Wherever man has delved, dredged, or drilled the earth to win its precious minerals he has created centers whose names are synonymous with both misery and joyous bonanza—Virginia City, Silver City, Sutler’s Mill. One of the most spectacular of these Eldorados sprang up just before the Civil War in the rolling farm country of northwestern Pennsylvania around the towns of Titusville and Franklin. The region was an unlikely setting for an economic boom, save for one peculiarity: It abounded in a foulsmelling, foul-looking, foul-tasting substance that polluted wells, slicked the tops of ponds and canals, and seeped into newly plowed fields. The locals called the bothersome stuff “Seneca oil,” after the Indians who had used it as a kind of cure-all. Out of exasperation they even named one of the streams in the area Oil Creek.

Then, in May of 1858, a former steamboat clerk, dry-goods salesman, express agent, and railroad conductor arrived in Titusville with his wife and two children. Colonel Edwin L. Drake—the honorific had been dreamed up by his employers—had been hired to develop the properties of the Seneca Oil Company. The company was made up of a group of men who had become interested in the stuff oozing out of the ground around Titusville after a flask of it had been analyzed by the distinguished chemist Benjamin Silliman, Jr., of Yale; he thought it had real potential as a substitute for whale oil in lamps. For more than a year—despite difficulties in purchasing even the simplest tools and finding a trained borer—the determined Drake worked at his task. Finally, on August 27, 1859, he brought in his well, and neither Titusville nor the world was ever quite the same again.

The population of Titusville, two or three hundred at the time of Drake’s strike, soon climbed into the thousands. Derricks went up like umbrellas in a cloudburst, and lots which had been worth no more than $100 changed hands for $40,000 and then $100,000. Into the area flooded men from New York law offices and from the gold fields of California. They slept sixteen to a room in the hotels—or on the lobby floors or on billiard tables or in barber chairs or on counters. They ate their meals of salt pork, beans, and poorly baked biscuits by shifts in tents. And at night they gambled and drank and went to sporting houses where men and women danced together in the altogether. The more respectable element was soon calling Titusville “Sodden Gomorrah.” And over it all and under it all was the wet, black, money stink of oil.

Into the midst of this combined hell and paradise came a man who was to preserve it all, not under glass but on glass. He was John Aked Mather, born in Lancashire, England,