Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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Titusville was not like Rouseville, which had suddenly sprung from the mud as uncertain as a mushroom of the future. It had been a substantial settlement twenty years before oil was found there, small but sturdy with a few families who had made money chiefly in lumber, owning good homes, carefully guarding the order and decency of the place.

The discovery of oil overran the settlement with hundreds of fortune seekers. They came from far and near, on foot, horseback, wagon. The nearest railroad connection was sixteen miles away, and the roads and fields leading in were soon cut beyond recognition by the heavy hauling, its streets at times impassable with mud.

The new industry demanded machinery, tools, lumber—and the bigger it grew, the greater the demand. Titusville, the birthplace of all this activity, as well as the gateway down the Creek, must furnish food and shelter for caravans of strangers, shops for their trades, offices for speculators and brokers, dealers in oil lands and leases, for oil producers, surveyors, and draftsmen—all the factors of the big business organization necessary to develop the industry. In 1862 the overflow was doubled by the arrival of a railroad with a connection sixteen miles away with the East and West. The disbanding of the Army in June of 1865 brought a new rush—men still in uniform, their rifles and knapsacks on their backs. Most of this fresh inflow was bound to the scene of the latest excitement, Pithole.