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ong before oil was struck in western Pennsylvania by Colonel Edwin Drake, it had oozed from subterranean springs into Oil Creek (the name dated from the eighteenth century), mantling the surface with an iridescent scum. The slimy liquid was so ubiquitous that it tainted well water and plagued local contractors drilling for salt. Already in the eighteenth century, the Seneca and Cornplanter Indians devised manifold uses for it, employing it for soothing skin liniment, medicine, and even war paint. To extract oil from the creek, they floated blankets or flannel rags on the water, then wrung the oil from the saturated material. Even before Drake’s find, Seneca Oil had become known as a sovereign remedy for stiff joints, headaches, and other ailments. Around 1850, Samuel Kier gathered unwanted oil from his father’s salt wells, bottled it in little half-pint bottles, and marketed it as Kier’s Rock Oil. With a touch of the charlatan, Kier touted the all-purpose medicinal properties of this elixir, contending it would cure liver complaints, bronchitis, and consumption—and that was just for starters. One wonders whether Doc Rockefeller flogged Kier’s Rock Oil from the back of his buggy.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Edwin Drake · Oil Creek · Samuel Kier · Pennsylvania · Seneca Oil · Rock Oil · Seneca
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In the 1850s, the whale fisheries had failed to keep pace with the mounting need for illuminating oil, forcing up the price of whale oil and making illumination costly for ordinary Americans. Only the affluent could afford to light their parlors every evening. There were many other lighting options—including lard oil, tallow oil, cottonseed oil, coal oil refined from shale, and wicks dipped in fat—but no cheap illuminant that burned in a bright, clean, safe manner. Both urbanization and industrialization sped the search for an illuminant that would extend day into night, breaking the timeless rhythm of rural hours that still governed the lives of farmers and city folk alike.
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The petroleum industry was hatched in a very modern symbiosis of business acumen and scientific ingenuity. In the 1850s, George Bissell, a Dartmouth College graduate in his early thirties who had enjoyed a checkered career as a reporter, Greek professor, school principal, and lawyer, had the inspired intuition that the rock oil plentiful in western Pennsylvania was more likely than coal oil to yield a first-rate illuminant. To test this novel proposition, he organized the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil Company, leasing land along Oil Creek, a tributary of the Allegheny River, and sending a specimen of local oil to be analyzed by one of the most renowned chemists of the day, Professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr., of Yale. In his landmark 1855 report, Silliman vindicated Bissell’s hunch that this oil could be distilled to produce a fine illuminant, plus a host of other useful products. Now the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil Company faced a single, seemingly insurmountable obstacle: how to find sizable quantities of petroleum to turn Professor Silliman’s findings into spendable cash.
Names: Yale University · Oil Creek · Allegheny River · George Bissell · Benjamin Silliman, Jr. · Pennsylvania · Rock-Oil Company · Dartmouth College
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It took nearly three years for Bissell’s company (which soon evolved into the Seneca Oil Company) to dispatch someone to Pennsylvania to hunt for large, marketable pools of oil. To this end, an investor in the project, a New Haven banker named Townsend, enlisted a boarder in his rooming house, Edwin Drake, to travel to Titusville in December 1857. A former conductor on the New Haven Railroad, Drake was a thirty-eight-year-old widower who was solemn, rather courtly, and disabled by neuralgia of the spine. Photos present a dashing figure with a full beard, broad forehead, and bright, heavy-lidded eyes. Though he made only a nominal investment in the venture, he was dressed up with the fancy title of president to dazzle the gullible yokels and was conveniently endowed (and permanently entered the history books) with the honorific title of colonel.
Names: Edwin Drake · Titusville · George Bissell · Pennsylvania · New Haven · New Haven Railroad · Seneca Oil Company · Townsend
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When Drake arrived in Titusville, Oil Creek Valley was still an idyllic place of dense pine and hemlock forest, rich in game. In his stovepipe hat and somber black clothes, the pallid Drake formed a picturesque contrast with this wilderness setting. Despite the enticing traces of oil that stained the creek’s surface, the search for significant oil deposits, without geological knowledge of underground oil structures, proved a long and frustrating one. While the locals found Drake charming and sociable and supplied with a good repertoire of stories, they also mocked him as a harebrained dreamer, seized by a wild obsession. When he tried to dig for oil, the walls caved in. Then, borrowing a method used for salt wells, he started to drill for oil. In this inhospitable setting, choked with underbrush, it was a feat just to assemble the necessary machinery and erect a strange, tall, wooden structure known as a derrick. On Sunday, August 28, 1859, Drake’s folly was rewarded when oil bubbled up from a well drilled a day earlier. It was less a matter of Drake discovering oil—its existence was scarcely a secret—than of his figuring out a way to tap commercial quantities in a controlled process so that it could be pumped from the earth in systematic fashion.
Names: Edwin Drake · Titusville · Oil Creek
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Laura Celestia Spelman, always known to friends as “Cettie.” (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Rockefeller Archive Center
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Drake’s feat touched off pandemonium as bands of fortune seekers streamed into Titusville and its pastoral surroundings. Speculators scrambled over the greasy slopes of the creek, leasing acreage from unsophisticated, often unlettered, owners; one farmer turned down an offer of a one-quarter royalty and stubbornly held out for a one-eighth share. Pretty soon derricks sprouted everywhere along the dark, narrow valley, the drilling scarring and denuding the once lush forest slopes. Drilling was the first step in an extended production chain. Within a year of Drake’s discovery, a dozen ramshackle refineries sprang up along the creek’s steep, secluded banks. Inevitably, this tumultuous activity attracted notice in Cleveland, which had the advantage of proximity to northwest Pennsylvania. Even in those days of slow transport, one could travel from Titusville to Cleveland in a day. Several Cleveland businessmen were already refining illuminating oil from bituminous coal and were naturally interested in a rival method. On November 18, 1859, nearly three months after Drake’s find, the Cleveland Leader reported on the mad hubbub around Titusville, saying that “the oil springs of northern Pennsylvania were attracting considerable speculation” and that there was “quite a rush to the oleaginous locations.” Among the first Clevelanders descending upon the area was a produce merchant named James G. Hussey, who was a former boss of Rockefeller’s partner, Maurice B. Clark, and he came home with ecstatic stories about the riches to be made.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Maurice B. Clark · Edwin Drake · Cleveland · Titusville · James G. Hussey · Pennsylvania · Clevelanders · Cleveland Leader
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We don’t know what Rockefeller thought of Drake’s breakthrough at the time, but years later, having harvested his unparalleled fortune from oil, John D. Rockefeller saw a large and providential design in the discovery of Pennsylvania oil, stating that “these vast stores of wealth were the gifts of the great Creator, the bountiful gifts of the great Creator.” He expressed his gratitude that “Colonel Drake and the Standard Oil Company and all others connected with this industry had the opportunity for useful work in preparing and distributing this valuable product to supply the wants of the world.” As we shall see, Rockefeller always viewed the industry through this rose-tinted spiritual lens, and it materially aided his success, for his conviction that God had given kerosene to suffering mankind gave him unswerving faith in the industry’s future, enabling him to persist where less confident men stumbled and faltered.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Edwin Drake · Pennsylvania
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For all his later evangelical fervor about oil, John D. Rockefeller didn’t behold its potential in a sudden revelatory flash but made an incremental transition from produce to oil. Clark and Rockefeller might have taken on consignment some of the first crude-oil shipments that reached Cleveland in early 1860, but it was the friendship between Maurice Clark and Samuel Andrews, an Englishman from Clark’s hometown in Wiltshire, that drew Rockefeller into the business. A hearty, rubicund man with a broad face and genial manner, Andrews was a self-taught chemist, a born tinkerer, and an enterprising mechanic. Arriving in Cleveland in the 1850s, he worked in a lard-oil refinery owned by yet another Englishman, C. A. Dean, and acquired extensive experience in making tallow, candles, and coal oil. Then, in 1860, Dean got a ten-barrel shipment of Pennsylvania crude from which Andrews distilled the first oil-based kerosene manufactured in Cleveland. The secret of “cleansing” oil with sulfuric acid—what we now term refining—was then a high mystery, zealously guarded by a local priesthood of practical chemists, and many curious businessmen beat a path to Andrews’s door.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Maurice B. Clark · Cleveland · Pennsylvania · Clark · Wiltshire · Dean · C. A. Dean
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An expert on illuminants enthralled by the unique properties of kerosene, Andrews was convinced it would outshine and outsell other sources of light. Finances were tight in the Andrews household—his wife took in sewing to supplement his income—but by 1862, Sam was plotting to leave Dean and strike out on his own. On the lookout for backers, he frequently dropped by the offices of Clark and Rockefeller. In another instance of the worldly advantages of his religious affiliations, Rockefeller knew Andrews and his wife from the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. When Andrews started talking about oil refining, the dubious Clark cut short his perfervid talk: “I told him there was no chance, that John and I together did not have more than $250 we could spare out of our business; we simply had enough working capital, together with our credit at the banks, to enable us to make advances to consignors, paying insurance and rent.” Stymied by one partner, Andrews barged into Rockefeller’s office and resumed his sales pitch. Already so flush that he had invested in his first railroad stock, with cash to spare for the firm, Rockefeller was far more receptive. After one chat with Rockefeller, Andrews went back into the warehouse to badger Clark. “I started to shut him off,” recalled Clark, “but when he said, ‘Mr. Rockefeller thinks well of it,’ I impulsively replied, ‘Well, if John will go in I will.’ ” With becoming modesty, Rockefeller later interpreted his own role as more passive, even skeptical toward the fateful oil venture and said that Maurice Clark’s two brothers, James and Richard, were such oil enthusiasts that he had been railroaded into refining by the combined pressure of the three Clarks and Sam Andrews.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Maurice B. Clark · Erie Street Baptist Mission Church · Clark · James · Clarks · Richard · Dean · John
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Whatever the truth, Rockefeller and Maurice Clark pledged $4,000 for half the working capital of the new refining venture, Andrews, Clark and Co., placing the twenty-four-year-old Rockefeller squarely in the oil business in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation and the stunning Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Of the initial $4,000 investment, he said dryly, “It seemed very large to us, very large.” Scarcely dreaming that oil would ever supersede their main commodity business, they considered it “a little side issue, we retaining our interest in our business as produce commission merchants.”As a commission agent distant from the oil wells, stationed at the commercial crossroads of Cleveland, Rockefeller naturally entered the industry as a refiner. As a middleman, he belonged to a new breed of people in the emerging industrial economy who traded, refined, or distributed products in the widening chasm that separated raw-material producers in the countryside from their urban consumers.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Maurice B. Clark · Cleveland · Union · Clark and Co. · Gettysburg · Vicksburg
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The spot chosen for the new refinery tells much in miniature about Rockefeller’s approach to business. He exercised an option on a three-acre parcel on the sloping, red-clay banks of a narrow waterway called Kingsbury Run, which flowed into the Cuyahoga River and thus provided passage to Lake Erie. A mile and a half from downtown Cleveland, it seemed at first glance an inauspicious site for the new refinery, christened the Excelsior Works. In these bucolic outskirts beyond the city limits, cows browsed peacefully, and trees still shaded the waterway. But for Rockefeller, the inconvenience was outweighed by the fact that it would soon adjoin new railroad tracks. On November 3, 1863, proudly flying the Union colors, a gleaming locomotive of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad pulled into a Cleveland station decked with bunting and launched a new era, giving the town access to New York City via the Erie Railroad and to a valuable direct route to the Pennsylvania oil fields. Able to ship by water or over land, Rockefeller gained the critical leverage he needed to secure preferential rates on transportation—which was why he agonized over plant locations throughout his career.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Erie Railroad · Cleveland · New York City · Cuyahoga River · Lake Erie · Pennsylvania · Atlantic · Union · Kingsbury Run · Excelsior Works · Great Western Railroad
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Before long, a string of other refineries had sprouted along Kingsbury Run. With a population of about 44,000, Cleveland was full of dynamic young men struggling to get ahead, and oil refining presented a rare chance to parlay a small investment into a huge fortune. It cost a pittance—as little as $1,000, or less than the cost of opening a well-stocked store—to construct a small refinery and hire hands to run it. By mid-1863, twenty refineries operated in the Cleveland area and shipped a quarter of their kerosene abroad. At first, the profits came in so thick and fast that everybody—big and small, clever and inept—made handsome profits without the fierce winnowing of adversity, the stern lash of marketplace discipline. Rockefeller sarcastically alluded to these palmy days as “the harvest time in which such large profits were reaped by the saloonkeepers and preachers and tailors and men from all the walks of life who were fortunate enough to find an oil still.” Oil was put to myriad uses during the Civil War, treating the wounds of Union soldiers and serving as a substitute for turpentine formerly supplied by the South. Even on the battlefield, the use of kerosene refined from crude oil spread, and Ulysses S. Grant often sat in his tent, drafting dispatches by the flicker of a kerosene lamp.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland · South · Ulysses S. Grant · Union · Kingsbury Run · Civil War
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Later on, Rockefeller became so embittered toward Sam Andrews that he denigrated him, quite unjustly, as the expendable figure in the Standard Oil saga. “Samuel Andrews was taken into the business as a poor workingman with little or nothing in the early stages when it was difficult to find men to cleanse the oil.… He had too much conceit, too much bull-headed English obstinacy and so little self-control. Was his own worst enemy.” This verdict, rendered much later, was darkly tinged by intervening events, but in the beginning Andrews enjoyed cordial relations with Rockefeller. Andrews knew nothing of business but was content to let Maurice Clark and Rockefeller mind the office while he acted as refinery boss. Reversing Rockefeller’s harsh judgment, Ida Tarbell went so far as to label Andrews “a mechanical genius” who had improved the quality of the kerosene and the percentage of it yielded by each barrel of crude oil.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Maurice B. Clark · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil
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In the early days, Rockefeller wasn’t so detached from the practical side of refining as when his empire later grew and he withdrew into the impregnable fortress of his office. Devoid of superior airs, he was often seen at Kingsbury Run at 6:30 A.M., going into the cooper shop to roll out barrels, stack hoops, or cart out shavings, reflecting the thrift inculcated by his mother and his puritanical religious upbringing. Since a residue of sulfuric acid remained after refining, Rockefeller drew up plans to convert it to fertilizer—the first of many worthwhile and extremely profitable attempts to create by-products from waste materials. Shaped by a childhood of uncertainty, he aspired to be self-sufficient in business no less than in life and reacted to a perpetual shortage of barrels by deciding to build his own. Disgusted by a suspicious error in a plumber’s bill, he told Sam Andrews, “Hire a plumber by the month. Let us buy our own pipes, joints, and all other plumbing material.” The refinery also did its own hauling and loading. Such was Rockefeller’s ingenuity, his ceaseless search for even minor improvements, that within a year refining had overtaken produce as the most profitable side of the business. Despite the unceasing vicissitudes of the oil industry, prone to cataclysmic booms and busts, he would never experience a single year of loss.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Kingsbury Run
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If Rockefeller entered the refining business with some reservations, he soon embraced it as the big, bold opportunity he had craved. Never one to do things halfway, he plunged headlong into the business, and his enthusiasm overflowed into his home life. Sharing a room with brother William, he often nudged him awake in the dead of night. “I’ve been thinking out a plan to do so and so,” he would ask. “Now, what do you think of this scheme?” “Keep your ideas till morning,” Will would sleepily protest. “I want to sleep.” In the predawn dark, John usually chatted with Maurice Clark and Sam Andrews at Cheshire Street, where they talked interminably of oil. As John’s sister Mary Ann observed, the older men deferred to him instinctively. “They did not seem to want to go without him. They would … walk in and visit in the dining room while John was at breakfast.” She found the infatuation with oil repugnant, screening out the dreadful carnage of the Civil War. “I got sick of it and wished morning after morning that they would talk of something else.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mary Ann Rockefeller Rudd · Samuel Andrews · Maurice B. Clark · Cheshire Street · Civil War · Uncle William · John
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Rockefeller leaped into oil with a zest reminiscent of his absorption in the Baptist Church. He lovingly tended his refinery much as he had swept the chapel floor, a parallel not lost on contemporaries. Said Maurice Clark: “John had abiding faith in two things—the Baptist creed and oil.” This very old, very young man found boyish pleasure in doing business, and when he captured a large contract, he strutted and whooped with a buoyant step or cut a small comic caper. As one early associate remarked, “The only time I ever saw John Rockefeller enthusiastic was when a report came in from the creek that his buyer had secured a cargo of oil at a figure much below the market price. He bounded from his chair with a shout of joy, danced up and down, hugged me, threw up his hat, acted so like a madman that I have never forgotten it.”These isolated joyful outbursts only underscored the usual constriction of his personality.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Maurice B. Clark · Baptist Church · John Rockefeller · John
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Rockefeller’s overwhelming influence on the oil industry stemmed from the conflict between his overmastering need for order and the turbulent, unruly nature of the infant industry. In the overheated memories of his enemies, Rockefeller became an omnipresent bogeyman who first appeared in the Oil Regions—the name given to the area along Oil Creek that encompassed Titusville, Oil City, and Franklin—not long after Drake’s discovery. One legend, rehashed by several early biographers, was that Rockefeller went to Titusville in 1860 to represent a group of Cleveland capitalists and advised them to refrain from the business, citing the uncertain flow of oil. In truth, Rockefeller testified, “I was engaged in the business when I took the trip; that was why I took the trip, to see about a supply of oil for my refinery.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edwin Drake · Cleveland · Titusville · Oil City · Oil Creek · Oil Regions · Franklin
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To reach his destination, he had to travel first by rail and then by stagecoach to penetrate the dark forests and wooded hills along Oil Creek. Despite the spot’s isolation—news of Fort Sumter’s fall took four days to arrive—so many adventurers descended upon the area that train aisles were jammed with newcomers while others squatted on the roof. It was no place for the squeamish. To reach the railroad, oil had to be carted in barrels across more than twenty miles of rough backcountry, a trade serviced by thousands of brawling, swearing teamsters with shaggy beards and slouch hats who charged extortionate rates. (The Pennsylvania barrel, equal to forty-two gallons, remains the industry standard to this day.) Sometimes oil-laden wagons stretched in interminable caravans along the rutted roads. Many barrels tipped over and smashed, making the hills treacherous. During wet seasons, the mud grew so thick that teamsters often took two horses, one to pull the other out when it invariably got stuck. Horses were routinely lashed to death with heavy black whips as they pulled enormous loads through the black muck. Left to die by the roadside, their hides and hair were eaten away by petroleum chemicals, leaving ghastly, corroded carcasses strewn across the landscape. Transport by water was no less revolting. Oil Creek flowed into the Allegheny River, where hundreds of flatboats and steamers handled the cargo traffic. Sometimes oil barrels were loaded on barges and floated down to Pittsburgh on man-made freshets produced by suddenly releasing water stored behind floodgates. “Lots of oil was lost by the capsizing of barges and smashing of barrels in the confusion and crush of the rafts,” said Rockefeller. By 1863, the Allegheny, befouled with oil, actually caught fire and burned a bridge in Franklin.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Oil Creek · Pittsburgh · Allegheny River · Franklin · Pennsylvania · Fort Sumter · Allegheny
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Tramping the banks, Rockefeller beheld the satanic new world bequeathed by the oil boom, an idyllic valley blackened with derricks and tanks, engine houses and ramshackle huts, thickly crowded together in a crazy-quilt pattern. Boomtowns appeared briefly, witnessed frantic activity, then vanished as abruptly as they had appeared. Rockefeller saw something slapdash about the industry. “You will remember that the business in its early years was a sort of gold-field rush,” he reminisced. “Great fortunes were made by some of the first adventurers, and everything was carried on in a sort of helter-skelter way.”Rockefeller represented the second, more rational stage of capitalist development, when the colorful daredevils and pioneering speculators give way, as Max Weber wrote, to the “men who had grown up in the hard school of life, calculating and daring at the same time, above all temperate and reliable, shrewd and completely devoted to their business, with strictly bourgeois opinions and principles.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Max Weber
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By the time Rockefeller arrived in the Oil Regions, it looked as if the oil would be more than a transient phenomenon. In September 1861, two Clevelanders brought in the Empire Well, the first mighty gusher, which rose “higher than steeples,” in the evocative words of one observer, yielding three thousand barrels of oil per day. To onlookers, there was something uncanny about this towering jet of oil. So fast did the Empire Well flow that its owners could scarcely find barrels to carry it off, and people came running with pails, dippers, cups, and buckets to scoop up the black gold. A sudden oil glut sent prices skidding to ten cents a barrel even as teamsters continued to charge $3 or $4 per barrel to ship it to the railroads. From its first days, the industry tended to oscillate between extremes: gluts so dire that prices plummeted below production costs, or shortages that sent prices skyward but raised the even more troubling specter of the oil running dry.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Oil Regions · Empire · Clevelanders
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Among the many tales of Rockefeller’s first trip to the oil fields, one told by Franklin Breed, a Titusville producer, has a ring of authenticity. He and Rockefeller rode on horseback through the valley to reach Breed’s well, then negotiated the final half mile on foot. As Breed later wrote:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Titusville · Franklin Breed
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It was necessary to cross a bayou of five or six feet in width and probably four feet deep. This bayou contained sediment which the oil men took from the bottom of the tanks. This, with mud in the bayou, resembled tar. Spanning the bayou was a six inch log.… I was used to crossing on it but Rockefeller declared he could not walk on it. He did, however, and he fell off.… He looked up at me with a smile and said, “Well, Breed, you have got me into the oil business head and ears.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Franklin Breed
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In talking to the hard-bitten wildcatters, Rockefeller must have seemed standoffish and self-possessed, but he professed to enjoy their company, calling them “pleasant fellows, the same type we meet in the mining regions, jolly, good-natured, happy-go-lucky.” The description is not without a note of condescension. But he listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, “It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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However stimulated by the money to be made, Rockefeller was appalled by the loose morals of a place infested with cardsharpers and prostitutes and already dubbed “Sodden Gomorrah.” The wildcatters were so rowdy, said a visitor, that throughout the area you could hear “the slap of cards on whiskey-stained tables of groggeries.” Another visitor marveled at the universal dissipation and reported, “The orgies in Petroleum Centre sometimes eclipsed Monte Carlo and the Latin Quarter combined.” For a sober, pious Christian such as Rockefeller, this world of brawny men addicted to vice must have seemed infernal. The oilmen walked around in tall boots, leaving black footprints in the brothels, taverns, and gambling houses of Titusville and Oil City. Many flaunted their nouveau-riche excesses, wearing high silk hats, diamond stickpins, and gold watch chains. In travelers’ reports, it is striking how frequently people resorted to hellish imagery to capture the mood. Rockefeller’s trips to the Oil Regions must have strengthened his belief that he stood foursquare for virtue in a godforsaken place. As an ardent temperance advocate, he was extremely uncomfortable around drinkers—perhaps one reason why he seldom visited the oil fields.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Titusville · Oil City · Oil Regions · Petroleum Centre · Monte Carlo · Latin Quarter
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Two stories, both of uncertain authenticity, convey Rockefeller’s disdain for the morals prevalent among many producers. One night in Rouseville, a local committee of vigilantes crept up to a flatboat moored to a bank and filled with ladies of easy virtue and whiskey salesmen; at the height of a bacchanal, they cut the boat loose and sent the sinners twenty miles downriver. It is said that Rockefeller “thoroughly approved” of the action. Another story tells of the time he stayed in Franklin, where he boarded at the Exchange Hotel and liked to have bread and milk for supper. Occasionally, he donned a dingy old suit to help his men load barrels. One Sunday, an employee came rushing in to tell Rockefeller that the river was rising dangerously and might sweep away their barrels. Rockefeller, preparing for church, put on his hat with aplomb, said he had to go to prayer, and refused to attend to business. Perhaps Rockefeller really did have God on his side, for his barrels survived the flooding intact.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Franklin · Rouseville · Exchange Hotel
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Drilling for oil often seemed less an industry than a lottery: Nobody knew if oil would prove a lasting benefit to mankind or an evanescent wonder. If the Oil Regions created many millionaires, they left many more paupers. Instead of building up an industry, most producers preferred to drain their wells as quickly as possible in this harum-scarum atmosphere. Under the so-called rule of capture, people could drill diagonally and siphon off a neighbor’s oil, adding to their haste to pump. Rockefeller succeeded because he believed in the long-term prospects of the business and never treated it as a mirage that would soon fade. Rockefeller’s first visit to Pennsylvania must also have persuaded him that he had picked the right entry point to the business. Searching for oil was wildly unpredictable, whereas refining seemed safe and methodical by comparison. Before too long, he realized that refining was the critical point where he could exert maximum leverage over the industry.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Oil Regions · Pennsylvania
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John D. Rockefeller had an unfailing knack for knowing who would help or hinder him in his career, an instinct only sharpened by time. Sensitive to patronizing behavior, he bridled when anyone tried to lord it over him, and he wanted to be dealt with as a peer even by senior men. Recoiling at what he saw as the Clark brothers’ pomposity, he eventually grew as censorious of them as he had been of George Gardner. The Clarks were the first of many business partners to underrate the audacity of the quietly calculating Rockefeller, who bided his time as he figured out how to get rid of them.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · George W. Gardner · Clark · Clarks
EPUB paragraph 29 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
All along, crosscurrents had ruffled his relationship with Maurice B. Clark, whom he dismissed as “an ignorant, conceited Englishman.” A tall, bluff man with a fiery temper and shadowy past, Clark had started out as a gardener in his native Wiltshire, chafing under a tyrannical boss. One day in 1847, he reared up and flattened the man. Fearing arrest, he fled to Boston as a penniless, uneducated fugitive from justice. He migrated west to Cleveland and worked as a woodchopper and teamster before entering the produce business. More of a free spirit than Rockefeller, Clark smoked, drank, and swore freely in the warehouse and showed scant religious interest. The personality profile didn’t appeal to Rockefeller, who bristled at Clark’s profanity, but he praised him as a smart, hustling businessman.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Maurice B. Clark · Cleveland · Boston · Clark · Wiltshire
EPUB paragraph 30 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Because Rockefeller had such respect for ledgers, Clark, nearly ten years older, looked down on him as a mere clerk, a rigid, blinkered man without vision. “He did not think I could do anything but keep accounts and look after the finances,” said Rockefeller. “You see, it took him a long time to feel that I was no longer a boy.” He thought Clark envious of his success in soliciting business on the road, perhaps because this undercut Clark’s image of him as an expendable clerk. At first, Rockefeller swallowed his anger and stoically endured this injustice. “He tried almost from the beginning of our partnership to dominate and override me,” he said of Clark. “A question he asked several times in our discussion of business matters was, ‘What in the world would you have done without me?’ I bore it in silence. It does no good to dispute with such a man.” Rockefeller had no doubt who was contributing the lion’s share of business. “I was the one who made the firm’s success. I kept the books, looked out for the money.” As part of Rockefeller’s silent craft and habit of extended premeditation, he never tipped off his adversaries to his plans for revenge, preferring to spring his reprisals on them.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Clark
EPUB paragraph 31 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
The investment in oil refining had brought Maurice’s brother James into the office, and Rockefeller came to detest him. An ex-prizefighter, James Clark was a powerful, bullying young man, and he tried to intimidate Rockefeller, who responded with great sangfroid and courage. One morning, James burst into his office and started swearing violently at Rockefeller, who put his feet up on the desk with imperturbable poise and showed no sign of upset; a fine actor, he always had masterful control of his facial muscles. When James finished, Rockefeller said evenly, “Now James, you can knock my head off but you might as well understand that you can’t scare me.” This fearless young man couldn’t be intimidated. After that confrontation, James Clark didn’t rant and bluster as much around Rockefeller, but it was clear that they were incompatible colleagues.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Maurice B. Clark · James Clark · James
EPUB paragraph 32 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
As with Maurice, Rockefeller quarreled with James about business methods and was dismayed by his devious side deals in oil. When James boasted about swindling a former boss or cheating people on buying trips to Pennsylvania, it must have aroused Rockefeller’s innermost suspicions, for he closely audited his partner’s expenses. Like Maurice, James smarted at Rockefeller’s self-righteousness and branded him the “Sunday-school superintendent.” Already contemplating the future, Rockefeller wanted to be surrounded by trustworthy people who could inspire confidence in customers and bankers alike. He drew a characteristic conclusion: The weak, immoral man was also destined to be a poor businessman. “We were beginning to prosper and I felt very uneasy at my name being linked up with these speculators.” Later on, the Clarks fully reciprocated this contempt, with James describing Rockefeller’s sole contribution to Andrews, Clark as that of a “financial manipulator” and claiming that in 1863 Rockefeller had cheated him of several thousand dollars.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Maurice B. Clark · Pennsylvania · Clark · James · Clarks
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.