What fools we mortals be!
The most celebrated wells were upon the Storey farm. Upon these we
obtained an option of purchase for forty thousand dollars. We bought
them. Mr. Coleman, ever ready at suggestion, proposed to make a lake
of oil by excavating a pool sufficient to hold a hundred thousand
barrels (the waste to be made good every day by running streams of oil
into it), and to hold it for the not far distant day when, as we then
expected, the oil supply would cease. This was promptly acted upon,
but after losing many thousands of barrels waiting for the expected
day (which has not yet arrived) we abandoned the reserve. Coleman
predicted that when the supply stopped, oil would bring ten dollars a
barrel and therefore we would have a million dollars worth in the
lake. We did not think then of Nature's storehouse below which still
keeps on yielding many thousands of barrels per day without apparent
exhaustion.
This forty-thousand-dollar investment proved for us the best of all so
far. The revenues from it came at the most opportune time.[28] The
building of the new mill in Pittsburgh required not only all the
capital we could gather, but the use of our credit, which I consider,
looking backward, was remarkably good for young men.
[Footnote 28: The wells on the Storey farm paid in one year a million
dollars in cash and dividends, and the farm itself eventually became
worth, on a stock basis, five million dollars.
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