1871.] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
179 
feeds 8 lbs. horse-manure daily per head, aud 
he fiuds that it acts favorably on the milk in 
increasing the butter thereiu. The peas in- 
crease the caseine in the milk. 
The cows, though they have just come in 
from the pasture, enjoy their curious desert 
thoroughly. Though Mr. S. loses the horse- 
manure, he make3 it up by being able to keep 
20 to 30 cows more under this system. His 
rule is to give his cattle all they can eat. winter 
and summer. 
The cows are milked by women in the stable, 
and the milk is at once poured into copper ket- 
tles (2 to 3 feet high, aud equally wide), which 
stand in a trough filled with ice-water. Mr. S. 
acts on the principle to let the cream rise with 
the milk at the lowest possible temperature. 
His dairy is a small building, in the center of 
■which is a water-tank. The milk-cans, which 
are 20 inches high and 20 inches wide, are set 
into this tank, after the milk has been measured 
and poured into them. The cans have covers 
■with an inch hole in them, and are not allowed 
to touch the bottom of the tank, but are hung 
up so that the cold water may circulate under 
them. During the summer, ice is used to keep 
the water in the tank at 39° to 41° Fahrenheit 
(45° at most), and in winter the water is natu- 
rally at about 33° Fahrenheit. 
The ice-house at Hofgarden is curious and 
simple. It consists of a ditch over which a 
wooden grating is placed to allow the water to 
run off. In winter the cakes of ice are piled on 
this, all spaces between the cakes are filled in, 
and in cold weather water is thrown on the ice- 
heap, so that it freezes into a solid mass. It is 
then covered with a heavy layer of sawdust, 
and with a straw roof. To avoid uncovering 
the ice daily, several days' supply is taken out, 
placed near the dairy, and covered well with 
sawdust. Even when they have days with the 
temperature at 77° to 86°, which is not rare in 
Sweden, the loss of ice is very slight, provided 
plenty of sawdust be used. 
The cream is churned at a temperature of 
50°, and in summer it is eooled down to this 
point by ice. Owing to the hight of the milk- 
pans, the cream attains a thickness of 1 to 2 
inches, and can be skimmed without much of 
the milk being mixed with it. The cream is 
entirely sweet when it is churned. 
Mr. S. has made many experiments in his 
system of allowing the cream to rise at a low 
temperature. He has discovered that 144 lbs. 
milk produce in the first 12 hours 5.30 lbs. 
cream ; i» the second 12 hours, 0.17 lbs. cream; 
in the third twelve hours, 0.06 lbs. cream. Ac- 
cording to this, it is not worth the trouble to 
let the process last longer than 12 hours, partic- 
ularly as the few remaining particles of butter 
in the skimmed milk add to the value of the 
"lean cheese" that is made of it. 
The system that has made Mr. Swartz's name 
so well known in Sweden and Denmark is, 
therefore, founded on what almost all farmers 
oppose — namely, low temperature during the 
rising of the cream, and high milk-pans. Mr. 
S.'s aim is to cool the milk as soon as it is taken 
from the udder (the cooling apparatus being in 
the stable), and to expedite the rising of the 
cream by keeping the milk at a low tempera- 
ture, 33° to 43°. The advantages claimed are : 
1st. The cream is separated from the milk in 
12 hours ; and, 2d, The milk is sweet. 
The 2-feet-high milk-pans, or cans, .are con- 
trary to Ml the views on the subject, that the 
particles of butter rise quickest in flat milk-pans. 
Mr. S. proves that, at a low temperature, the 
cream rises very rapidly. The surface of the 
vessels being small, the cream lies thick on the 
top, and is easily skimmed off. 
The foregoing is, to say the least of it, a very 
curious statement; aud it may be worth while 
for American farrows to try the effect of the 
deep setting of the milk at low temperature. 
The ration of horse-manure we do not care 
to recommend. 
Petroleum -The Early Days of the 
Business. 
BY H. B. COLTON. 
There is a principle of Nature's economy that 
when a demand is created, a supply is ready. 
For thousands of years a queer, pitchy, bad- 
smelling oil had oozed from the earth in different 
parts of the world, aud had in various ways 
served the use of man. Willi it the Egyptian 
embalmed his dead, and the leprous Assyrian 
bathed his sores. In our own land the virtues 
and value of Seneca oil had been transmitted 
down from the red man, and it was bottled and 
sent throughout our land to be used by the 
rheumatic, whose pains compelled an endur- 
ance of its smell, to give its healing virtue to the 
dumb beasts of our farms or stables. 
But a change has come over the land of the 
Senecas; and the creek, on whose banks they 
once sat aud dipped the queer oil with their 
horn cups, is now the center of a rushing, thriv- 
ing industry. The wealth, which for so many 
years had lain dormant, was roused to life just 
at a time when the needs of this great country 
and the world demanded it. 
Young, of Glasgow, had published to the world 
his wonderful discovery of extracting oil from 
coal, bringing to view the pent-up sunlight of 
ages ; but this wonderful discovery only created 
an intense thirst for the product he could not 
supply in sufficient quantities. In the mean- 
time, a corps of adventurous spirits were ex- 
ploring and boring in the wild, bleak hills of 
Pennsylvania. To Messrs. Eveleth and Bissell 
is due the credit of having opened the Drake 
well. Drake was a conductor on the New 
Haven Railroad, and employed by them to open 
the well. Prof. Silliman, of Yale College, was 
the first President of an oil company. On the 
28th day of August, 1859, the first vein of oil 
was struck. The well, at a depth of about 60 
feet, yielded 400 gallons per day. From this 
beginning slowly came up the great business, 
until it reached the wild whirl of excitement 
and speculation in 1863-64. Fortunes were 
made and lost iu a day ; thousands of gallons 
of oil ran to waste, and hundreds of thousands 
were sold for less than the cost of production. 
The mystical Johnny Steele flourished around 
New York hotels and bar-rooms with his in- 
come of thousands per day ; companies were 
gotten up with par shares from 50 cents to $5 ; 
servant girls invested their all, hoping soon to 
be able to ride in their carriages and live in 
brown stone mansions. Never since the days of 
Law's great Mississippi bubble had the world 
seen anything equal to it. Unfortunately, this 
wild mania is too recently and painfully promi- 
nent with many of our readers. Many — hard- 
working men — invested their all in an engine 
and a lease, to work for days and weeks only to 
find nothing, and sit down penniless and de- 
spondent, fully and completely " busted." 
The mode of getting petroleum is : A point 
selected, a derrick is erected, and augers gotten 
ready. The utensils consist of auger stem, 
reamer, bit, swivel, sinker-bar, sand-pump, etc. 
The auger stem is in sections, and as it goes 
down others are screwed on. Until the rock is 
reached, the sand-pump has frequently to be 
used. When the hole is finally bored and oil 
reached, the tubing is put down to the hard 
rock and the seed-bag put in. This is a leather 
bag filled with flaxseed, which fits around the 
pipe. It is put in the hole just at the sand rock, 
and as the seed soon swells, effectually prevents 
the oil coming up outside the pipe or the sur- 
face-water getting down. It was certainly a 
valuable discovery in oil-pumping. In the early 
days of petroleum, in many of the wells when 
the oil was struck, it burst forth with great 
force, sending the pump-rods and derrick-frame 
high in the air, mingling oil, gas, and salt-water. 
One of the most noted instances of this was the 
Burning Well, on the Buchanan Farm, at which 
the gas took fire and 38 persons were burned, 
of whom 18 died; among them the owner of 
the farm. It is generally conceded that those 
wells are most permanent which have no gas ; 
as people who make the most fuss in the world 
are not always those who accomplish the great- 
est good for themselves or others. 
The number of the wells is legion, and the 
most condensed history of them would fill a 
large volume. On January 1st, 1869, there were 
1,186 producing wells in Pennsylvania, and 
their average product was 11 J | 3 bbls. per day. 
Then there are many in Canada, Ohio, anil 
West Va. There is some attention being turned 
to the deposits in South America. The whole 
daily product of etude petroleum cannot be far 
from 18,000 bbls., of 40 gallons each. Some of 
the wells have produced enormously, even over 
4,000 bbls. per day. The oil has sold as low as 
20 cents per barrel, and as high as $ 10. It is 
said to pay handsomely at $4. Millions of gal- 
lons are now sent to market without being bar- 
reled, except figuratively. It is transported to 
the railroad in pipes laid under ground, and 
put into gauged tanks: 40 gallons is a barrel. 
In the early days it was floated down Oil 
Creek and its tributaries in flat-boats. The cus- 
tom was to pond up the water, and, when all 
the boats were ready, cut away the dams, thus 
floating them on the freshet to the mouth of 
Oil Creek. As may be imagined, there was fre- 
quent accidents and the wildest excitement. As 
much as 50,000 bbls. of petroleum have been 
known to be thrown out on the waters of the 
creek and rivers from the bursting barrels, and 
crushed-up flats, in a "jam." 
Fires of the most devastating character have 
frequently eccurred. The city of a day has 
been iu a few hours a mass of ashes. Now, the 
old lumber huts have given place to substantial 
brick buildings. The same may be said of the 
whole petroleum business ; its evanescent spec- 
ulative character has passed away, and it ie now 
one of the most substantial kinds of business 
in the land, the value of its export amounting 
to more than any other article except cottoD. 
The question whether these wells will con- 
tinue to yield, or whence comes this oil, is one 
we shall not discuss. It would take more space 
than we have, aud »ur readers would not then 
actually know more than they now do. Many 
wells that were flowing have become pumping — 
and these, too, have decreased iu yield. Meas- 
ures to resuscitate have been adopted, as ex- 
ploding nitio-glycerine, etc., in them. This has 
temporarily restored them. One manager filled 
his well with benzine, let it stay two weeks, 
pumped it out, aud his well continued to pump 
longer than from the nitro-glycerine explosion. 
His idea is, that the air which gets down into 
the wells causes the oil to gum and fill up 
the sand-rock through which it oozes. 
The oil regions of Pennsylvania present a 
