Hauling Oil to Garland

(condensed from Arch Bristow's Old Time Tales of Warren County)

               It is four o'clock in the morning, a chilly, foggy morning in the Valley of the Brokenstraw Creek  in the month of December, 1863.  Fog and darkness fill the valley; it will not be daylight for a long time yet. The village of Garland is still in bed and asleep, except for the three hotels from whose small paned windows the glow of oil lamps is making soft fan-shapes in the fog. There is some activity too at this early, clammy hour in the two livery stables.  Lighted lanterns are moving about in the barns, the heavy crunch of horses grinding corn can be heard at the door. Everything drips, oozes, soaks. The leafless trees are beaded with tiny drops. The whole valley is full of pearl mist which reaches half way to the hilltops. One warming, comfortable note comes in this chilly, cheerless scene, the sharp sizzle of frying buckwheat cakes in the Ross House kitchen. There are no sidewalks and the mud is everywhere.

               The road up the valley, toward Grand Valley and Pleasantville, invisible in the foggy darkness, is a sea of mud--a deep, sticky mire in which oily pools of water drain into ruts that run slow rivulets. It is not a road, it is a wallow, a batter of mire that shows plainly it has been stirred and pounded and mixed like a bed of mortar. Yet it is a road and over it this foggy, wet, December day will strain and splash four hundred teams of heavy horses, mired to their hame straps, plunging, sweating, slipping, struggling to haul their heavy loads of oil.

               The oil was hauled in barrels, five, sometimes six, laid crossways in the wagon bed. The number of barrels hauled depended on the condition of the roads, and the capacity of the team.  The roads were always bad, in summer slime and stones, in winter a barter of mud or hard-frozen ruts. Oil dripping from leaky barrels mixed with the mud making a black mire that clogged the spokes of the wheels till they looked solid, like circus-wagon wheels. A man living at “the summit,” now the location of the Rhinehart farm, made a corduroy road from that point to Garland and charged teamsters for driving over it.

               The trip, loaded, took eight to ten hours, often much longer when the road was particularly bad. Teamsters often made it through to Garland and back as far as Grand Valley in a day. At any hour of the night a team or two were likely to come ploughing past the isolated farm houses along the road, the joggling spark of the teamster’s road lantern, a brand new invention, showing in the dark.

Courtesy of the Warren County Historical Society