Townsend needed investors for his fledgling company, and even more importantly, he needed a man on the ground to do the hard physical work of the venture. Townsend, who became something of an acquaintance of Drake’s, was a promoter of the Seneca Oil Company, a Connecticut corporation formed to locate and extract petroleum near the oil seeps of the rural hills and valleys of western Pennsylvania. One of Drake’s frequent passengers on the railroad was a New Haven man named James Townsend. It was steady work, and the pay came on time. He had wandered the countryside looking for odd jobs, worked as a farmhand, a store clerk, and a deckhand on an ore freighter and never earned more than $50 in any given month. Born in 1818 in a small town in upstate New York, Edwin Drake had cut a simple and rather undistinguished path during his first 40 years on Earth. Working on the railroad was the best employment he had ever had in his life. His most recent occupation was that of a train conductor on the New York, New Haven and Long Island Railroad, a high-tech kind of job in the late 1850s. He was certainly not commissioned in any military organization. Through the exploitation of plentiful oil, the world was at first lubricated and illuminated… and then over the next 145 years mechanized, motorized and plasticized.” By achieving his “Conquest of the Rock,” Colonel Drake demonstrated that it was possible to extract oil in industrial quantities. “The world of the 1850s was a place of raw animal power, supplemented on occasion with energy derived from wind, burning wood, falling water or hard-won coal from pits dug into the sides of hills.
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