HAWORTH. | Discoveries of Oil and Gas. 13 
bed and near the mouth of French creek, the indications were 
numerous and unmistakable. The first white man to turn 
them to account was Marcus Hulings, of Franklin, the original 
Charon of Venango county. Each summer he would skim a 
quart or two of ‘earth-oil’ from a tiny pond formed by dam- 
ming a bit of the creek, the fluid serving as a liniment and 
medicine. 
“Rxcavating for the Franklin canal in 1832, on the north 
bank of French creek, opposite ‘the infant industry’ of Hulings 
forty years previously, the workmen were annoyed by a per- 
sistent seepage of petroleum, execrating it as a nuisance. A 
well dug on the flats ten years later, for water, encountered 
such a glut of oil that the disgusted wielder of the spade threw 
up his job and threw his besmeared clothes into the creek! 
When the oil excitement invaded the county-seat the greasy 
well was drilled to the customary depth and proved hopelessly 
dry. At Slippery Rock, in Beaver county, oil exuded abund- 
antly from the sandy banks and bed of the creek, failing to pan 
out when wells were put down. Something of the same sort 
occurred in portions of Lawrence county and on the banks of 
many streams in different sections of the country. 
In early days in America, people living back some distance 
from tide-water were greatly inconvenienced by not having a 
good supply of salt. This led to many attempts, successful and 
otherwise, to obtain brine by boring or drilling, from which 
salt could be produced by evaporation. These old salt-wells 
really should be looked upon as the precursors of oil-wells. 
Some of these earliest borings were along the Kanawha river 
in West Virginia. Quoting again from McLaurin: 
“Dr. J. P. Hale, a reputable authority, claims oil caused 
much annoyance in Ruftner Bros.’ salt-well, begun in 1806, 
bored sixty feet with an iron rod and a two-inch chisel-bit at- 
tached by a rope to a spring-pole, completed in 1808 and mem- 
orable as the first artesian well on this continent. The fluid 
eame from the territory once famous as the ‘Kanawha sa- 
lines,’ reputed to produce an unsurpassed table salt. Before 
the advent of the white man the Indians made salt from the 
saline springs a short distance above the site of Charleston. 
‘here Daniel Boone had a log cabin, and George Washington, 
as long ago as 1775, for military services was awarded lands 
containing a ‘burning spring.’ Fired by the tidings of the 
saline springs, Joseph Ruffner sold his possessions in the Shen- 
andoah valley and journeyed beyond the mountains in 1794 to 
establish salt-works on the Kanawha. He leased the salt in- 
terest to Elisha Brooks, who took brine from the shallow 
quicksands. Joseph Ruffner dying, his sons, Joseph and David, 
acouired his lands and salt-springs and resolved to try some 
better plan of procuring the brine. A section of a hollow syca- 
