would not last. He had not purchased much land in the region, and the oil industry exploded around him outside of his control. His first well yielded only modest returns and he was fired by Seneca. He never patented the drilling method he pioneered, and lost his modest earnings from the oil business speculating on Wall Street. He would eventually die a poor pensioner in 1880. The rush Soon the area had many wells drilled by Seneca Oil Company and others. The oil boom in Pennsylvania paralleled in many ways the gold rush in California ten years earlier. It is reported that in the first year (1859), these wells produced . Boomtowns such as Titusville, Oil City and Pithole sprang up within years and an early chronicler of the region, Reverend S. J. M. Eaton, observed in 1866 that the Oil Creek Valley was so densely packed it was impossible to distinguish the borders where one town ended and another began. The Titusville population exploded from 250 residents to over 10,000 in little more than five years and in 1866 it incorporated as a city. Ironworks were erected to supply drilling tools and eight oil refineries were built between 1862 and 1868. Pithole expanded from four log-cabin farmhouses to a bustling city with over 50 hotels over the span of five months in 1865. Annual domestic output of crude swelled from in 1859, the year of Drake's “discovery,” to in 1869 and in 1873. The ongoing industrial development of Europe spurred this rapid expansion. European, and especially British, factories began importing large quantities of cheap American oil during the 1860s. By 1866, US petroleum exports far surpassed petroleum distributed to domestic markets and the value of these exports nearly doubled from $16 million in 1865 to $30 million in 1869. Petroleum jumped from the sixth most valuable US export to the second most valuable during this period. At the peak of the oil boom, Pennsylvania wells were producing one third of the world's oil. Transportation In the first years of the oil rush, high overland shipping costs drove many well owners to float their product down Oil Creek to the Allegheny River as lumber producers did. For decades, logs had been transported using man-made floods, known as pond freshets, created by successively breaking milldams along the length of the river. These freshets could carry up to 800 skiffs filled with