The Newtown Pentacle

Friday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The machines that cut down the forests, and the ones which ground the mountain tops away to facilitate the harvest of mineral treasuries from the deep, and the machines which fly to the edge of space – and in fact the very machine which I drove to a spot 3 miles south of Titusville, Pennsylvania (in Cherrytree Township) – wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for this site. Neither would one have had quite as much to talk about on NYC’s Newtown Creek for all those years, if weren’t for the Drake Well and its many descendants.

In 1859, this is where the modern world was born. You’re looking at a theoretically accurate recreation of the Drake Well site. The original installation was swept away during the tumult of the Pennsylvania Oil Rush, which occurred in this section of the commonwealth from the 1860’s to 1890’s. The Drake Well is a National Historic place, a National Historic Landmark, a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark, and a National Historic Chemical Landmark as well.

It’s also where the modern world was born.

The beetle like race who will take over stewardship of the planet, after we are gone, will likely view it in the same way we regard the asteroid which annihilated the dinosaurs, or the volcanic overactivity which caused the great dying during the Permian era – which is coincidentally when the deposits of organic material that would become petroleum were first laid down, in vast mounds of death.

This is the actual exact spot where the current, anthropogenic in nature, Holocene Mass Extinction event began.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I’ve read about this place and the PA. Oil Boom hundreds of times in pursuance of knowledge about the fabled Newtown Creek, and the 80+ small oil refineries which proliferated along its banks in the post civil war period. An oil boom, aka a ‘great rich quick’ feeding frenzy, erupted here in the 1860’s and played out for decades. There were no environmental or regulatory laws back then, when ‘progress’ was the order of the day. Much of this activity was conducted by small operations, a vast army of wildcatters and roughnecks who were working for themselves or entrepreneurs.

An ancient Hemlock forest was here, which dated back to the retreat of the glaciers. That forest was cut down, and wood from its multitudinous trees was used to build the oil extraction derricks. None of the trees in any of these photos is older than 120 or so years, as they’re what grew back after the boom ended, when the wildcatters moved on to despoil even greener pastures in the west and south. Everything I’ve read about what the landscape looked here, after the boom ended, is reminiscent of WW1’s Ypres, or Tolkien’s Mordor.

Today, the recreation of the Drake Well sits on a 22 acre wooded property that operates as a museum, and has since 1945. A waterway called ‘Oil Creek’ is nearby, but more on that next week.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

By the early 1890’s, after the oil rush in Pennsylvania had abated, the young industry had moved on to other and more productive fields in Texas and California. The independent entrepreneurial side of the oil business had also all but evaporated, as well. If you wanted to be involved in this sort of endeavor, you were going to have to deal with HIM, lest you draw destruction upon yourself.

Gaunt, ruthless, humorless and severe, HE had risen to the top of the heap in this new industry. He controlled the production, transport, refinement, and distribution of petroleum product in not just the United States, but 90% of the entire world.

Later in life, HE suffered from Alopecia universalis, rendering HIM bald as a cue ball. In HIS lifetime, HE was viewed as the very embodiment of evil and greed by the country at large (an actual contemporaneous quote about HIS business practices, from the NY World: ‘the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country’.) By the time of HIS death, HIS accumulated fortune was greater than that of all the Pharoahs of Egypt, the Caesar’s of Rome, and the Crown heads of Europe – all put together.

An entire generation of comic book villains were based on HIM – Lex Luthor, Doctor Sivana, even Mr. Potter from the ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ movie. All you had to do to indicate that a fictional character was ‘evil’ was to show them as being rich and bald. HE became an archetype.

HIS name was John Davison Rockefeller, and his Standard Oil Trust was the lever by which he moved the world. His dominance over the petroleum industry, and the Nation, started during the Pennsylvania Oil Boom.

The oil extracted here was at first shipped to and refined in Cleveland (Standard Oil Company of Ohio), but after merging the Standard operation with Charles Pratt’s “Astral” operation in Brooklyn, it began flowing to the East River and Newtown Creek (Standard Oil Company of NY) for processing and distribution through NY Harbor.

Rockefeller controlled shipping rates for oil on the Pennsylvania Railroad, ensuring that his ‘product’ was cheaply transported and that his competitors paid more for the service. The Standard Oil Trust was a distributed network, one which controlled – for instance – the price of the timber and iron which would be used for oil barrels, and the salaries of the coopers who constructed the barrels. Canneries, and the mines which supplied tin or steel for the cans, were under his thumb as well. All of the secondary suppliers were called ‘combinations.’

Standard Oil was depicted as an octopus by its contemporaries, with tendrils reaching into all sectors of the economy. By the end of the 19th century, the Standard Oil Trust had become a de facto government unto itself.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

None of the equipment within the Drake Well building is original, rather it’s a recreation using equipment contemporary to what Drake would have had access to, with its position and typology based on historic photographs from the actual wellhead.

A bit of signage is installed within that describes the circumstance of the tableau.

The Standard Oil Trust’s activity – economic, politically, and industrially speaking – which spawned out from this spot defined the 20th century in the United States. Rockefeller’s operation did everything it could to ensure that only elected officials friendly to Standard Oil would populate any State or Federal level offices which could interfere with the de facto monopoly they had on the petroleum business. From pumping it out of the ground, to the end phase of distribution to the consumer, every phase of oil production was controlled.

Rockefeller called this ‘horizontal integration.’

Even the President of the United States was famously ‘on their side.’ William McKinley, who waged war against the Spanish Empire largely for the benefit of the Brooklyn based Havemeyer Family and their Sugar Trust, raised the American Flag in Puerto Rico, conquered Cuba and the Philippines, and forced colonization upon Hawaii and Guam.

McKinley was a protectionist, who enacted brutally high tariffs on foreign goods as well, and advocated for a ‘gold standard’ monetary policy which strictly benefited those who already held the gold. He was legendarily friendly to the various Trusts and Combinations, and especially so with Standard Oil. He was ‘their man in Washington.’

That is, until McKinley was assassinated by a self described ‘Anarchist’ back in 1901, and his Vice President took over.

The new President, Theodore Roosevelt, was no friend to the monopolies, combines, or the trusts. Roosevelt was a Progressive Republican from NYC, and had been added to McKinley’s ticket in order to shore up electoral strength in traditionally Democrat turf like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.

Rockefeller had opposed adding Roosevelt to the ticket, as did several of his counterpart ‘Captains of Industry,’ but there you are.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Using the Sherman Anti Trust Act as his lever, Roosevelt forced the breakup of Standard Oil into 43 smaller companies in 1911.

The new company based at Newtown Creek in Brooklyn was called ‘The Standard Oil Company of New York,’ or ‘SOCONY,’ and like the 42 other new companies, it was forbidden from colluding with The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, or any of the other baby Standards, to fix prices on supply or distribution, or to share resources.

Whereas at the time, the end of the capitalist world was predicted due to regulation, this newly competitive environment forced innovation, and vastly magnified the financial rewards for these off shoots of Standard Oil. The lesson learned by Wall Street was that monopoly is bad and competition is good. A hundred years later, AT&T was taught the same lesson in the 1980’s. Google is likely next on that list.

SOCONY became Mobil, Standard of New Jersey became Exxon, Standard of California is Chevron. Standard of Ohio became Marathon, Standard of Texas became Texaco – and the list goes on and on.

Added together, the valuation of the Standard Oil offshoots are worth a great deal more than the original behemoth was, and hundreds of thousands of their shareholders and legions of their employees are enriched by it, rather than just a handful of oligarchs.

Of course, this predicate storyline and super valuable industry is how humanity ended up in the pickle that we’re experiencing a century and a half later.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The petroleum in the ground in Pennsylvania, and all the other places, (mentioned above) was deposited as organic matter laid down during another mass extinction – the Permian-Triassic’s ‘Great Dying’ event. Petroleum is generally prospected in areas which were once oceanic or sea floor, but are now deeply buried in the ground due to the actions of plate tectonics. The Appalachian Mountains are amongst the oldest on the planet, and are rich in hydrocarbon deposits – famously coal, but with oil and gas as well.

A second oil rush is currently underway hereabouts, harvesting the formerly unreachable or economically unfeasible banks of ‘shale oil,’ using a process referred to as ‘fracking.’

Whew. I haven’t talked about this particular subject in a year, so forgive the verbose telling of it. It’s like letting a Djinn out of a bottle.

Back next week with more from Oil Country, in Pennsylvania’s Venango County.

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