An underground oil transmission pipeline that cuts through the extreme southwestern corner of the township was installed more than 120 years ago. A scattering of small orange signs mark its course, a more or less straight line from the intersection of Pinewood and Liberty Corner Roads (at the Bernards boundary) to Morning Glory Road at King George Road  (at the Green Brook boundary).

In 1878 the Tidewater Oil Pipeline Co. began building a pipeline to transport crude oil from the oilfields in northwestern Pennsylvania to markets in the East. Constructed of 6-inch wrought iron pipe laid only several feet below the surface, the line follows the natural contours of the land over which it passes. Reaching New York City in 1886, the line carried some 10,000 barrels of oil daily for many years. Pumping stations 25 to 60 miles apart forced the oil over the many hills and mountains the pipeline crossed.

The discovery of huge oil deposits in western Pennsylvania proved to be both a bonanza and a dilemma. How to store and transport the oil from the producing to consuming regions taxed the imagination. “What huge spouting wells were opened in those days, the floods of which went sadly to waste, in many instances pouring their torrents into the water-courses,” wrote a New York Times reporter on March 23, 1884. “All shipments were made in barrels, and the teams collecting the same scrambled over and through most impossible places. Cooperage and tankage were scarce and often not at hand when the great strike was made. Old oil-men of today almost weep over the drunken excesses of nature in those times, and the vast waste is one of the best remembered facts of the first petroleum era.” In the beginning oil was pumped into barrels and the barrels then sent via team and later railroad car to depots. When Standard Oil gained control over the nation’s oil transportation network, rivals turned to other ways of carrying oil. In 1878 the Tidewater Oil Company was founded to build a pipeline over the Alleghenies. By the time the Tidewater line reached New York City in 1886, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil owned an 86% interest in its rival, a story told in griping detail in Ida M. Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company (1925). Construction of the pipeline through Warren must have been the source of amazement yet, curiously, there is no mention of it in local newspapers.

Disused for many years, the Tidewater line (as well as many other decommissioned lines elsewhere in the country) gained a new lease on life in the early 1990s when Williams Tele-communications installed fiber optic transmission cables within the pipelines.