Oil boom and bust

Delanceyplace.com has a selection from The Prize by Daniel Yergin:

With the price of oil dropping again, it is worth recalling the beginning of the oil era. In 1859, in the obscure town of Titusville in northwestern Pennsylvania, 'Colonel' E.L. Drake and 'Uncle Billy' Smith successfully drilled the first oil well (photo, bottom) and ushered in the titanic booms and busts of the oil era. In one nearby town just six years later, a parcel of land worth two million dollars was soon thereafter worth less than five bucks:

Nothing revealed the feverish pitch of oil speculation better than the strange story of Pithole, on Pithole Creek, some fifteen miles from Titusville. A first well was struck in the dense forest land there (photo, top) in January of 1865 and, by June, there were four flowing wells, producing two thousand barrels a day, one third of the total output of the Oil Regions, and people fought their way in on the roads already clogged with the barrel-laden wagons. 'The whole place,' said one visitor, 'smells like a corps of soldiers with diarrhea.' The land speculation seemed to know no bounds. One farm that had been virtually worthless a few months earlier was sold for over a million dollars in July of 1865, and then resold for two million dollars in September.
In that same month, production around Pithole Creek reached six thousand barrels per day. By that same September, what had once been an unidentifiable spot in the wilderness had become a town of fifteen thousand people. The New York Herald reported that the principal businesses of Pithole were 'liquor and leases'; and The Nation added that: 'It is safe to assert that there is more vile liquor drunk in this town than in any of its size in the world.' Yet Pithole was already on the road to respectability, with two banks, two telegraph offices, a newspaper, a waterworks, a fire company, scores of boarding houses and businesses, more than fifty hotels (at least three of which were up to elegant metropolitan standards) and a post office that handled more than five thousand letters a day.
But then, a couple of months later, the oil production abruptly gave out just as quickly as it had begun. To the people of Pithole, this was a calamity, like a Biblical plague, and by January of 1866, only a year from the first discovery, thousands had fled the town for new hopes and opportunities. The town that had sprung up overnight from the wilderness was totally deserted. Fires ravaged the buildings, and the wooden skeletons that were left were torn down to be used for building again elsewhere, or burned as kindling by the farmers in the surrounding hills. Pithole returned to silence and wilderness. A parcel of land in Pithole that sold for two million dollars in 1865 was auctioned for $4.37 in 1878."

Rico says it was a bummer for the aptly-named Pithole...