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The life of John Davison Rockefeller, Sr., was marked to an exceptional degree by silence, mystery, and evasion. Even though he presided over the largest business and philanthropic enterprises of his day, he has remained an elusive figure. A master of disguises, he spent his life camouflaged behind multiple personae and shrouded beneath layers of mythology. Hence, he lingers in our national psyche as a series of disconnected images, ranging from the rapacious creator of Standard Oil, brilliant but bloodless, to the wizened old codger dispensing dimes and canned speeches for newsreel cameras. It is often hard to piece together the varied images into a coherent picture.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil
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This has not been for lack of trying. Earlier in the century, Rockefeller inspired more prose than any other private citizen in America, with books about him tumbling forth at a rate of nearly one per year. As he was the most famous American of his day, his statements and actions were reported and analyzed minutely in the press. Yet even in his heyday of popular interest, he could seem maddeningly opaque, with much of his life unfolding behind the walls of his estates and the frosted-glass doors of his office.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · United States
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Rockefeller often seems to be missing from his own biographies, flitting through them like a ghostly, disembodied figure. For the principal muckrakers, such as Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell, he served as shorthand for the Standard Oil trust, his personality submerged in its machinations. Even in the two-volume biography by Allan Nevins, who strove to vindicate Rockefeller’s reputation, Rockefeller vanishes for pages at a time amid a swirl of charges and countercharges. The attention paid to the depredations of Standard Oil has tended to overshadow everything else about Rockefeller’s life. H. G. Wells defended this biographical approach: “The life history of Rockefeller is the history of the trust; he made it, and equally it made him … so that apart from its story it seems hardly necessary to detail his personal life in chronological order.” So steadfastly have biographers clung to this dated view that we still lack an account of our foremost nineteenth-century industrialist that explores his inner and outer worlds and synthesizes them into a fully rounded portrait.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Allan Nevins · Standard Oil · H. G. Wells
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For all the ink provoked by Rockefeller, his biographies have been marred by a numbing repetition. Whatever their political slant, they have, on the whole, followed the same chronology, raked over the same disputes about his business methods, rehashed the same stale anecdotes. One has the impression of sitting through the same play over and over again, albeit from slightly different seats in the theater. Some of this derives from our shifting conception of biography. With the exception of John D., a slender volume by David Freeman Hawke published in 1980, the Rockefeller biographies were all published before mid-century and betray a Victorian reticence about private matters. Whatever their merits as business reportage, they betray minimal post-Freudian curiosity. They touch only glancingly, for instance, on the story of Rockefeller’s father, a bigamist and snake-oil salesman, who so indelibly shaped his son’s life. Even the exhaustive Nevins showed scant interest in Rockefeller’s marriage or his three daughters. The feminist concerns of our own day have recently produced two books—Bernice Kert’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Clarice Stasz’s The Rockefeller Women—that have begun to pry open this hermetically sealed family world. Rockefeller’s social life beyond the office—his friendships, hobbies, sports, et cetera—has suffered from equally conspicuous neglect. Other matters that warrant investigation include Rockefeller’s political views and theory of trusts, his attitude toward public relations, his stewardship of his investments beyond Standard Oil, his transfer of money to his children and his dynastic ambitions, his persistent fascination with medicine, and the imprint he left upon the many philanthropies he endowed. There has also been a remarkable lack of curiosity about the forty-odd years that he spent in retirement, with some biographers omitting those decades altogether. Yet it was during those decades that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., both perpetuated and radically modified his father’s legacy, a subject to which I devote considerable attention.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Allan Nevins · Standard Oil · David Freeman Hawke · Bernice Kert · Clarice Stasz · The Rockefeller Women
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When Random House proposed that I write the first full-length biography of Rockefeller since Allan Nevins’s in the 1950s, I frankly balked, convinced that the subject had been exhausted by writers too eager to capitalize on his fame. How could one write about a man who made such a fetish of secrecy? In the existing literature, he came across as a gifted automaton at best, a malevolent machine at worst. I couldn’t tell whether he was a hollow man, deadened by the pursuit of money, or someone of great depth and force but with eerie self-control. If the former was true, I would respectfully decline; in the unlikely case that the latter proved true—well, then I was intrigued.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Allan Nevins · Random House
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To settle the matter, I spent a day at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York, the repository of millions of family documents. When I told the curators of my misgivings and explained that I couldn’t write about Rockefeller unless I heard his inner voice—the “music of his mind,” as I phrased it—they brought me the transcript of an interview privately conducted with Rockefeller between 1917 and 1920. It was done by William O. Inglis, a New York newspaperman who questioned Rockefeller for an authorized biography that was never published. As I pored over this seventeen-hundred-page verbatim transcript, I was astonished: Rockefeller, stereotyped as taciturn and empty, turned out to be analytic, articulate, even fiery; he was also quite funny, with a dry midwestern wit. This wasn’t someone I had encountered in any biography. When I returned home, I told Ann Godoff, my editor at Random House, that I was now eager to do the book.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William O. Inglis · Rockefeller Archive Center · New York · Random House · Ann Godoff
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To delve into the voluminous Rockefeller papers is to excavate a lost continent. Yet even with such massive documentation, I had the frustrating sense, early in my research, that I was confronting a sphinx. Rockefeller trained himself to reveal as little as possible, even in private letters, which he wrote as if they might someday fall into the hands of a prosecuting attorney. With his instinctive secrecy, he excelled at employing strange euphemisms and elliptical phrasing. For this reason, the twenty thousand pages of letters that Rockefeller received from his more outspoken business associates proved a windfall of historic proportions. Written as early as 1877, seven years after Standard Oil’s formation, they provide a vivid portrait of the company’s byzantine dealings with oil producers, refiners, transporters, and marketers, as well as railroad chieftains, bank directors, and political bosses. This panorama of greed and guile should startle even the most jaundiced students of the Gilded Age. I was also extremely fortunate to have access to the papers of five distinguished predecessors, all of whom left behind complete research files. I combed through the abundant papers of Ida Tarbell at the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Pennsylvania, Henry Demarest Lloyd at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and Allan Nevins at Columbia University, in addition to those of William O. Inglis and Raymond B. Fosdick (the author of the official biography of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) at the Rockefeller Archive Center. These collections contain a vast number of contemporary interviews and other materials that were only partly used by their authors.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Raymond B. Fosdick · William O. Inglis · Allan Nevins · Standard Oil · Rockefeller Archive Center · Titusville · Pennsylvania · Gilded Age · Drake Well Museum · Columbia University · State Historical Society of Wisconsin
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Like many moguls of the Gilded Age, Rockefeller was either glorified by partisan biographers, who could see no wrong, or vilified by vitriolic critics, who could see no right. This one-sidedness has been especially harmful in the case of Rockefeller, who was such an implausible blend of sin and sanctity. I have tried to operate in the large space between polemics and apologetics, motivated by the belief that Rockefeller’s life was of a piece and that the pious, Bible-thumping Rockefeller wasn’t simply a cunning façade for the corporate pirate. The religious and acquisitive sides of his nature were intimately related. For this reason, I have stressed his evangelical Baptism as the passkey that unlocks many mysteries of his life. Those who would like to see Rockefeller either demonized or canonized in these pages will be disappointed.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Gilded Age
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This seems an auspicious time to resurrect Rockefeller’s ghost. With the fall of trade barriers and the vogue for free-market economics, the world is now united by a global marketplace that touches five billion souls, with many countries just emerging from Marxist or mercantilist systems and having their first taste of capitalism. The story of John D. Rockefeller transports us back to a time when industrial capitalism was raw and new in America, and the rules of the game were unwritten. More than anyone else, Rockefeller incarnated the capitalist revolution that followed the Civil War and transformed American life. He embodied all its virtues of thrift, self-reliance, hard work, and unflagging enterprise. Yet as someone who flouted government and rode roughshod over competitors, he also personified many of its most egregious vices. As a result, his career became the focal point for a debate about the proper role of government in the economy that has lasted until the present day.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · United States · Civil War
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“Reading this book brings back to my mind facts and situations that I had forgotten for years,” John D. Rockefeller mused. “It digs up things long past and dead, so that they stand before me once more alive. I am glad of it, very glad of it.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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For months, Rockefeller had listened to his authorized biographer read aloud from Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth, a savage account of his career published in 1894. Now retired and in his late seventies, the world’s richest man had reluctantly agreed to reminisce behind closed doors. Starting in 1917, for an hour each morning, Rockefeller fielded questions while slumped in an easy chair or reclining on a lounge in his bedroom at Kykuit, a Georgian mansion set amid the woodland beauty of Westchester County’s Pocantico Hills. Serene in his conscience, convinced that God had blessed his career and that the court of history would acquit him, Rockefeller had submitted to this exercise only to please his son, who wanted to cleanse the family name of all controversy. As Rockefeller reminded his appointed Boswell, the affable William O. Inglis, a newspaperman recruited from Rockefeller’s old nemesis, the World, but “for the urgent request of my son, who is not familiar with this history … I would never have taken the time and the trouble to make any refutation to these questions.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William O. Inglis · Pocantico Hills · Kykuit · Westchester County · World · Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth · Boswell
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Despite his initial hesitation, Rockefeller couldn’t resist the invitation to relive his turbulent early years in the petroleum industry, and he warmed to the giant task of remembrance. During hundreds of hours of interviews, spanning a three-year period, he revisited the past and spoke his mind freely. At times, he evoked his life in the dulcet tones of a preacher addressing a brotherhood of kindred souls. At other moments, he was dryly sardonic or brutally funny about his critics—though all the while, as a good Christian, he tried to suppress vengeful feelings toward them.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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Before Inglis’s wondering eyes, the old man was rejuvenated by the flood tide of memory, and his voice deepened from the high, breathy pitch of age to the mellow baritone of early adulthood. His step grew springy and lithe as he paced the floor, recounting the glorious struggles of his career. Far from dodging controversy, Rockefeller suggested a novel structure for this retrospective talk: Inglis would read passages from Rockefeller’s two chief antagonists, Henry Lloyd and Ida Tarbell (whose influential broadside had been published in the early 1900s), and Rockefeller would refute them, paragraph by paragraph. Having dismissed their indictments as beneath his dignity, he hadn’t deigned to read them when they first appeared. Now, in a measure of his feisty self-confidence, he decided to tackle the toughest charges point-blank. “I was averse for eight months to say anything in response to these foolish writers,” he noted, “but now that I’ve gotten into it I find it interesting.” And once John D. Rockefeller, Sr., set his mind to something, he brought awesome powers of concentration to bear.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Henry Demarest Lloyd · William O. Inglis
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As Rockefeller undertook this extended defense, he clearly believed that he had been vindicated in the time since these journalists had blackened his reputation in the early 1900s and made him America’s most hated businessman. “All of those in the business today are doing business along the modern lines, following the plans which we were the first to propose,” he said with pride.Public bitterness toward him had waned, he believed, and opposition to his petroleum empire was “practically nil and has been for many years, and it has ceased to be popular to raid the Standard Oil Company.” Indeed, the American public during World War I appreciated the industrial strength conferred by the Standard Oil companies, and Rockefeller imagined, with some justice, that his compatriots now viewed him as a public benefactor, not as a corporate buccaneer. The huge philanthropies he had endowed in recent years had also mitigated public animosity toward him.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · United States · World
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As always with Rockefeller, the pregnant silences in the interview spoke as eloquently as the words. Coached by his publicist, Ivy Lee, Rockefeller eschewed such loaded terms as trust, monopoly, oligopoly, or cartel when referring to Standard Oil and preferred to speak of “cooperation.” He expressed scorn for the textbook world of free markets evoked by Adam Smith: “What a blessing it was that the idea of cooperation, with railroads, with telegraph lines, with steel companies, with oil companies, came in and prevailed, to take the place of this chaotic condition in which the virtuous academic Know-Nothings about business were doing what they construed to be God’s service in eating each other up.” During the three-year interview, Rockefeller never once alluded to his most stinging setback: the federal government’s 1911 dismemberment of Standard Oil into dozens of constituent companies. Annulling the Supreme Court verdict by a trick of memory, Rockefeller talked of Standard Oil as if the old monolith still stood unscathed.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ivy Lee · Standard Oil · Adam Smith · Supreme Court
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Of all the poses he assumed, perhaps the hardest to maintain was that he bore no grudges against his detractors. He peppered his talk with references to his forgiving nature. “The representatives of the Standard Oil Company cherish most kindly and brotherly feelings even toward those who abused them most, and are ready to lay it to their weakness and ignorance and whatever else was controlling them.” Furthermore: “And to those who have uttered against them harsh words, we cherish no resentment. ‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’ ” And, even more conciliatory: “And I rejoice also that we are charitable and sweet-spirited to these jealous, small men who made it the business of their lives to try to pull us down because their vision did not extend beyond the ends of their noses.”
Names: Standard Oil
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Over time, however, the sacerdotal tone began to falter. Rockefeller couldn’t conceive of a genuinely principled objection to his career and increasingly resorted to ad hominem attacks, deriding his critics as croakers, howlers, grumblers, complainers, blackmailers, pirates, spoiled children, whiners, adventurers, wolves, and freebooters. Clearly, the allegations rankled, especially those of Ida Minerva Tarbell, whose cool, clear-eyed investigative prose had turned his name into a byword for corporate greed. With golf cronies, Rockefeller had poked fun at her, calling her “Miss Tarbarrel,” but this was a transparent attempt to draw the sting from her words.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell
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During the marathon interview, Inglis saw Rockefeller’s iron poise and self-mastery crumble only twice and both times, significantly, in responding to Tarbell. The first time came when he read aloud her charge that in 1872 the thirty-two-year-old Rockefeller had taken over the Cleveland refineries by threatening to crush rivals who refused to join his cartel. Now, 1872 had been the starting point of his relentless march toward supremacy in oil. If that year was tainted, then everything was. Inglis recorded a graphic account of Rockefeller’s reaction to Tarbell’s allegation:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · William O. Inglis · Cleveland
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“That is absolutely false!” exclaimed Mr. Rockefeller so loudly that I looked up from the notes. As he spoke he jumped up from the big chair in which he was reclining and walked over to my table. His face was flushed and his eyes were burning. It was the first time I had ever seen him show any but pleasant feeling, and there could be no doubt that he was aflame with anger and resentment. His voice rang out loud and clear. He did not beat the desk with his fist, but stood there with his hands clenched, controlling himself with evident effort. He could not immediately regain his balance. “This is absolutely false!” he cried, “and no man was told that by me or by any of our representatives. You may put that down once and for all. That statement is an absolute lie!”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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After this outburst, Rockefeller’s emotions subsided, but the insinuation stung. Later, he and Inglis roamed over the hills and golf fairways of his vast estate; “How ridiculous all that talk is!” he exclaimed. “It’s twaddle, poisonous twaddle, put out for a purpose. As a matter of fact, we were all in a sinking ship, if existing cut-throat competition continued, and we were trying to build a lifeboat to carry us all to the shore. You don’t have to threaten men to get them to leave a sinking ship in a lifeboat.” The purchase of his competitors’ firms had not been the benevolent act that Rockefeller suggested, but he had a powerfully selective memory.
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Rockefeller reserved his most bitter epithets for another passage, where Tarbell dealt with the touchiest matter in his personal life: the character of his colorful, raffish father, William Avery Rockefeller. In July 1905, she had capped off her serial history of Standard Oil with a two-part “Character Study” of Rockefeller filled with venomous portrayals of his father, an itinerant peddler of patent medicines who had led a shadowy, vagabond life. William Avery Rockefeller had been the sort of fast-talking huckster who thrived in frontier communities of early-nineteenth-century America, and Tarbell amply reported his misdemeanors. At one point in her blistering portrait, she said, “Indeed he had all the vices save one—he never drank.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil · United States
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This thrust against his dead father probed some buried pain, some still-festering wound inside Rockefeller, and he suddenly erupted with explosive fury. “What a wretched utterance from one calling herself a historian,” he jeered, speculating, quite incorrectly, that Tarbell had been embittered by the failure of her series to dent the Standard Oil empire. “So she turned to this miserable fabrication, with all the sneers, all the malice, all the sly hintings and perversions of which she is master, and with more bitterness than ever attacked my father.” Momentarily, Rockefeller couldn’t regain his self-control: His famous granite composure had utterly broken down. And for one of the few times in his life, he let forth a torrent of intemperate abuse. Spluttering with rage, he railed against “the poison tongue of this poison woman who seeks to poison the public with every endeavor … to cast suspicion on everything good, bad, or indifferent appertaining to a name which has thus far not been ruined by her shafts.” Aware that he had, uncharacteristically, let down his guard, Rockefeller soon checked himself and restored the old pose of philosophic calm, reassuring Inglis in soothing tones, “After all, though, I am grateful that I do not cherish bitterness even against this ‘historian,’ but pity.” The titan had regained his dignity, and he made sure that his tightly fitted mask never slipped again in front of his authorized biographer.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · William O. Inglis · Standard Oil
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The earliest known photographs of William Avery and Eliza Davison Rockefeller. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Rockefeller Archive Center · William Avery
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n the early 1900s, as Rockefeller vied with Andrew Carnegie for the title of the world’s richest man, a spirited rivalry arose between France and Germany, with each claiming to be Rockefeller’s ancestral land. Assorted genealogists stood ready, for a sizable fee, to manufacture a splendid royal lineage for the oilman. “I have no desire to trace myself back to the nobility,” he said honestly. “I am satisfied with my good old American stock.” The most ambitious search for Rockefeller’s roots traced them back to a ninth-century French family, the Roquefeuilles, who supposedly inhabited a Languedoc château—a charming story that unfortunately has been refuted by recent findings. In contrast, the Rockefellers’ German lineage has been clearly established in the Rhine valley dating back to at least the early 1600s.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Andrew Carnegie · Rockefeller family · Rhine · Languedoc · France · Germany
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Around 1723, Johann Peter Rockefeller, a miller, gathered up his wife and five children, set sail for Philadelphia, and settled on a farm in Somerville and then Amwell, New Jersey, where he evidently flourished and acquired large landholdings. More than a decade later, his cousin Diell Rockefeller left southwest Germany and moved to Germantown, New York. Diell’s granddaughter Christina married her distant relative William, one of Johann’s grandsons. (Never particularly sentimental about his European forebears, John D. Rockefeller did erect a monument to the patriarch, Johann Peter, at his burial site in Flemington, New Jersey.) The marriage of William and Christina produced a son named Godfrey Rockefeller, who was the grandfather of the oil titan and a most unlikely progenitor of the clan. In 1806, Godfrey married Lucy Avery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, despite the grave qualms of her family.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Godfrey Rockefeller · Lucy Avery Rockefeller · Johann Peter Rockefeller · Diell Rockefeller · New York · Philadelphia · Christina Rockefeller · William Rockefeller (great-grandfather) · New Jersey · Germany · Massachusetts · Miller · Great Barrington · Somerville · Amwell · Germantown · Johann · Flemington
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Establishing a pattern that would be replicated by Rockefeller’s own mother, Lucy had, in her family’s disparaging view, married down. Her ancestors had emigrated from Devon, England, to Salem, Massachusetts, around 1630, forming part of the Puritan tide. As they became settled and gentrified, the versatile Averys spawned ministers, soldiers, civic leaders, explorers, and traders, not to mention a bold clutch of Indian fighters. During the American Revolution, eleven Averys perished gloriously in the battle of Groton. While the Rockefellers’ “noble” roots required some poetic license and liberal embellishment, Lucy could justly claim descent from Edmund Ironside, the English king, who was crowned in 1016.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Lucy Avery Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · England · Massachusetts · Salem · Averys · Groton · Devon · Edmund Ironside
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Godfrey Rockefeller was sadly mismatched with his enterprising wife. He had a stunted, impoverished look and a hangdog air of perpetual defeat. Taller than her husband, a fiery Baptist of commanding presence, Lucy was rawboned and confident, with a vigorous step and alert blue eyes. A former schoolteacher, she was better educated than Godfrey. Even John D., never given to invidious comments about relatives, tactfully conceded, “My grandmother was a brave woman. Her husband was not so brave as she.” If Godfrey contributed the Rockefeller coloring—bluish gray eyes, light brown hair—Lucy introduced the rangy frame later notable among the men. Enjoying robust energy and buoyant health, Lucy had ten children, with the third, William Avery Rockefeller, born in Granger, New York, in 1810. While it is easy enough to date the birth of Rockefeller’s father, teams of frazzled reporters would one day exhaust themselves trying to establish the date of his death.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Godfrey Rockefeller · Lucy Avery Rockefeller · New York · Granger
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As a farmer and businessman, Godfrey enjoyed checkered success, and his aborted business ventures exposed his family to an insecure, peripatetic life. They were forced to move to Granger and Ancram, New York, then to Great Barrington, before doubling back to Livingston, New York. John D. Rockefeller’s upbringing would be fertile with cautionary figures of weak men gone astray. Godfrey must have been invoked frequently as a model to be avoided. By all accounts, Grandpa was a jovial, good-natured man but feckless and addicted to drink, producing in Lucy an everlasting hatred of liquor that she must have drummed into her grandson. Grandpa Godfrey was the first to establish in John D.’s mind an enduring equation between bonhomie and lax character, making the latter prefer the society of sober, tight-lipped men in full command of their emotions.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Godfrey Rockefeller · Lucy Avery Rockefeller · New York · Great Barrington · Granger · Livingston · Ancram · Grandpa Godfrey
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The Rockefeller records offer various scenarios of why Godfrey and Lucy packed their belongings into an overloaded Conestoga wagon and headed west between 1832 and 1834. By one account, the Rockefellers, along with several neighbors, were dispossessed of their land in a heated title dispute with some English investors. Another account has an unscrupulous businessman gulling Godfrey into swapping his farm for allegedly richer turf in Tioga County. (If this claim was in fact made, it proved a cruel hoax.) Some relatives later said that Michigan was Godfrey’s real destination but that Lucy vetoed such a drastic relocation, preferring the New England culture of upstate New York to the wilds of Michigan.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Godfrey Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · New York State · New England · Lucy · Michigan · Tioga County · Conestoga
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Whatever the reason, the Rockefellers reenacted the primordial American rite of setting out in search of fresh opportunity. In the 1830s, many settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut were swarming excitedly into wilderness areas of western New York, a migration that Alexis de Tocqueville described as “a game of chance” pursued for “the emotions it excites, as much as for the gain it procures.” The construction of the Erie Canal in the 1820s had lured many settlers to the area. Godfrey and Lucy heaped up their worldly possessions in a canvas-topped prairie schooner, drawn by oxen, and headed toward the sparsely settled territory. For two weeks, they traveled along the dusty Albany-Catskill turnpike, creeping through forests as darkly forbidding as the setting of a Grimms’ fairy tale. With much baggage and little passenger space, the Rockefellers had to walk for much of the journey, with Lucy and the children (except William, who did not accompany them) taking turns sitting in the wagon whenever they grew weary. As they finally reached their destination, Richford, New York, the last three and a half miles were especially arduous, and the oxen negotiated the stony, rutted path with difficulty. At the end, they had to lash their exhausted team up a nearly vertical hillside to possess their virgin sixty acres. As family legend has it, Godfrey got out, tramped to the property’s peak, inspected the vista, and said mournfully, “This is as close as we shall ever get to Michigan.” So, in a memorial to dashed hopes, the spot would forever bear the melancholy name of Michigan Hill.
Names: Godfrey Rockefeller · Lucy Avery Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · Richford · New York · Erie Canal · Alexis de Tocqueville · Massachusetts · Michigan · Connecticut · Albany · Michigan Hill · Grimms · Uncle William
EPUB paragraph 8 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c01_r1.htm
Even today scarcely more than a crossroads, Richford was then a stagecoach stop in the wooded country southeast of Ithaca and northwest of Binghamton. The area’s original inhabitants, the Iroquois, had been chased out after the American Revolution and replaced by revolutionary army veterans. Still an uncouth frontier when the Rockefellers arrived, this backwater had recently attained township status, its village square dating from 1821. Civilization had taken only a tenuous hold. The dense forests on all sides teemed with game—bear, deer, panther, wild turkey, and cottontail rabbit—and people carried flaring torches at night to frighten away the roaming packs of wolves.
Names: Rockefeller family · Richford · Binghamton · Ithaca
EPUB paragraph 9 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c01_r1.htm
By the time that John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839, Richford was acquiring the amenities of a small town. It had some nascent industries—sawmills, gristmills, and a whiskey distillery—plus a schoolhouse and a church. Most inhabitants scratched out a living from hardscrabble farming, yet these newcomers were hopeful and enterprising. Notwithstanding their frontier trappings, they had carried with them the frugal culture of Puritan New England, which John D. Rockefeller would come to exemplify.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Richford · New England
Source: Ron Chernow, Titan. Names and relationships retain the full atlas’s extraction limits. Map points are references; historical sites and regions can be approximate. Open the full interactive atlas.