Mr. Watson was elected president and W. G. Warden of Philadelphia secretary of the new association. It will be noticed that the largest individual holdings in the company were those of W. G. Warden and O. F. Waring, each of whom had 475 shares. The company most heavily interested in the South Improvement Company was the Standard Oil of Cleveland, J. D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller and H. M. Flagler, all stockholders of that company, each having 180 shares—540 in the company. O. H. Payne and J. A. Bostwick, who soon after became stockholders in the Standard Oil Company, also had each 180 shares, giving Mr. Rockefeller and his associates 900 shares in all. It has frequently been stated that the South Improvement Company represented the bulk of the oil-refining interests in the country. The incorporators of the company in approaching the railroads assured them that this was so. As a matter of fact, however, the thirteen gentlemen above named, who were the only ones ever holding stock in the concern, did not control over one-tenth of the refining business of the United States in 1872. That business in the aggregate amounted to a daily capacity of about 45,000 barrels—from 45,000 to 50,000, Mr. Warden put it—and the stockholders of the South Improvement Company owned a combined capacity of not over 4,600 barrels. In assuring the railroads that they controlled the business, they were dealing with their hopes rather than with facts. The organisation complete, there remained contracts to be made with the railroads. Three systems were to be interested: The Central, which, by its connection with the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, ran directly into the Oil Regions; the Erie, allied with the Atlantic and Great Western, with a short line likewise tapping the heart of the region; and the Pennsylvania, with the connections known as the Allegheny Valley and Oil Creek Railroad. The persons to be won over were: W. H. Vanderbilt, of the Central; H. F. Clark, president of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern; Jay Gould, of the Erie; General G. B. McClellan, president of the Atlantic and Great Western; and Tom Scott, of the Pennsylvania. There seems to have been little difficulty in persuading any of these persons to go into the scheme after they had been assured by the leaders that all of the refiners were to be taken in. This was a verbal condition, however, not found in the contracts they signed. This important fact Mr. Warden himself made clear when three months later he was on the witness stand before a committee of Congress appointed to look into the great scheme. “We had considerable discussion with the railroads,” Mr. Warden said, “in regard to the matter of rebate on their charges for freight; they did not want to give us a rebate unless it was with the understanding that all the refineries should be brought into the arrangement and placed upon the same level.”