Immediately there was a great uproar in the region. The hundreds of teamers and the owners of teams saw at once that this new method of trans portation, if allowed to live, was sure to deprive them of the profitable business which they had monopolized for five years. They also found ready sympathy outside of their own ranks, since the teamsters and boatmen made up a large proportion of the population, and every tradesman and mer chant had to look to them for much of his profits. Everything possible was done to injure Van Syckle's line. The pipes were cut ; storage tanks connected with the line were set on fire ; and all associated with it received threats of personal vio lence unless pumping was discontinued. So seri ous was the trouble that armed patrols had to be employed to protect the pipes, and the arrest of a number of ringleaders was necessary before the disturbance could be stopped.
The pumping of oil offered such a vast improve ment over the old practice of teaming that even the most hostile opponents were eventually forced to admit its unquestioned advantages. Yet the growth of pipe lines was surprisingly slow at first, lines being laid only from the wells to the local refineries and to the main shipping points on the railroads.
The first real trunk line of pipe did not come un til 1875, when a six-inch pipe was laid from the lower oil field of Butler County to Pittsburg, a dis tance of about forty miles. The oil men, however, were becoming more and more impressed with the possibilities of pipe-line transportation. Enthu siastic ones believed that there was no limit to the distance which oil might be pumped and, in the same year which witnessed the opening of the trunk line to Pittsburg, the Pennsylvania Trans portation Company was chartered to build a line to the seaboard, over 300 miles away. The na ture of this project shows the growing trend of opinion, even though its only result was the con struction of various new local lines in the oil regions.
A full dozen years after Van Syckle's first suc cess, the railroads were still the important long distance carriers, with the pipe lines acting as local feeders. Various traffic agreements existing at that time between the refining interests, the most impor tant of which was the Standard Oil Company, and the leading railroads tended to perpetuate this con dition. The railroads, on the one hand, struggling for their very existence, were naturally unwilling to lose their valuable oil traffic, and the Standard, on the other hand, still engaged in crushing its rivals, found its most powerful weapon of offense in the secret favors obtained from the railroads.
The most significant event in this struggle for existence was probably the building of the Tide water Pipe Line in the late seventies, from Brad ford County to Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was built by an independent company to afford an outlet not controlled by the Standard and its rail road allies, the connection with the seaboard being made at Williamsport through the Reading Rail road, which was not a party to any of the secret rates agreements. The chief service of the Tide water line, however, was not in reducing rates nor in relieving temporarily the heavy burden of op pression from which many a small operator suf fered. It rendered a much greater service in dem onstrating the absolute feasibility of piping oil for long distances across any kind of country.
From that time on, the extension of the pipe-line system was one of the most remarkable develop ments in the whole growth of the industry. The first complete line to the coast was opened in 1879 from Olean, New York, to the refineries at Bay onne, N. J. Other trunk lines were soon con structed to all the important refining and shipping centers on the seaboard and on the Great Lakes, and the railroads were rapidly forced out of the business of carrying crude oil.
Pipe lines have been practically the only means used in transporting crude oil since the early eighties. Wherever the industry has spread, the pipe line has followed it, keeping pace with its growth, until now thousands of miles of pipe make a complete network throughout the fields, connect ing wells to storage tanks and tanks with the great trunk lines to the important refineries. Time and again this extension of the pipe-line business has been marked by fierce wars of competition be tween the Standard interests and rival independ ent companies, and in the eastern part of the coun try, with but a single important exception, the Standard has always been the victor. Some idea of the development of pipe-line transportation may be had from the fact that it is now possible to pump oil from the remotest parts of the Oklahoma fields, by way of Whiting, Ind., direct to any one of the great refineries along the Atlantic coast, the oil following a continuous line of the Standard pipes from the time it leaves the well until it enters the still at New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore. In the Appalachian region alone, acting merely as feeders to its great trunk system, the Standard Company owns pipes enough to belt the earth.