Person:Edwin Drake (7)

About Edwin Drake

Early Life

Edwin Drake was born in Greenville, Greene County, New York on March 29, 1819, the son of Lyman and Laura (née Lee) Drake. He grew up on family farms around New York State and Castleton, Rutland County, Vermont before leaving home at the age of 19. He spent the early parts of his life working the railways around New Haven, Connecticut as a clerk, express agent and a conductor. During this time he married Philena Adams who died while giving birth to their second child in 1854. Drake re-married three years later to Laura Dowd, sixteen years his junior, in 1857. During this summer, illness prevented Drake from carrying on with his job. He retained the privileges of a train conductor, including free travel on the railroads. By 1858, the Drake family found themselves living in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Seneca Oil

While petroleum oil was known prior to this, there was no appreciable market for it. Samuel Martin Kier is credited with founding the first American oil refinery in Pittsburgh. He was the first person in the United States to refine crude oil into lamp oil (kerosene). Along with a new lamp to burn Kier's product a new market to replace whale oil as a lamp oil began to develop.[1][2]

Seneca Oil, originally called the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, was founded by George Bissell and Jonathan Eveleth. They created the company after hearing of reports that petroleum collected from an oil spring in Titusville, Pennsylvania was suitable for use as lamp fuel. Until this time, the primary lamp fuel had been whale oil. Bissell found that the "rock oil" would be a practical alternative if a method could be devised to extract the oil from the ground. Interest in the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company was initially low until a report commissioned by Bissell and Eveleth showed that there was significant economic value in petroleum. Due to a disagreement between the shareholders and the pair, the company was split and Seneca Oil was formed in 1858. Before being offered a job by Bissell and Eveleth, Drake bought stock in Seneca Oil. But his job opportunity with the company arose because both parties were staying in the same hotel in Titusville. He was hired on a salary of $1,000 a year to investigate the oil seeps on land owned by Seneca Oil.

Drilling for Oil

Edwin Drake was hired by the Seneca Oil Company to investigate suspected oil deposits in Titusville, Pennsylvania.[3] James Townsend, President of the Seneca Oil Company, sent Drake to the site in the spring of 1858. The oil company chose the retired railway man partly because he had free use of the rail. Drake decided to drill in the manner of salt well drillers. He purchased a steam engine in Erie, Pennsylvania, to power the drill. The well was dug on an island on the Oil Creek. It took some time for the drillers to get through the layers of gravel. At 16 feet the sides of the hole began to collapse. Those helping him began to despair, but not Drake. It was at this point that he devised the idea of a drive pipe. This cast iron pipe consisted of 10-foot-long (3.0 m) joints. The pipe was driven down into the ground. At 32 feet they struck bedrock. The drilling tools were now lowered through the pipe and steam was used to drill through the bedrock. The going, however, was slow. Progress was made at the rate of just three feet per day. After initial difficulty locating the necessary parts to build the well, which resulted in his well being nicknamed "Drake's Folly", Drake proved successful.

Meanwhile crowds of people began to gather to jeer at the apparently unproductive operation. Drake was also running out of money. Amazingly, the Seneca Oil Company had abandoned their man, and Drake had to rely on friends to back the enterprise. On August 27 Drake had persevered and his drill bit had reached a total depth of 69.5 feet (21 m). At that point the bit hit a crevice. The men packed up for the day. The next morning Drake’s driller, Billy Smith, looked into the hole in preparation for another day’s work. He was surprised and delighted to see crude oil rising up. Drake was summoned and the oil was brought to the surface with a hand pitcher pump. The oil was collected in a bath tub.

Drake is famous for pioneering a new method for producing oil from the ground. He drilled using piping to prevent borehole collapse, allowing for the drill to penetrate further and further into the ground. Previous methods for collecting oil had been limited. Ground collection of oil consisted of gathering it from where it occurred naturally, such as from oil seeps or shallow holes dug into the ground. Drake tried the latter method initially when looking for oil in Titusville. However, it failed to produce economically viable amounts of oil. Alternative methods of digging large shafts into the ground also failed, as collapse from water seepage almost always occurred. The significant step that Drake took was to drive a 32-foot iron pipe through the ground into the bedrock below. This allowed Drake to drill inside the pipe, without the hole collapsing from the water seepage. The principle behind this idea is still employed today by many companies drilling for hydrocarbons.

While some claims of prior art do exist (e.g., Bóbrka, Poland in 1854, Wietze, Germany in 1857, Oil Springs, Ontario, Canada in 1858), the Drake Well at Titusville was the first well to be widely copied.[citation needed] Within a day of Drake's striking oil, Drake’s methods were being imitated by others along Oil Creek and in the immediate area. This culminated with the establishment of several oil boom towns along the creek. Drake's well produced 25 barrels (4.0 m3) of oil a day. By 1872, the entire area was producing 15.9 thousand barrels (2,530 m3) a day.

Drake set up a stock company to extract and market the oil. But, while his pioneering work led to the growth of an oil industry that made many people fabulously rich, for Drake riches proved elusive. Drake did not possess good business acumen. He failed to patent his drilling invention. Then he lost all of his savings in oil speculation in 1863. He was to end up as an impoverished old man. In 1872, Pennsylvania voted an annuity of $1,500 to the "crazy man" whose determination founded the oil industry.

He died on November 9, 1880 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he had lived since 1874. He and his wife are buried at Titusville, next to a memorial built in his honor.

Biography

From the October 23, 2009 Oil City Derrick, by: Judith Etzel:

Not-so-glamorous life of Drake examined

The former railway agent and onetime dry goods salesman who launched the petroleum industry along Oil Creek on Aug. 27, 1859, had as ignominious an end as did the wood apparatus that housed his well — tossed aside without a thought given to posterity. Highlights in research done by William R. Brice, Ph.D., for his new book, “Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry,” were outlined at a public program Thursday at Venango Campus. Brice’s talk was part of the Barbara Morgan Harvey Center Lecture series, now in its fifth year.

Brice, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, said his book has been two years in the making and is due soon for publication. His research was supported by a grant from the Oil Region Alliance of Business, Industry and Tourism and is dedicated to longtime oilman and Meadville resident Samuel Pees who, said Brice, “got me involved in the oil industry.”

“How special to live in an area where an event changed the world,” Brice told his audience. “...(Oil) is the magical elixir, thanks to modern chemistry and the persistence of Col. Drake.”

In tracing Drake’s early life as a child (born 1819) growing up in the Catskills of New York and later in Vermont, Brice said Drake worked on the Erie Canal, labored on his uncle’s farm and worked as a hotel clerk in Michigan, served briefly in the Michigan militia, sold drygoods in Connecticut and New York City.

He married and began a family, only to have “unbelievable tragedy” over the space of six years, said Brice, when his wife and three children died between 1848 and 1854. Drake and his surviving child, a 4-year-old son, moved to New Haven, Conn., where they lived in the Tontino Hotel at a cost of $9 a week for room and board. While there, he became acquainted with influential individuals, including George Bissell, a Dartmouth graduate and later superintendent of the New Orleans school system.

Struck by the idea that crude oil, as seen in medicinal and illumination advertising, might be obtained by drilling in the same method used to obtain salt water, Bissell became aware of oil seepages in western Pennsylvania, particularly along Oil Creek. He formed the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co. of New York in 1854, a company that soon was taken over by a New Haven group led by James Townsend.

Townsend contacted Drake to go to Titusville — “he had a free railroad pass (as a former conductor) and they didn’t have to pay for transportation,” Brice said — under the auspices of a new company, the Seneca Oil Co.

“To make Drake appear important in the eyes of the Titusville people, Townsend used the unofficial title of ‘Colonel’ and addressed letters to him at Col. Edwin Drake. The title was thereafter attached to his name,” Brice said.

It was not entirely made up, said the lecturer. Drake’s wife said “his eastern buddies gave him the nickname Colonel” because of his service in the Michigan militia. Drake formally received the military title during the 1959 Oil Centennial when Pennsylvania made him a colonel in the Pennsylvania National Guard.

Drake and his second wife and their two children stayed first at the American Hotel in Titusville and later moved into a house on East Main Street (now the high school gym site).

“Most people in Titusville thought that Drake was crazy to drill for oil when you could just soak it up from the creek,” Brice said.

While the oil company funded the drilling operations, they did not pay Drake, said the speaker, and he was forced to borrow money to feed his family. Within months of his successful well, Drake “was out of a job and began driving horses and wagons hauling oil,” Brice said.

Despite how the company neglected him, Drake has a very good reputation in Titusville where he was elected justice of the peace, Brice said. Drake and his wife were among the founders of St. James Episcopal Church and their son was the first child to be baptized there.

In 1863, Drake and his family left the oil valley and within three years, he “was literally begging his friends for money — he was destitute in New York City,” Brice said.

A chance encounter with a Titusville friend in New York City prompted a campaign to raise money for Drake.

“It was 1869, 1870, and the Drake family was living on sale a potatoes. Laura (his wife) was making all their clothing (and) they were living in a friend’s house,” Brice said. “Titusville people raised $5,000....Everyone else was getting rich by this time and here the man who started it all was starving.”

In 1873, the Pennsylvania legislature granted Drake an annual pension of $1,500, “enough to keep them alive but barely,” Brice said. The Drakes moved to Bethlehem where he died in 1880. In 1902, his remains were moved to Woodlawn Cemetery in Titusville where a memorial statue, “The Driller” by Charles Niehaus, marks his burial site. The $100,000 cost was paid by an anonymous donor who was not revealed until he died — Henry Rogers, Standard Oil vice president.

The Drake Well buildings (the second set — the first burned in October 1859) were moved for a display at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. “They were left to rot — a very ignoble end to a building that started the world’s most successful industry, the oil and gas industry,” Brice said.

Despite all the personalities involved in the 1859 drilling and production venture, it is Drake who rightfully claims the fame, Brice said.

“They don’t call it the Bissell well, although he thought of it. They don’t call it the Townsend well, although he financed it. They don’t call it the (Uncle Billy) Smith well, although he actually drilled it,” Brice said. “We call it the Drake Well because it was the project manager, Edwin Drake, who kept the project alive in the face of ridicule, derision, starving of his family. He kept the dream alive.”

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Edwin Drake, in Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.

   the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

   Edwin Laurentine Drake (March 29, 1819 – November 9, 1880), also known as Colonel Drake, was an American businessman and the first American to successfully drill for oil.
   

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2.   .

   http://www.oilcitypa.net/Oil%20City/colonel_edwin_drake.htm