The Titusville Herald from Titusville, Pennsylvania • Page 203

PAGE TEN. SECTION A THE TITUSVILLE HERALD. TITUSV1LLE. PEMNA. MONDAY, AUGUST 24, 1959 Drake's Suffering May Have Been Caused by Malaria and Arthritis His Letters Are Full Of Sickness By JAMES B.

STEVENSON Continued From Page Three, This Section this structure was raised, the work of two dozen men in an hour, it fascinated the villagers. "Drake's yoke," they called it. By that time it was August, 185S, but no driller showed up. Drake went to Tarentum and learned that the man regarded Drake as "crazy" and had promised to come to Titusville merely to get rid of him. Failing to get another competent driller that fall, work suspended for the winter.

February is a mean month for travel in northwestern Pennsyl- but Drake forced himself to go to Tarentum again. Here he hired a 46-year-old blacksmith, W. A. Smith of Salina, who was on the point of quitting blacksmithing for farming. Known henceforth to history as "Uncle Billy," Smith agreed to drill for Draka in Titusville at $2.50 a day and 'throw in" the services of his boy, Sam, 15.

With the lad and his daughter, Margaret, Smith arrived in Titusville about mid-May. Drake and Smith got well together, but plenty of trouble lay directly ahead Drove Pipe to Bed Rock At first they tried digging a common well hole before putting the steam engine to its task of driving the drilling tools into the earth. However, with Oil Creek only a short distance away and higher than the hole, water seeped in and caused one cave-in after another. At this point Drake's Yankee ingenuity came to the fore. He got two sections of cast-iron pipe, each 10 feet long, and with a white oak battering ram Drake and Smith drove the pipe to bed rock, shutting off the water.

Inside the pipe they lowered the drilling tools and put the steam to work, making the hole deeper by three feet a day. While Drake was toiling away Titusville nearly forgot him. His plans was regarded as visionary. When Drake's close Titusville friend, the merchant R. D.

Fletcher, visited New York, he called on an old acquaintance and told him what Drake was doing. The man burst out laughing. "You don't mean to tell me that Drake thinks he can get oil out of solid rock?" he roared. Work at the well stopped on the hot Saturday afternoon of August 27 just after the drill, 69 feet in the hole, slipped six inches into a crevice. The men pulled out the tools and quit for the day.

The next afternoon Smith and his boy visited the well, not far from their house, and saw a dark fluid floating on the water near the top of the pipe. Quickly Smith plugged a piece of rain spouting, lowered it into the hole and brought up oiL "Uncle Billy" and his boy were the first persons in the world to go nearly crazy with excitement over finding oil. They thus became the leaders in a long The Colonel's Daughter This photograph of Mary Laura "Mamie" Drake came to light only last month. It was presented to the museum at Drake Park by Mrs. Mary Bowman Kaufhold of Akron, 0., whose grandfather was an editor of an early oil journal.

This is the first time the picture has been made public. Mary Drake was born March 2, 1865, at Bethlehem, and died in 1917 at Germantown. This photograph was taken in Red Bank.iN. where the family lived in the later part of the 1860s. Mamie Drake became the mother of Mrs.

Marie Emory Carver, one of the two granddaughters of Colonel and Mrs. Drake who made plans to attend Centennial ceremonies. parade. Oil fever is violent and contagious. Drake was immediately notified.

Admittedly the day was Sunday, but this writer refuse to believe that for such a reason Drake didn't bother to visit his well until Monday. He more than likely saddled up and tore across Watson's Flats toward the well like mad. But the well could still cause trouble, even though it was producing several barrels a day. Early in October, when the oil industry was only six weeks old, it caught fire when "Uncle Billy" entered the tank house with a flare. The building, oil vats, 300 barrels of oil, the derrick and the Smith house were destroyed.

Drake was returning from Erie when a man on a lathered horse rode up, panting out the news. The colonel's wit did not desert him. After listening carefully, he asked: "Did the hole burn?" Drake Drilled Three Wells Drake drilled a second well, then a third. At that time he might have gone out on his own and made some money, but it was too late. The best land, which he could have had so cheaply, had been snapped up by others." In 1860 he was elected a justice of the peace in Titusville.

In those busy days the legal work made the office worth about J3.000 a year. At the same time. Drake bought oil on commission for Schiefflin Brothers and of New York, the chemical and drug house. His total yearly income probably amounted to $5,000 a year. Three years later Drake sold the land he owned in the heart of Titusville netting about 510,000, and with 515,000 to $20,000 in his pocket he left Titusville for Wall Street.

By 1866 he had lost it and was broke. Drake Constantly HI Fond of companionship, conversation and funny stories, and of a drink now and then, Drake with his determination and agile mind might have gone as far in wealth and ease as many of the oil princes and coal barons later did, except for one thing. He was a sick man. For with him to Titusville, in addition to his family, had come illness. It never left his side.

His vitality was sufficient to Serving individuals, business and industry in the Original Oil Region for 29 of ihe Oil Industry's llrsi 100 years. First Loan Company In Titusville Home of the World's First Oil Well COMMUNITY LOAN Established 1930 Locally Operated 118 N. Franklin St Titusville, Pcnna. spur him through the rugged and frustrating days which culminated in the completion of the world's first well drilled specifically for oil. He had found the path to the summit of success.

He had only to drill more wells, with a royalty interest his prestige could easily have commanded, in territory where dry holes at first were the exception and not the rule. Then he would have been on easy street for life. But the opposite was to come to pass. He did not have the strength to continue. Will and mind were ready for the trail, quite likely, but not the body.

Back in 1857 Drake's resignation from the railroad was caused by "a severe illness of a malarial type," an associate later reported. Recovering in a few months he went to Titusville, and again made the trip less than a. half year later. In winter here it rained four days a week, Drake wrote, and not the snow but the mud was knee deep. The wide-eyed son of "Uncle Billy" said when he first saw Drake in May, 1859, that the 5 man was sick.

One of his two best friends in Titusville, Mr. Fletcher, the man who backed Drake with credit because he liked him, said that Drake was in poor health. In April, 1860, after having unlocked nature's secret oil chambers, Drake himself noted that "my health is very poor." He was an invalid from this very year, a Philadelphia newspaperman was to report before a decade had passed, suffering from "muscular neuralgia." (Editor's Note: See the Drake letters on Page Thirteen of this section). The colonel, as his backers first called him for prestige, but a title he deserves as a leader, had a jewel for a wife. As her husband's health went from bad to worse, Mrs.

Drake tried to help support the family, which now numbered four children. But toward the end of the colonel's days she, too, fell ill from overwork when she took in boarders. Old oil region friends raised nearly $5,000 for them. It should have been much more. Drake was extremely grateful, but medical bills and family expenses soon took it all.

In 1869 only ten years after his spectacular well, Drake wrote to a friend about his "almost useless leg and foot." In 1873 he stopped walking, a cripple at 54. That year the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania gave him an annual pension of $1,500. In 1874 he told a correspondent apologetically that his hand was so numb it had delayed his writing a reply. Five years later, in 1879, he was gray, much stouter, and sat in an invalid chair all the time. His limbs withered and he suffered great pain.

In 1880 relief came in the form of death, at Bethlehem, Penna. What ailed this man? What disease incapacitated him so that he could not enjoy the fruits of the promised land of light into which he had led humanity? A medical authority has diagnosed the patient for us, 79 years after death, without seeing the living being or the body. But enough evidence is present for a hypothesis. First, personality has something to do with health. The lean and hungry Drake was of the imaginative, inventor type, a kind of individual who is often nervous or even neurasthenic, subject to indigestion, intervals of fatigue and a variety of aches and pains.

Malaria Common at the Time Further, in his time malaria was common. The illness which removed him from the employ of the New Haven Railroad was described at the time as malarial in type and might very well have been just that. The benign, chronic, long-continued form of this disease may greatly impair the health of an individual over a long period without killing. Finally, the muscular neuralgia and following invalidism with loss of the use of his limbs, inactivity in the reclining chair, a weight gain but with great pain and withered together, the medical authority said, these sound like rheumatoid arthritis which, when affecting the spine particularly, as it did with Drake, is sometimes called spondylitis. However, with muscular degeneration, polio is not to be ruled out in case.

In summary, it seemi likely that Drake was a particular personality type with symptoms related to his situational difficulties, had chronic and recurring rheumatoid arthritis and generally weakened health from chronic, recurring malaria. To overcome physical handicaps like these a person must have a tremendous internal drive. Drake, fond of gentlemanly comforts, possessed enough of this to see him through the extremely trying period from May. 1S5S, until August, 1S59. But' by then he was exhausted and needed his remaining inner compulsions to battle his aches and pains.

While perhaps not content merely to have showed the way, he appeared to be. And appearance matters a great deal. After all, appearance wns one of the reasons why they sont Drake out here in the first place. Keep Calm, Drake Advises To the officers of the oil company which hired him, Drake directed this letter. Written in Titusville on March 24, I860, five months after the first well, it says: "Dear Friends, Bowditch and Townsend.

Your telegrams just received. I have been down sick. Will have the oil shipped Tuesday as I cannot get cars before that time. Will come to New Haven as soon as possible. Don't get excited over anything you hear.

Our second well is a good one. Yours, E. L. Drake." Three comments are deserved: (1) Drake was sick again, as usual; (2) cars for hauling oil were would continue to be for years; (3) Drake was over-optimistic about the second well. It never was "good." Drake's Rendezvous With Destiny By DR.

S. K. STEVENS Executive Director Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission Tn the small valley of Oil Creek about a half-mile south of Titusville, Pennsylvania, lies a spot of the greatest historical significance to Pennsylvania and to the world. Here on August 27, 1859, Edwin L. Drake completed drilling the world's first successful oil well.

That achievement masks the birth of the far-flung petroleum industry of today. Though often referred to as the "discovery" of oil, Drake's achievement was not of such dimension. Petroleum was not an unknown substance before 1859. Early French missionaries are believed to have been describing an oil spring near present Cuba, New York, they wrote in the 17th. century that it contained a "thick and heavy water, which ignites like brandy, and boils in bubbles of flame when fire is applied to it." A century later there are reports of trade in oil brought to Niagara by the Seneca Indians.

This is the reason why "Seneca Oil" became one of the earliest terms for petroleum. The first document known to indicate the presence of oil in Pennsylvania is the Map of the Middle British Colonies in America published by Lewis Evans in 1755. Valued as Medicine Even before 1840 the greatest single known source of petroleum in America was along Oil Creek. As white settlers moved into the region and settled along this stream, they began to skim petroleum from little springs either on the bank or in the bed of the stream. Various methods were used to secure this oil.

Early settlers valued and used the petroleum primarily as a medicine. Petroleum was also known as an unwanted by-product of salt wells. The producers of salt had first obtained their brine from salt springs; but as early as 1808 David and Joseph Ruffner on the Kanawha River in present West Virginia had worked out a method of drilling wells to obtain a greater quantity of brine. Drilling soon became a standard practice for salt producers in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. Frequently the brine pumped from these salt wells was accompanied by petroleum.

Nothing was done with the unwelcome petroleum except to bottle and sell small amounts of it as a medicine. The turn of events, however, was shaping a growing, need for both a new illuminating fluid and a lubricant. The growth of cities was creating a demand for cheap, safe burning fluids for lighting. Likewise, as the industrial revolution progressed there was a swelling demand for lubricants for the increasing amount of new machinery. These new demands coincided with a decline in the supply of whale oil and when, as well, the supply of lard oil was insufficient to meet the needs of a changing civilization.

This situation was worldwide and led first to efforts to develop methods of obtaining oil from coal by distilling. In Canada, Abraham Gesner produced such an oil and gave it the name of "keroselain," a combination of the Greek words for "wax" and "oil." It later came to be called "kerosene." Luther and William Atwood in Boston developed "coup oil," a lubricant made by mixing vegetable and animal with an ci! distilled from coal tar. The result of all these experiments, and of others in Great Britain, was that by 1859 there were more than fifty companies in the United manufacturing oil from coal. Kerosene was displacing other burning fluids for lighting purposes because it was cheaper and safer. One large plant in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, had a capacity of 6,000 gallons of kerosene daily.

Kier the Medicine Man In Pittsburgh, Samuel M. Kier became interested about 1845 in making use of the petroleum produced by salt wells operated by his father at Tarentum on the Allegheny River. bottled and sold For a time he the petroleum SAMUEL as medicine. He made further experiments in distilling the petroleum to produce an illuminant. By 1854 he had succeeded to such an extent that he built a refinery with a five-barrel still at Pittsburgh to manufacture what was called "carbon oil." He is generally considered to have been the first commercial refiner of petroleum, and the site is so marked.

By 1S58 Kier and the Pittsburgh firm of McKeown and Finley was selling sizable quantities of carbon oil to New York City distributors. Petroleum from western Pennsylvania waj also being sold to textile mills for use as a lubricant. The growing demand outran the supply; and the price of oil climbed from seventy-five cents to two dollars a gallon. Necessity is always a mother of invention and the development of these markets set the stage for the drilling of the Drake Well. Wt can bypass the lon well known story of Brewer, Eveleth, Bissell and others and Silliman's experiments to come directly to the Drake Well story.

The Seneca Oil Company on March 23, 1858 leased a Titusville property from the earlier Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company. Edwin L. Drake was named general agent of the Seneca Oil Company at an annual salary of $1,000, and in the spring of 1858 he was sent to Titusville to begin the production of oil. His background was not distinguished and he had been rather a failure in life. One major reason he was selected for his rendezvous with destiny was the fact that as a former railroad conductor he held a pass enabling him to make the trip cost to the promoters.

Arriving at Titusville in May, 1858, Drake went quietly about'his work. He attempted first to use the well known, method to dig a well at the site of the principal spring on the Hibbard farm leased by his company. The workmen struck a vein of water that drove them out of the pit. Drake decided that it would be better to drill. Lacking any previous experience in this work, he went to Tarentum to observe the man- to hire a driller for his own project.

This experience in salt well drilling became all important. Returning to Titusville, he ordered from Erie a six-horsepower steam engine and a "Long John" stationary, tubular boiler to furnish power for the drilling; but his driller did not appear. Drake could not find an immediate replacement, and since it was growing late in the season he suspended his plans for drilling until the winter had passed. In the spring of 1859 Drake secured the services of "Uncle Billy," William A. Smith of Salina, Pennsylvania, who had worked on the salt wells at Tarentum.

Smith thereby became the often forgotten hero of the "discovery of oil." Smith made the drilling tools kind commonly used in drilling salt Drake at Tarentum. There was some difficulty in starting the well because ground water continually caused the hole to collapse, Drake solved this problem by obtaining several ten-foot sections of cast-iron pipe from Erie, driving the two feet down to bedrock with an oak battering ram lifted by a windlass. This too was a new ap- jproach. With this done, drilling was begun at that depth about the middle of August, 1859. 'Black Gold 1 Spurti Up On Saturday afternoon, August 27, as Smith and his helpers were nearly finished for the day, the drill dropped into a crevice at a depth of sixty-nine feet from the surface and slipped downward six inches.

The men pulled the tools out of the hole and then went home with no thought of having struck oil. Late Sunday afternoon "Uncle Billy" visited the well, peered into the pipe, and saw a dark fluid floating on top of the water within a few feet of the derrick floor. Ladling up a sample, he found that it was oil. Greatly excited, he sent his boy running to the Upper Mill crying, "They've struck oil." Black gold began to spurt from the soil of northwestern Pennsylvania and it was soon to rival in importance the yellow R. D.

FLETCHER Titusville merchant who loaned Drake money so that he could continue drilling. Fletcher later built the brick business block now occupied by the Dunn Stationery Supply Co. It was ner of drilling salt wells and also) completed July 14, 1885. gold found in California just ten years earlier. Then began a series of peculiar events in relatio.i to Drake.

He seemed pleased at his success, but he did not appear much excited. It is doubtful whether he or indeed others at once realized the full significance of his achievement. Later that meaning became much clearer. What had he done? Drake had the founder of the modern petroleum industry by providing the one essential factor which had hitherto been demonstrated that a dependable supply of this great natural resource could be obtained by drilling. His persons! contributions to this achievement included a dogged persistence which refused to be discouraged by continued disappointments and the vision to apply salt well drilling techniques to tap the reservoirs of petroleum beneath the' surface.

This is one great lesson in the Drake Well story. His well also disclosed the existence of the vast oil fields of northwestern Pennsylvania. It thereby helped to provide in a few years a supply of petroleum which would soon displace coal as the source of safe, cheap burning fluids. It would also furnish superior lubricants so essential to a developing industrial civilization. The decline of other sources for light and lubricants was met as by a miracle through the discovery of a practical way to get petroleum from the earth.

Annual Pension $1,500 Drake himself never profited from his remarkable enterprise and died a virtually penniless invalid. In recognition of the important contribution he had made to the economic development of the Commonwealth, the legislature in 1873 voted him an annual income of S1.500. After his death in 1880, the pension was transferred to his wife. Drake was living in Bethlehem at the time of his death and was buried there, but in 1901 his body was moved to Titusville where a splendid monument honors his memory. Why he failed personally to see the opportunity for personal gain all around him is one of the mysterious aspects of his career.

He literally rose from nothing to fall to nothing despite his rendezvous with destiny. It is one of the ironies "of history that a man who was something of a neer-do- well and a bogus "colonel" should have been the person to set in motion the forces which would create a basis for an industry which was uniquely American in origin and early development, which would spread throughout the world, and involve billions of dollars. It is hard to envision the later industrial economy of America and of the world without benefit of the products derived from the black gold "discovered" by Edwin Drake. It is interesting also to speculate upon the fact that the discovery of gold in California, which again was not really an original discovery, provided the precious metal necessary to establish the monetary systems essential to furnishing the Continued on Page Fifteen, This Section Low-Bed Trailer Hy-Lift Shovel Hasbr Sand Washed Rt. 2.