The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-21 00:00:00

The Oil Regions of Pennsylvania.

(Fro in the Times' Correspotulent)
OIL CITY, OCt. 5.
The more one sees of Oil City and its surround-
ings the less one likes them, though the more one
sees of them the :more one has reason to be astonished
at its sudden growth and the extraordinary business
activity which prevails from dawn till night, filling
the mud of its main street with traffic, covering the
broad waters of the river with rafts and scows and
barges and steamers of every kind—all, streets, boats,
tnd rafts, engaged alike in the universal labour of
transporting oil. The city proper—that is to say,
its business part—consists solely of one main tho-
roughfare, so called because it is almost impassable.
There is so much water in it that it literally more
resembles an old canal than a new street, and but
for the immense boulder stones which occasionally
interrupt its flow of mud, I am certain that more
traffic might be got along it by rafts than by carts.
Nothing but a shantybecomes such a street, and with
praiseworthy consistency the people have built no-
thing but shanties. The...* are hung against the side
of the cliff, set loosely on piles, or stuck on mounds of
earth, without the slightest regard to the comfort of

either neighbours or occupiers, and without the most
remote approachto anykind of method or regularity.
If there is room on some point of rock for a shanty
between the derricks of two oil wells or 'between two
oil tanks themselves, well and good. The frame is
put together in the course of a few days, and the
building finished in less than a fortnight. It makes
not the smallest difference if on examination of any
of these enviable sites it is found that there is not
room for the intended structure. Then the coat is
cut according to the cloth and the house built in all
sorts of odd ways to suit its odd position. It is
plain that when the plan of Oil City was conceived
people lacked faith. They did not believe that
the oil yield could last, and so made their abiding
place temporary. They are not only frame houses
which exist here, but of the lightest description of
structure, of that kind known as balloon frame. It
is of such houses strewn pell-mell on either side of
the muddy channel I have spoken of that Oil City
consists, and bankslderricks, hotels, vats of oil,
land officers, refineries, mountains of empty barrels,
mountains of full barrels, with grog-shops, clothing
stores, rough piles of old machinery, broken-down
waggons, barges moored alongside the street as
lodging-houses, &c., are all mixed up together in the
widest confusion and dirtiest disarray. No two places
are alike. No two places have any common point of
resemblance, save in their mud, their greasiness, and
their stench of the omnipresent oil. In these three
Unpleasant particulars no building is better than the
rest, and it is difficult to imagine how in each parti-
cular any could be worse. Such a thoroughfare is
at once the Cheapside, Cornhill, and Thames-street
of Oil City, and if your readers can imagine it
crowded with teams, reeking with oil, and thronged
with a muddy population from all parts of America
—from California to Nova Scotia, from Canada to
Texas, they will have some idea of everyday life in Oil
City. Yet all this has grown up in little more than
three years. In little more than three years it has
changed from a poor "half-scratched" unproductive
farm land, with a population of less than 50 souls,
to such a place as I have tried to indicate—
to a wooden city with nearly 9,000 inhabitants,
having two newspapers, two large banks, half a
dozen hotels, ten oil refineries, five churches, and
one public school. Not included in the estimate of
Oil City, but forming, nevertheless, its only clean
and pretty suburb, is a village town on the opposite
bank of Oil Creek called Cottage-hill. It is a very
picturesque semi-mountainous ridge, on the slopes
of which are scattered the residences of the oil kinds
and princes, as they are termed, of this neighbour-
hood. There are houses belonging to men who
have made their two or three million dollars out of
" ile"-i-Anen who do not reside in the " region," as
it is called, but who occasionally come down to look
after their interests, and who, following the rule of
extravagance which prevails throughout Petrolia,
have built themselves there handsome little villas in
which to stay during their brief visits. They are all
exceedingly neat and pretty houses, much after the
style of the Swiss chalets. Considering that every-
thing has to be brought with great difficulty from
long distances it is surprising to find how elegantly
some of these houses are furnished, and sometimes,
also, how roughly they are occupied. From this hill
a fine view can be had over the picturesque country
around, and especially down into the most unpic-
turesque mudflat on which Oil City stands or rather
is strewed. Everywhere up and down the river and
up and down Oil Creek flat barges are being towed
laboriously through the water by horses harnessed to
their bows as to a cart. These river flats, with empty
barrels, are crowding up in scores, and their teams
require very careful driving to avoid collision with
the barges laden with oil, either in barrels or in bulk,
which come spinning down with the force of the cur-
rent at a great velocity. Everywhere, on the hills, in
the valleys, from the back-yards of houses, and even
at the corners of streets and passages, rises the irre-
pressible brown, greasy derrick ; everywhere are
fussy little steam-engines and busy walking beams
pumping the brown, stinking fluid into vats, tubs,
barrels, or tanks ; anything, in fact, that will hold
it, and into a good many things which, as it
turns out, will not hold it at all. Everywhere the
oil is flowing, either of its own force or by the force
of the pumps ; everywhere its gas is escaping
and so laden is the whole atmosphere with
this nauseous miasma that the pipes and tanks are
sometimes covered with white stalactites of paraffin
• wax which the gas has deposited.
The visitor who stops in the hotels of Oil City
will be inclined to think leniently of the extrava-
gance of the oil princes who have built their little
villa up on Cottage-hill. Unlike either Pithole
City, Titusville, Franklin, and other oil centres,
this city owns hotels only in name. One might as
well expect the hotel to himself as a bed or a room,
and if it be true that every one has to eat a peck of
dirt in his lifetime, then there is no part of the
world where the task can be got through with such
uninterrupted rapidity as here. Everything in the
hotels is in the rough, and roughest of all is the
company, for people only come here to make money,
and get out of the place as fast as they can. The
discomforts of life are very grievous they admit, but
they are not going to live here, and they don't at all
see why they should make the place more comfort-
able for those who will come after them. It is the
same with the shopkeepers, the hotelkeepers, and
with all. They know their customers will never be
regular customers, and they know that they them-
selves intend to leave as soon as they have made
enough and can sell their business at a profit, and
is in a purely transitory state. No
thus everything
roads are made, though for the want of them oil
costs 3} dollars a barrel to bring from the wells to
this city, when a tax of lOc. a barrel would pay for
a good road in a month, and reduce the cost of its
conveyance from pi to 2 or even less. No
bridges are made, though hundreds of barrels of
. oil are wrecked in the streams for the want of
them. Getting oil is a comparatively easy task ;
but getting it away from the wells is a very dif-
ferent matter. Oil City is literally choked with
oil that can find no means of transport. The
Atlantic and Great Western Railway, which has
opened up this region, is taking it away by trains
clay and night ; yet, though it receives the enormous
rate of 4d. per ton per mile, and takes almost thou-
sands of tons daily, it can
effect but little towards
getting rid of Oil City's accumulation, or meeting
the immense demand which is existing' through the
States for the supply of petroleum for a hundred
purposes. In the same way the track for that city
to Pithole Creek is all but impassable even for
horsemen. A horse tram could be made here in a
month for 1350,000, which would pay $1,000,000 in
a year. The extraordinary mixture of energy and
apathy in the American
apparent than in these oil regions. They run up a
city, as at Pithole, in four months, yet the rough
mountain track along which the oil must go to the
market is utterly disregarded. The well-owner
says, " If they want my oil, why they must come
for it and take it away ;" and the consumer who
buys it at the well says. " If I have to pay so much
more for getting it down, the well-owner must sell
it so much cheaper ; and thus both seller and buyer
inadvertently combine to keep up a tax on the pro-
fits of both, which, if imposed by the State, would