HISTORY-MAKING OIL FIELD EVENT AT CORYVILLE CITED
WORLD’S FIRST PIPELINE TRIED THERE 55 YEARS AGO
McKean Democrat
Volume 5 (rest unknown)
Editor Russell R. Lindsley
Smethport, Pa., Thursday, May 10, 1934
A full-page advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post
this week dramatically revives a fact little known to the younger generation –
that at Coryville, now a hamlet near Smethport, 55 years ago occurred an incident
as important to the great world oil industry as Fulton’s first steamboat
was to human transportation.
It was the opening of the world’s first pipeline, regarded as a crazy experiment,
built to carry oil, brought to Coryville from wells of the nearby Bradford field
for storage in tanks underground and over the Allegheny mountains to Williamsport,
Pa, 100 miles away.
The scheme worked perfectly and from the first experiment launched with colorful
ceremony at Coryville grew the pipeline method of conveying oil with thousands
of miles of pipeline throughout the United States and in every country of the
world where oil is produced.
The Coryville-Williamsport line was eventually extended to the Atlantic seaboard
in New Jersey.
The Coryville pump station was soon followed by other pumping plants and pipelines
at nearby Colegrove, Rixford, and other points in this area.
The advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post, commemorating an event which revolutionized
the oil business, was inserted by Veedol Motor Oil, a Tide Water Associated Product.
Accompanied by a drawing of the gathering which witnessed the turning of the first
gate of the line, with a more or less accurate artist’s conception of the
hills overlooking Coryville, the ad was captioned, “GAMBLERS LOST THEIR
SHIRTS WHEN ‘BENSON’S FOLLY’ WORKED.”
The text of the ad reads:
“On the morning of May 28, 1879, the townsfolk of Coryville, Pa., were in
a gay and carnival mood. Byron D. Benson was about to reveal his long promised
miracle. A magic pipeline that would whisk petroleum over the mountains to Williamsport-over
100 miles away.
“For months, ‘Benson’s pipe dream’ had been the talk of
the town. Oil men called it a harebrained scheme. Gamblers bet 50 to 1 that no
pump could be built powerful enough to force a stream of oil across the Alleghenies.
“But Benson and his associates, the founders of the Tide Water Oil Company,
had grimly proceeded with their project. They knew they had to win. They knew
that the railroads were crushing the Pennsylvania oil producers to death with
exorbitant freight rates. They knew that unless a cheaper way could be found for
shipping Pennsylvania crude, the public would be forced to buy an inferior petroleum.
“A great crowd was on hand when Benson turned the valve which let the first
oil into the pipes. Came a clinking, thumping noise…and a mighty cheer arose.
The oil was on its way, moving on and upward over the hills of Coryville.
“Seven days later, the liquid gold poured out of the pipe terminals at Williamsport.
And Tide Water knew it had completed the first leg of its pipeline journey to
the sea.”
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