" Petroleum was hard to sell because it was costly to transport by wagon and smelled terrible in its raw state. Refining it required moving it from Oil Creek to one of the many refineries, most of them small, that sprang up between Titusville and Pittsburgh. But swampy or frozen dirt trails slick with spilled oil played hell with caravans of up to one hundred wagons loaded with thousands of gallons of barreled oil. "
― Richard Rhodes , Energy: A Human History