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came very blue and discouraged but still kept at it and would no 
sooner get to running before something would break and he 
would be obliged to shut down and fix it up as best he could. He 
kept at it, however, in this fashion for three months—proving the 
truth of the old adage, “Continual dropping wears a stone.” Fin- 
ally when he had the hole down within one hundred feet of the 
oil sand, in sheer desperation, he sold three-eighths interest in the 
well for three hundred dollars. With this money he soon finished 
her up, and she came in dry, and there have been hundreds of 
similar experiences in the oil business. 
In January, 1865, the Frazer well on the Holman farm at 
Pithole, Pa. was struck. ‘This was the first of a series of rich 
strikes in the way of flowing wells, and they acted like powerful 
magnets drawing restless spirits from every quarter. Pithole 
grew as by magic. Natural gas had turned night into day and 
in the evening contracts were let to have houses completed by 
sunrise next morning. All the beds were doing double duty and 
as soon as any were empty the second relief turned in. Within 
a few months Pithole grew from nothing to a city of 20,000 
inhabitants. It also had a $75,000 hotel, a fire department, daily 
newspapers, a fine opera house, churches,, etc., and it was the 
third postoffice of importance in Pennsylvania, being outranked 
only by Philadelphia and Pittsburg. To-day there is not a build- 
ing to mark the site of this ephemeral city; it came and disap- 
peared like a phantom of the imagination. 
The question of how to handle the oil and get it to the refin- 
eries was one of vital importance. In 1862 a mechanical genius 
named Hutchingson of New Jersey laid the first pipe line from 
the Tarr farm to the Humbolt refinery. Teamsters and roust- 
abouts were the uncompromising enemy of the pipe lines, and 
they repeatedly tore them up to prevent competition with the 
hauling of oil. The first lines were made of iron with lead joints. 
The jar of the pumps would loosen the joints, and cause them to 
leak, so they were impracticable. In 1864, Samuel Van Sickle 
also of New Jersey, solved the problem and laid a two inch iron 
line with screw joints from Pithole to the Miller farm. This was 
capable of running eight hundred barrels of oil a day. There are 
