melons.  Before the Saratoga Hand Melon farm became a traditional favorite with the Saratoga summer racing crowd, Bender was selling his melons to them to be shipped all over the country.  In 1917 the Joseph Harris Seed Company began selling "Bender Supreme" melon seeds but Bender's seeds were only part of his success. William Taylor who learned the business from Bender, eventually buying him out, explained his secret. He "babied them in every way possible."  In dry weather he hauled to the fields a 300 gallon skid tank of rainwater collected from the eaves of his barns and other buildings, ladling water over each and every plant.  In damp weather the thousands of maturing fruit were raised upon wooden plates or trios of cobblestone that littered the stony fields.  "Bender had no kids. The melons were like his kids."

E-Mail Me: If you have comments about this blog or any other thing having to do with NYSHM's I would be delighted to hear from you. I would be especially interested if you know of any new or interesting markers or can report on any efforts to restore old markers. My email is tba998@gmail.com I look forward to hearing and sharing your thoughts on this blog.