the hotel was especially poor; a lack of insulation and innumerable gaps in the walls made conditions in the hotel miserable during the winter. At one point, the Pithole Post Office, located on the first-floor of the Chase House, was the third-busiest in the state of Pennsylvania, behind Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Three different churches—Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian—were constructed by their respective congregations. Pithole's local newspaper, the Pithole Daily Record was started on September 5, 1865. The largest building in Pithole—the three-story, 1,100-seat Murphy's Theater—opened on September 17. Among all the glamour, "every other building [in Pithole] was a bar". Prostitution was rampant in Pithole, with most of the brothels built along First Street. Although the borough council passed ordinances banning the sex trade and carried out raids in an attempt to enforce them, they had little impact. As oil production increased through the success of wells like the Frazier, Twin, Pool, Grant, and the two Homestead Wells, transportation of the oil to the outside world was still reliant on teamsters. The teamsters were notorious for mistreatment of their horses, most of which lost their hair due to a buildup of oil and only had a lifespan of a few months in Pithole. The high mortality rate caused a horse shortage, with more having to be brought in by rail from Ohio and New York. Teamsters often refused to work on days when the roads were impassable or gouged the oil producers. Various investors, fed up with the teamsters, pooled resources and built a plank toll road from Pithole to Titusville. Samuel Van Sykle, an oil buyer also frustrated with the teamsters, designed the world's first pipeline, which opened on October 9, 1865. The , pipeline connected Pithole to the Oil Creek Railroad and was initially able to transport per hour operating with three steam engines, equivalent to 300 teams working a 10-hour shift. A fourth engine brought the pipeline's maximum capacity to a day. The Oil City and Pithole Branch Railroad (OC&P) was opened on December 18. It was renamed the Pithole Valley Railway in 1871, and was to be abandoned in 1874. It ran from Oleopolis, and had passenger stops at Bennett, Woods Mill and Prather. A second railroad was partly built but never finished -this was the Reno, Oil Creek and Pithole Railroad, which in 1865 was building from Reno west of Oil City to Pithole via Rouseville