which these two men were for mally allied. At this time Hardison and Stewart decided that if they were to make a success of the oil busi ness in California they would have to attract big money. The richest man in the county was Thomas R. Bard who had come to California to drill wells on a vast acreage owned by some friends. When the drilling failed to produce oil in quantity, Bard had turned to buy ing up the distressed properties for a stock syndicate. This had proved highly profitable and Bard himself was already a millionaire. His only oil interest at the time was the little company known as the Mission Transfer Company which owned several thousand acres of land in Ventura County, with tanks, pipe lines and a small refinery. The company did a thriv ing business transporting and mar keting other producers' oil. Bard had sold a half interest in the Mission Transfer Company to the Pacific Coast Oil Company, the big competitor of Hardison and Stewart. Much to their surprise, he agreed to sell the other half interest to them. He was receptive to their idea of launching a new company to drill in Sespe Canyon on proved oil lands which Hardi son and Stewart controlled through leases. This was the beginning of the Sespe Oil Company with Bard as president, although most of the stock was owned by Hardison and Stewart. Soon after this deal was consummated, Hardison and Stew art bought the other half of the Mission Transfer Company and Bard served as president of this company also. In December, 1886, the Hardi-
ment, the partners borrowed mon ey to get together equipment and men to drill once more. They managed to drill an even dozen wells in 1884, but hard luck still plagued them. The oil from their first wells in Adams Canyon was heavy dread oil with small kero sene content and was of little value. All the oil that Hardison and Stewart were able to pump and sell in 1884 was not nearly enough to keep them drilling. They were kept operating by oc casional dividends from oil leases they still held in Pennsylvania. Both Stewart and Hardison began to suspect that the heavy asphaltic oil that was being found at shallow depths was simply the by-product from deeper pools being pushed up by pressure from larger de posits deeper down in the earth. It was this suspicion that led them to bring John Irwin, a relative of Stewart, who was a geologist, from Pennsylvania to study the situation. As a result of his advice they began to drill deeper wells. This proved their suspicions that there were deep pools beneath the surface of the heavier oil. It was the result of this development that the two partners began their success in the California oil busi ness. All the agreements between these two men up to this,time had been informal and purely verbal. With the prospect of great ly expanded operation in the West, and at the suggestion of their bankers, they decided to draw up a written partnership, in which Lyman Stewart and his fam ily owned 51% and Hardison and his friends 49% of the stock. Thus began the first oil company in
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