File:America, picturesque and descriptive (1900) (14777585695).jpg

Identifier: americapicturesq01cook (find matches)
Title: America, picturesque and descriptive
Year: 1900 (1900s)
Authors: Cook, Joel, 1842-1910
Subjects: United States -- Description and travel Canada -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York, P.F. Collier
Contributing Library: New York Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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down to lead the gas to Pittsburg fromthe different fields. PETROLEUM. The great petroleum fields lie in and near thePittsburg region, in the basin of the Allegheny andOhio Rivers, and extend from New York southwestto West Virginia, and also into Ohio. This regionhas had enormous yields in different parts of theriver basin, the wells, however, ultimately dwindlingas their supplies are drawn out. The petroleum in-dustry, which has been one of the greatest in Penn-sylvania, has been gradually all absorbed by theStandard Oil Company, which is probably the mostextensive industrial combination in America, and cer-tainly the most powerful. Yet we are told thatthose financial magnates began their wonderfulcareer with an aggregate capital of only $24,000,largely borrowed money. There have been fortymillions of barrels of petroleum taken from this greatbasin in a single year. The oil wells are bored inmany places, south, southwest, north and northeastof Pittsburg. The Panhandle Railroad, which
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TH*; NEW YORKPUBLIC LIBRARY A3TOR, LENOX ANDTIL.DEN ATiQNS R L 00 PETROLEUM. 33o crosses West Virginia to the Ohio, exhibits many ofthem. A branch of this railroad goes to Canons-burg, and thence to the town of Washington, on theold National Road, thirty miles from Pittsburg.At Canonsburg was founded in 1773 Jefferson Col-lege, in a log cabin, which has now become the Jef-ferson Theological Seminary of the PresbyterianChurch. Washington is a town of about four thou-sand people, rambling over a pleasant hilly region inSouthwestern Pennsylvania, having as its chief insti-tution Washington and Jefferson College, also aPresbyterian foundation, started in 1806 in whatwas then a remote Scotch-Irish colony beyond themountains. Near this town in 1888 were struck thegreatest petroleum wells the world ever knew. Oneof them, the Jumbo well, in sixty days after the firststrike had poured out one hundred and forty thou-sand barrels of oil, flowing a steady circular streamof almost white o

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