The History of the Standard Oil CompanyTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
History
The History of the Standard Oil Company
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Petroleum industry and trade -- United States -- History; Standard Oil Company -- History
When young Rockefeller was thirteen years old, his father moved from the
farm in Central New York, where the boy had been born (July 8, 1839), to
a farm near Cleveland, Ohio. He went to school in Cleveland for three
years. In 1855 it became necessary for him to earn his own living. It
was a hard year in the West and the boy walked the streets for days
looking for work. He was about to give it up and go to the country when,
to quote the story as Mr. Rockefeller once told it to his Cleveland
Sunday-school, “As good fortune would have it I went down to the dock
and made one more application, and I was told that if I would come in
after dinner—our noon-day meal was dinner in those days—they would see
if I could come to work for them. I went down after dinner and I got the
position, and I was permitted to remain in the city.” The position, that
of a clerk and bookkeeper, was not lucrative. According to a small
ledger which has figured frequently in Mr. Rockefeller’s religious
instructions, he earned from September 26, 1855, to January, 1856, fifty
dollars. “Out of that,” Mr. Rockefeller told the young men of his
Sunday-school class, “I paid my washerwoman and the lady I boarded with,
and I saved a little money to put away.”
[Illustration:
Fragment of a page in the city directory of Cleveland, Ohio, for 1857.
This is the first year in which the name John D. Rockefeller appears
in the directory. The same entry is made in 1858. The next year,
1859, Mr. Rockefeller is entered as a member of the firm of Clark
and Rockefeller.
]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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