Another version about the time, but not the place, of the appearance of the first standard-volume barrel is given in a reprint from the Oil News newspaper, published in the Jackson Progress – Argus issue of July 8, 1921.

According to this version, the first such 42-gallon barrel was made somewhere between 1864 and 1865 by Samuel Van Syckle, an enterprising engineer who was one of the first to realize that the main task of the industry was not to extract and pour oil into barrels, but to deliver that oil to where it was needed: the refinery. His goal was to create a standardized barrel size, which, he believed, would protect buyers from unscrupulous suppliers who used barrels with excessively thick staves, making a barrel that outwardly looked like a 42-gallon "tierce" actually have a much smaller volume.

The irony of this situation is certainly that after Van Syckle built the first metal (and, very importantly, laid in a trench half a meter deep) oil pipeline of great length for that time in 1865, connecting the now ghost town Pithole with the railroad nearly 10 kilometers away, he had to protect it from attacks by teamsters delivering barrels of oil (possibly of his own design) from wells to rail and river terminals.

Since horse-drawn transport was the main means of transporting oil from the Oil Creek valley, teamsters could set any price for their services – they usually received $3 per barrel, while Van Syckle charged $1. To combat what they saw as unfair competition, teamsters repeatedly tried to dig up the pipeline and treat it as they did other pipelines laid on the surface connecting wells to storage and processing points.

But into this "wild capitalism" suddenly intervened a tangible "invisible hand of the market" in the form of a sheriff who posted guards along the entire pipeline route, forcing horse-drawn transport to leave Pithole altogether.

However, such small-scale or even artisanal productions could not compete with the gradually gaining strength large enterprises.

Such was, for example, the plant of the Greif brothers, Vanderwyst and Greif Cooperage, which, like Standard Oil, incidentally, appeared in 1877 in Cleveland, Ohio. Less than thirty years later, in 1908, it became the largest cooperage plant in the world.