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This is WQLN.

It's 1865 and the world is chang I am an oil man.

I have leased the rights to dril in Pithole, Pennsylvania.

The town is boomed, but I'm starting to feel like th might be stacked against me.

Most of the land around here was already occupied by farmers who owned anywhere from a hundred to four hundred acres.

Lumber companies were formed all throughout northwestern Pennsylv that then leased farms, the woodland on the farms for harvesting the timber, or owned land outright.

A lot of these lumbermen already had the skill to transpo lumber down the waterways, down the Oil Creek, down the Allegheny River to Pitt and even on down to Cincinnati.

It was primarily these early lum that jumped into the oil industr and they end up becoming some of players with some of the biggest producing wells.

They already knew the land, they knew the territory, they knew their way to Pittsburg refineries down there.

So there are people who were abl a head start on the rest of us.

That's okay.

There's plenty of oil flowing.

It'll be fine for those of us th buy into the action.

Pithole is located on top of a h The waterways are all, of course, down in the valleys.

There was not a plentiful supply up on the hill where Pithole City was built.

There were a couple water wells, water tasted pretty oily, and with all the people and horses and the shallow wells, it probably wasn't a good thing to be drinking the water.

One of the diseases that struck was a cholera epidemic, probably caused by fouled water.

But that was okay.

We had a pretty good solution fo Whiskey was cheaper than water.

You could buy a cup of water for a cup of whiskey might only cost a dollar.

Oh no, I guess I'll have me another glass then.

Only to avoid the dangers of cholera, of course.

With natural gas and the dangers explosion in the oil region, you can imagine the fire hazards in Pithole.

Not that people paid much attention to it.

These cheaply made frame buildin and the first major disasters in April of 1866, 18 buildings burn in one night.

So I'm at risk of cholera exploding things out of me, or rigs exploding out of the gro And it wasn't like we were in mu position to combat it.

There's no fire department to co rescue in Pithole, Pennsylvania.

In Pithole, all the building lots were leased.

You could put up a building of a any type that you wanted on your But as far as a community, there was no fire company.

The town wasn't organized.

It didn't exist long enough for of volunteers to form their fire and for taxes to be collected to buy that steam pump Citizens automatically would for brigade to carry water to a fire to pass the buckets up to the fr person in line who tossed it on only with marginal success.

It was faster to tear down a bui and hope that the fire stopped in that now vacant lot.

If a building caught fire, then lose all your personal possessio And if you owned the building, w you probably just lost your livelihood, too.

Some of the buildings were insur and through different banks, probably in New York City And so they did get a partial return on their loss.

With drilling happening around t and a lively entertainment scene keeping the city bustling, fires usually spotted pretty quickly.

There's all kinds of activities in Pithole, including a lot of carousing at night.

And amazingly, most of the fires begin at night.

One time, they were using a woma the Widow Rickett's well, to fill up barrels of, buckets o which then were passed down the street to fight the fire.

Then they noticed that the fire was getting bigger, and then someone in the dark rea "Hey, the well's producing oil!"

So they stopped putting water on and started barreling the oil.

Oil in the water wells?

I guess myself another whiskey.

Pithole has all kinds of people living in it.

The chambermaids and cooks would to wake up extremely early to get those cooking fires going to get the food on the table for oilmen heading down over the hil down into the valley, where the oil wells were located.

The chambermaids quickly went to work in the fine hotels to clean the hotel rooms so that guests could come in, aka the other oilmen now getting their shift and looking for a bed to sleep in.

Many of the hotels didn't bother with chambermaids.

You were better off finding a pl had straw instead of a bed.

Even if you could afford a clean were soon filthy once you went o They built plank sidewalks for the buildings, but they talk about the difficul ladies in their long dresses trying to get across the street.

These are mud-filled streets, so of which they said had no bottom So you had to find a safe place Pithole had to have smelled.

Besides the people and the horse got the coal stoves, the wood fire, obviously the smell of oil, and then all the other smells as with it, and the flies.

There's no sewer system in Pitho There's thousands of people, thousands of horses.

Add in the warm summer days and yourself quite the stench.

Someone arriving in Pithole woul thought that they were entering part zoo, part circus.

You're looking down over this crowded city into a valley filled with oil derricks, tanks as big as a house, and then across the valley to ye couple of different towns.

But once you got past the smell, it could be quite fun.

Pithole ended up with a number o clubs, things for men, of course they could participate in.

I believe she's referring to the establishments in which oil men enjoy the company of women, for Then you've got three churches, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic Because we are good Christian men, after all.

The Methodist Church begins a Su school class very quickly, as well as primary grades for young children.

So you've got singing groups, ch that sort of socially acceptable behavior in Victorian Then for the men, you've got the parlors, the dance clubs, the co saloons, and you've got theaters The Murphy's Theater would have few hundred thousand to build to filled with lavish curtains, six up in the balconies, three stori concert pit for an orchestra of with nationally known artists an performers coming through the ar Two different circuses performed in Pithole.

There was a baseball team, at le that was playing baseball teams from Oil City or Titusvill We had the money to bring some o finest acts to come and entertai A welcome distraction from the stresses of oil wells.

Throughout the Appalachian Basin paraffin-based crude.

Paraffin today is still used and produced by oil refineries.

It's used to coat paper milk car It's used for wax paper.

And what would life be like with crayons or cheap candles?

One of the businessmen that came oil region in the late 1860s saw the oil men taking this blac stuff off of the wells and rubbing it on their joints.

The oil men claimed it helped.

So he then gathered up this subs which was a mixture of paraffin and petrolatum, and further refined it into what we know as petroleum jelly.

Some of that petrolatum was then some of the first makeup, the first lipsticks, or other products widely sold to the early 20th century.

This businessman was called Ches and you will likely know his company, Vaseline.

But the paraffin was a real problem for us in Pithole.

Gentlemen tried all sorts of dif ways to get rid of the paraffin in their wells.

They actually tried scratching i with different devices.

Others tried using black powder.

The paraffin and petrolatum in Pennsylvania crude oil is so thi that it clogs the rock itself, t sandstone, and it gathers in the well tubing and casing that in the early years, operato buy benzene or naphthas from the refineries to pour down their well to try to melt it.

In 1865, Colonel E.A.L.

Roberts brother Walter came here and started using black powder in tin torpedoes, using water as a weight to hold explosive force down in the well cracking the rock and getting the well to produce.

In 1867, they received the rights to use nitroglycerin.

Nitroglycerin is highly explosive and highly effective in solving this paraffin-petrola problem for the well owners.

It cracked the rock, vaporized the paraffin, and was widely effective in getting to rejuvenate wells.

I'll risk the cholera.

I'll risk the fires.

But you wouldn't catch me transporting nitroglycerin.

No thank you.

For as volatile as nitro is, it' more accidents didn't happen when considering a drop can caus If you hit a bump in a wagon wit load of nitro, you're gone.

The substance is so volatile and during those early years of manufacturing.

We really don't know how many accidents did happen.

Wells were known to have had all of their casing, we're talking 800 feet of casing, blown up and out of the from a chute that didn't go prop There's a lot to navigate when i to being an oil man, but none so tricky as the people need to do business with.

Speculators came to Pithole from over, including Europe, and all over the U.S. you've got soldiers coming out of the war with no employment, they came looking for employment, and you've got some that have so but not necessarily an understan economic principles or how stock So, you've got an oil operator who's dishonest, who has a price to buy a quarter of the oil, where that gets divided into an a sixteenth or a thirty-second o Then you've got some that are se portions of a thirtieth of a wel Now, I don't consider myself much of a mathematician, but I do know that if you divide something into 30, but you sell it 60 times, someon getting shortchanged.

By the time Pithole is developed the industry had begun to be sta to the point where everyone was using a 42-gallon barrel.

This allowed for two gallons to or evaporate from the oil barrel ensuring that everyone, includin refiners in Philadelphia, or Cle would still get 40 gallons in the barrel that was arriving.

And this was a good move.

It mad easier for everyone.

Same size barrels, same price, less hassle.

Then you've got the oil producer knows he's got to produce a heavy barrel of oil.

So I put rocks in the bottom, put in a false bottom, fill the rest with oil so it looks like it's all oil.

They're not going to find out un get to the refinery anyways.

Pithole was not short of fraudst You've got all kinds of people coming to the oil region to take part in this new prosper Not all of them are honest.

So you've got oil companies sell that might not exist, but the people in Philadelphia a the stock and what do they know?

Then you've got teamsters that m be that experienced with horses.

ÓBut hey, I found a wagon for ch these two old nags ought to be able to pull it.

I'm in business.

Ó Dragging these barrels was hard even the fittest horses, and the teamsters drove them har So many horses died that it created a supply shortage.

Moving the oil was hard.

Tracking the oil was also a chal There's some accountability.

Companies create stencils to put stencil on their barrel.

But then they've got to try to g barrel back from the refiner.

Or the refiner can paint the bar sell it to somebody else.

But everything is already painte and I mean everything.

This was no place to be wearing your Sunday best.

With all of the wells, and then got the flowing wells, the oil is rising up out of the then over the derrick floor, and then down the hillside, you don't necessarily know what source of the oil is.

Is it someone's leaking barrel?

Someone's leaking tank?

Then you've got all the mess created by the horses, all in this, what is supposedly So many horses, so many people, it's hard to even describe the numbers involved.

We have no count on how many tea We know it was thousands.

Because again, you've got 98 wel nine months of January 1865.

And again, some of those wells a producing 500 barrels or a thousand barrels a day.

So you need that many wagons, that many teamsters, in order to move all of those ba oil to the railroad.

And for a while, that was the only option.

Getting the oil out of the ground was relatively easy, compared to getting it out of Pi Titusville was the nearest railr The railroad came from Corry to Titusville and then all the way down the Oil Creek Valley.

Their alternative is to go over and then down a steep hill, wind to the railroad that's in the Oil Creek Valley.

With the condition of the roads, probably took all day for a wagon to get to Titusville because you've got a long traffic jam of horses and wagons Someone's wheel falls off, they get stuck in a mud hole.

Everybody gets off their wagon to help them push them out Then the whole wagons can all get going again.

Somebody else's wheel falls off.

It's a nightmare of transportati So they built a plank road to make things easier.

A plank road is like it sounds, made of wooden planks or trees cut in half and then la mud to create a roadway, from Pithole to Titusville.

And that costs money.

Guess who's picking up the tab?

It's the well owners.

It's the men that can afford it, to buy all that lumber needed, to create this wooden roadway, to try to speed up the traffic.

Get those rail cars filled, they heading to the refineries.

The sooner the oil gets to the refineries, the faster the oil producers get who can then pay the teamsters and the coopers.

It definitely improves it, but a because of the traffic and unloading the barrels at the train station, there's still a large traffic ja It was all costing so much money Teamsters, anyone with a wagon a owned a couple of horses, ended up controlling the industry in the early days.

They could charge whatever they If they knew that that oil produ desperately needed wagons, they could charge $4 a barrel.

Then you've got the cost of the This is one reason why oil produ don't necessarily get rich in those early years.

You've got to pay the cooper, yo to pay the teamster, and the teamsters end up putting stranglehold on the industry.

That's why we end up with pipeli And the pipelines really change things for Pithole.

So with the teamsters having a stranglehold on the industry, it was imperative to find a new, way to transport the oil.

Though other pipelines had been in existence before, the Van Syckel pipeline that wen Pithole to Miller Farm was considered the most successful to that date.

It could move 81 barrels of oil in an hour.

You'd need 24 wagons, those teamsters and all those horses, and all the day to move that same amount of oil.

A two-inch piece of pipe that could move oil in any weather, 24 hours a day.

Needless to say, the teamsters s pulling up the pipeline.

The owners of the pipeline hired Pinkerton detectives to then protect the line.

So you've got all the teamsters leaving Pithole in the spring of 1866, winter of after that pipeline goes in.

With all of that loss of business and disastrous fires, some business people just couldn't afford to keep on going Without the thousands of teamste hotels and stores begin to close There's less demand for saloons and entertainment.

It's a domino effect.

Likewise, there was a number of fires along the flats.

Now, if your well was getting fi with paraffin and petrolatum or just was not pulling as much oil out of the ground, and if the price of oil was down you might not be able to afford to stay in business.

With hotels being so expensive, food being so expensi But this is black gold.

How could the prices be down?

If you don't have a market, price goes down.

There were several gushers in the Oil Creek Valley producing thousands of barrels o The market crashed.

There wasn't enough refineries.

Not enough people were buying the kerosene.

And big wells are being found in other towns.

People begin packing up to try their luck elsewhere.

It seems like everyone is gettin except the Pithole oil man.

I should have got into brass manufacturing.

Brass is highly stable when it comes to salt and corrosion, where salt can eat holes into ca Brass is a much stronger element withstand the brine that comes up with the oil.

One of the biggest manufacturers to be successful in the oil indu was the Jarecki family.

Henry Jarecki designed brass val and other brass parts used by st engines or steam boilers, essential elements in the oil fi He ends up opening factories in the heart of the oil country.

So there was money to be made, h those trying to make money.

Everybody came to the oil region hoping to get rich.

The hard truth is most people di Some wells failed to produce any Others, the tools got stuck.

Your chances of producing and be rich really weren't that great.

And then the final blow, the wells start running dry.

The term ÒThe well dried Ó was of indicate a well that wasn't prod enough to be commercially viable So they might have still been pr barrel or two or five if pumped once a week.

But in 1866, when you've got wel producing a thousand or three thousand barrels a day, five isn't enough.

So then it becomes a question of how many wells do you have, what's your total production and can you afford to survive?

Or is it going to be better, che your losses and run?

You've got hundreds of people just packing up, gathering as much as they could a wagon on the stagecoach or a h or on their back and leaving.

Boomtowns were happening all over the oil region.

Many people went to nearby Red H Shamburg, which were just up the Others went all the way over to County to Tidioute, where a new oil field on top of had been opened up because of pi So 20,000 people, thousands of h where did it all go?

There are no brick buildings in So when Pithole dies, many of these buildings are sold, they're then taken apart, hauled wagons, reassembled somewhere el And just how long did all this l The birthplace of America's blac the key that unlocks the door to petrochemicals, plastics, computing, and so much more.

From the first well to everyone leaving, from boom to b Pithole appeared overnight and disappeared before your very eye all in less than 500 days.

Now, it's nothing more than a gh