Some time in April, 1876, the most ambitious project of all was announced. This was a seaboard pipe-line to be run from the Oil Regions to Baltimore. Up to this time the pipe lines had been used merely to gather the oil from the wells and carry it to the railroads. The longest single line in oper ation was the Columbia Conduit, and it was built thirty miles long. The idea of pumping oil over the mountains to the sea was regarded generally as chimerical. To a trained civil engineer it did not, however, present any insuperable obsta cles, and in the winter of and 1876 Henry Harley, whose connection with the Pennsylvania Transportation Com pany has already been noted, went to his old chief in the Hoo sac Tunnel, General Herman Haupt, and laid the scheme before him. If it was a feasible idea would General Haupt take charge of the engineering for the Pennsylvania Trans portation Company? At the same time Mr. Harley employed General Benjamin Butler to look after the legal side of such an undertaking. Both General Haupt and General Butler were enthusiastic over the idea and took hold of the work with a will. It was not long before the scheme began to attract serious attention.The Eastern papers in particular took it up. The references to it were, as a whole, favourable. It was regarded everywhere as a remarkable undertaking: "Worthy," the New York Graphic said, "to be coupled with the Brooklyn Bridge, the blowing up of Hell Gate, and the tunnelling of the Hudson River." As General Haupt's plans show, it was a tremendous undertaking, for the line would be, when finished, at least Soo miles long, and it would be worked by thirty or more tremendous pumps. On July 25 a meeting was held at Parker's Landing, presenting publicly the reports of General Haupt and General Butler. The authority and seriousness of the scheme as set forth at this meeting alarmed the railroads. If this seaboard line went through it was farewell to the railroad-Standard combination. Oil could be shipped to the seaboard by it at a cost of r6 2-3 cents a barrel, General Haupt estimated. All of the interests, little and big, which believed that they would be injured by the success of the line, began an attack.
Curiously enough one of the first points of hostility was General Haupt himself. An effort was made to discredit his estimate in order to scare people from taking recalled the Hoosac Tunnel scandal and the fact that the General once built a bridge which had tumbled down, ridi :uled his estimate of the cost, etc., etc. The "card" in which General Haupt answered his chief critic, one who signed himself "Vidi," was admirable : At the same time that General Haupt was_attacked the Pennsylvania Transportation Company was criticised for bad management. A long letter to the Derrick August 14, 1876, claimid that the company in the past had been mismanaged; that the credit it asked could not be given safely; that its management had been such that it had scarcely any business left. Indeed this critic claimed that the last pipe-line organ ised, a small line known as the Keystone, had during the last six months done almost double the business of the Pennsyl vania. Under the direction of the Pennsylvania Railroad, it was believed, the Philadelphia papers began to attack the plan. Their claim was that the charters under which the Pennsyl vania Transportation Company expected to operate would not allow them to lay such a pipe-line. The opposition became such that the New York papers began to take notice of it. The Derrick on September i6, 1876, copies an article from the New York Bulletin in which it is said that the railroads and the Standard Oil Company, "now stand in gladiatorial array, with shields poised and sword ready to deal the cut."
An opposition began to arise, too, from farmers through whose property an attempt was being made to obtain right of way.
tand of counties s a r ad no business to take their property for a pipe-line. One of the common complaints of the farmers' newspapers was that leakage from the pipes would spoil the springs of water, curdle milk, and burn down barns. The matter assumed such proportions that the secretary referred it to the attorney general for a hearing. In the meantime the Pennsylvania Transportation Company made the most strenuous efforts to secure the right of way. A large number of men were sent out to talk over the farmers into signing the leases. Hand bills were distributed with an appeal to be generous and to free the oil business from a monopoly that was crushing it. These same circulars told the farmers that a monopoly had hired agents all along the route misrepresenting the facts about their intentions. Mr. Harley, under the excitement of the enter ' prise and the opposition it aroused, became a public figure, and in October the New York Graphic gave a long interview with him. In this interview Mr. Harley claimed that the pipe-line scheme was gotten up to escape the Standard Oil monopoly. Litigation, he declared, was all his scheme had to fear. "John D. Rockefeller, president of the Standard monopoly," he said, "is working against us in the country newspapers, prejudicing the farmers and raising issues in the courts, and seeking also to embroil us with other carrying lines." It was not long, however, before something more serious than the farmers and their complaints got in the way of the Pennsylvania Transportation Company. This was a rumour that the company was financially embarrassed. Their certifi cates were refused on the market, and in November a receiver was appointed. Different members of the company were arrested for fraud, among them two or three of the best I known men in the Oil Regions. The rumours proved only too true. The company had been grossly mismanaged, and the verification of the charges against it put an end to this first scheme for a seaboard pipe-line. .0 While all these efforts doomed to failure or to but tem porary success were making, a larger attempt to meet Mr. Rockefeller's consolidation was quietly under way. Among those interested in the oil business who had watched the grow ing power of the Standard with most concern was the head of the Empire Transportation Company, Colonel Joseph D. Potts. In connection with the Pennsylvania Railroad Colonel Potts had built up this concern, founded in 1865, until it was the most perfectly developed oil transporter in the country. It operated soo miles of pipe, owned a thousand oil-tank cars, controlled large oil yards at Communipaw, New Jersey, was in every respect indeed a model business organisa tion, and it had the satisfaction of knowing that what it was it had made itself from raw material, that its methods were its own, and that the practices it had developed were those followed by other pipe-line companies. While the Empire had far outstripped all its early competitors, there had grown up in the last year a rival concern which Colonel Potts must have watched with anxiety. This concern, known as the United Pipe Line, was really a Standard organisation, for Mr. Rocke feller, in carrying out his plan of controlling all the oil refin eries of the country, had been forced gradually into the pipe line business.