Their story began with a simple wedding that ended in blood. Their story ended 100 years later with the nation's first gas well in Murrysville—and it also ended in blood. But the effects of their story still send ripples into your life now, in the way you heat your homes here in the Alle-Kiski region…maybe even in how you make your car go...

The wedding at Miller’s blockhouse was over, but Michael and Phoebe Hawkins Rugh had stayed over. Overnight stays were common custom in 1782—traveling even a few miles was a hard thing in those days so soon after the Revolutionary War. And then there was the Infair. According to 1906 writer John Boucher, who wrote about what happened, the wedding day was for the bride (in this case Mary Courla) and the next day was a big party--the Infair--for the groom (James Duncan) as was the day’s custom.

It was rare that people could let down their hair and have fun without fear. Living on the frontier’s edge was hazardous; blockhouses provided a place of safety from Indian attacks, so celebrations like weddings had to be held at such places. The Rughs with their three-year-old daughter, Mary, and baby boy had traveled from their own blockhouse in today’s Murrysville to Samuel Millers’ blockhouse. As many as 40 guests, mainly women and young people, were gathered from around the Westmoreland County seat, Hannastown (we’d call the area Greensburg and Murrysville.)

According to Boucher, that afternoon as the fiddle played and people danced, men cutting hay in a nearby field heard shots and war cries from the nearby Hannastown fort and dashed to warn the party at the Miller blockhouse. The haycutters themselves did not realize other Indians had also been about to attack them as they mowed. The cutters saved themselves as they raced to tip off the wedding party, but a war party of 50 Indians hot in pursuit was breathing down their necks. The fiddle suddenly stopped and the dancing ceased. With only seconds to spare, some of the party tried to fortify themselves in the blockhouse while others escaped to hide in nearby hills and homes. Some apparently made it to Rugh’s blockhouse even.

It would not matter in the end. A few of the haycutters were killed trying to defend some of the women. The rest of the wedding party were eventually tracked down and captured or even killed, like Michael Rugh’s mom, Francina. Both Miller’s and Rugh’s blockhouses were torched. Fifteen survivors, including both Rughs and both children, were taken prisoner by the war party. No calvalry, no help, would come from Westmoreland County’s capitol, Hannastown—it too had been burned, citizens either slaughtered or captured in what was obviously a well-thought-out, planned and coordinated strike calculated to engrave terror into the settlers’ hearts.

In an eerie hint of petroleum things to come for the Rugh descendants 100 years later, the captives were marched to the area we call Oil City today. They stayed nearly eight months or so, through the winter, at the Indian’s camp there. One of the Rugh family would not make it, however, and another one would be separated from the family for nearly a decade.

The Indians delivered Michael and Phoebe into the hands of the British in Canada in the Spring. The British kept them imprisoned. But the winter prison in the hands of the Indians had been downright cruel to the Rughs. Their baby boy died in that place. No one seems to know why. And Michael and Phoebe were also forced to walk out on Mary, their toddler. The Indians kept her. An old Indian woman began to raise her. With their family shattered, and not knowing the fate would be of their new US of A, much less their own fate, the Rughs’ story could end right there.

It did not.

Flash forward a few years. A somewhat temporary, if unstable, peace wavered between the Americans, the British, and the Indians. Michael and Phoebe are freed and then dispatched to New York City. They soon were able to go home to their farmland, back to what would become Murrysville, then called Franklin Township—without a clue, or hope, about their daughter Mary’s fate. In the days after their return, Michael Rugh must have determined to never let his wife Phoebe go through what happened again. That meant stopping the chain of events that led to their son’s death and their daughter’s kidnapping, and the only way was to nip it in the bud. He would make sure there would always be a place of safety for those in his home, one that could not be burned.

Michael Rugh constructed a house of stone.

Not too far from where his old home had been burned by Indians, Rugh built another home, this time of rock, that perhaps would also stand time’s test. He also prospered in the land, serving at some point in his life as a district justice and a Representative in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in Philadelphia. Maybe due to his legislative experience, his stone home became known as the Philadelphia Mansion. The years went by in relative peace for the Rughs; of course even minor troubles probably seemed like nothing after what they’d been through. But it had to be hard to find joy after the loss of not one but both children.

The 1881 account of then-88-year-old Mrs. Hannah Rugh Rowe, as retold by Boucher, continues the Rughs’ life. Apparently in 1790, a few Indians came into a town on the Susquehanna River, hoping to trade. One of them, a young Indian maiden, must have caught someone’s eye in the town. Whoever it was must have been sharp to notice something was wrong. She only spoke the language of the Indians with her, and her skin looked like that of the other Indians. But it had been stained; the real hue of her skin was actually more like that of the settlers. Someone in that town figured out she was actually some settler family’s daughter, and bought her from the Indians for 10 dollars.

Somehow, some way, somebody uncovered the truth of this mystery girl: she was Mary Rugh, daughter of Michael and Phoebe who lived near Pittsburgh on the other side of Pennsylvania. Whoever that somebody was, they got her back to her parents. She still could not speak English, and did not know her mom and dad. I don’t know what happened in the four years that followed, but her parents HAD to be overjoyed beyond belief. Their girl had come home!! They thought she was gone and suddenly she was there in their midst!

And somehow over those four years of being home with Mom and Dad, she must have learned some English and learned some of her culture’s ways. You see, by 1994, she had met and married Jacob Haymaker. He would later serve in the War of 1812 and become a Justice of the Peace. Together, Jacob and Mary Haymaker would raise their family in their own home that came to be known as the Haymaker House.

The Haymakers' sons grew to be wealthy farmers themselves. At one time the Rugh/Haymaker land stretched apparently from Turtle Creek to south of today’s Sheetz store on Rt. 22 in Murrysville.

Again, the story could end here, nice happy ending and all.

But you have to hear the story of Michael and Obadiah Haymaker.

That’s Mary and Jacob’s grandkids, and the great-grandkids of Michael and Phoebe Rugh’s. Joan Kearns, the President of the today’s Murrysville Historical Preservation Society says Obadiah and Michael Haymaker had found natural gas seeping out of the ground along Turtle Creek. Somewhere near today’s Murrysville-Trafford Road, Pleasant Valley Road and Mill Street, according to Kearns, they found a man named Josh Cooper boiling a pot of maple sugar over a fire fed by that natural gas out of the ground. Cooper’s fire sparked them to consider that where there was gas, there was probably oil! They drilled for two years looking for oil before, on November 3, 1878, their drill pierced to a depth of 1400 ft.

Then it happened.

"Without the slightest warning there was a terrific roar and rumble that was heard 15 miles away,” Michael Haymaker would later write. “Each piece of rigging went sky high, whirling around like so much paper caught in a gust of wind. But, instead of oil, we had struck gas. It was being shot out under such enormous pressure that it continued to shake the ground and roar for months rattling windows for miles around. You can't imagine the production at such pressure…Nobody knew how to stop it. But it had to be stopped and we tried all kinds of devices."

Joan Kearns, who so kindly provided Michael’s quote above, notes that the gas was blowing out of the ground at a hurricane-type fury of 30-40 million cubic feet of gas per day! Apparently they still weren’t sure what to do with it nearly three year later. Kearns points out that on September 18, 1881, a bunch of people were checking out the well, while carrying lanterns.

Yes, lit lanterns.

Yikes!

They, uh, got a little too close. Immediately, the ground belched a fireball out of the depths of its belly! A geyser of flame erupted and streamed nearly 100ft high. One year and six months would pass before they found a way to put it out. During that time, you could hear the constant roaring for five to six miles away, with people in Trafford, Pitcairn, New Alexandria, Jeannette and Monroeville also saying they heard it, Joan says. You could see the Haymakers’ fountain of fire for anywhere from eight to eighteen miles away and, “You could read your newspaper by the fire’s light for a year and half,” Joan Kearns also points out.

Local folk tried to quench the fire geyser over the next 18 months, but for a long time nothing worked. Eventually, however, they figured it out. They snuffed out the flame by carefully maneuvering a 45ft-tall smokestack into place above it. Like putting a can over a candle, it cut off the flow of oxygen to the stream of flame, and it simply…died out. Suffocated!

With the fire out, ideas for its use flowed in. George Westinghouse came up with the idea of piping it to Pittsburgh to use in the mills instead of coal. Michael and Obadiah Haymaker were soon considering offers. It wasn’t long before a Mr. Weston from Chicago made the right one, then made a down payment. However, he wouldn’t pay anymore, and the Haymakers got the land back, courtesy of the Pennsylvania courts. Enter Joseph Newton Pew, a Pittsburgh area businessman whose interest had also been sparked also by the thought of piping gas. Pew sent Weston his down payment back, and then began work on buying the well from Michael and Obadiah.

But Weston heard apparently heard about piping the gas to Pittsburgh, and tried to take possession of the Haymaker well. The courts were no help for him. The use of hooligans, brutes and enforcers, however, were not. November 26, 1883, 50 thugs armed to the teeth with rifles and bayonets struck the Haymaker well site. Weston sent them to gain control of it. Obadiah Haymaker and 10 others tried to stop Weston’s goons. In the struggle for control, Obadiah was shot, and also bayoneted four times by Weston’s small army. He breathed his last breath on the front porch of his Old William Penn Highway home. Once more, tragedy had struck the Rugh/Haymaker families, and their story ended in blood.

Epilogue:

But maybe the story really doesn’t end there. What you don’t know is that:

• Michael Haymaker was not harmed
• The nefarious Mr. Weston and his band of thugs were arrested, convicted, and some were even jailed
• The Haymaker well was, at one time, the largest commercial gas well in the world
• The Haymaker has been called the first in the country, and one of the most productive in the world
• This has been called the beginning of the modern natural gas industry in the US
• Gas from the Haymaker was piped to Pittsburgh in 1886, among other areas, for industrial use
• It was the first time gas was delivered like that to a large metropolitan city by a corporation organized to produce and transport natural gas
• The “Y” in Murrysville’s huge tree sign (that spells out MURRYSVILLE) points to the Haymaker Gas Well
• Joseph Pew, who bought the Haymaker well, became one of the founders of the company that became Peoples Gas
• Pew was also the founder of Sun Oil. We know it today as Sunoco
• Joseph Pew’s two sons and two daughters, in honor of their parents’ memory, with the goal of contributing to the public’s health and welfare, established The Pew Charitable Trusts, an independent nonprofit foundation. To this end, in fiscal year 2005, it invested $177 million into various organizations, research, and studies
• There is a monument about the Haymaker Well in Murrysville today
• Portions of the Rugh’s home, the Philadelphia House, are still around and in use
• The Haymaker House, now called the Haymaker Mansion, is still around today and in use
• There are tools and artifacts used in drilling gas wells in that area, on display at the Murrysville Library entrance hallway
• The Murrysville Historical Preservation Society, Inc. meets every other month, beginning with January, on the 3rd Monday at 7:30 PM at the Senior Center located in the Community Center on Carson Street, unless otherwise noted in the PennFranklin. All meetings are open to the public. Information about the Society may be obtained by contacting the Society at 4997 Longview Ct., Murrysville, Pa. 15668

Watch for the video where we take you on location to where some of these sites are still standing! You will be able to access it here in late May.