John Rockefeller: The Legacy Of John Davison Rockefeller

Nearly everyone has heard of the name Rockefeller. Whether they remembered it from history class or they think of the renowned Rockefeller Center in New York City, the name rings a bell. John Davison Rockefeller not only created an oil empire, but he also created a legacy to follow after him. As a teenager, Rockefeller worked at a Cleveland commission firm as an office clerk. Four years after starting that job, he and a business partner created their own commission firm. During that year, 1859, the first oil well in America was drilled, and in 1863, Rockefeller and multiple partners joined the new oil industry. They invested in a Cleveland refinery and two years later Rockefeller took control of the refinery, the largest in the city (history.com). In 1866, two-thirds of the kerosene from Cleveland was being flown overseas, and it was almost all routed through New York. According to the biography Titan written by Ron Chernow, Rockefeller stated, “It seemed absolutely necessary to extend the market for oil by exporting to foreign countries, which required a large and most difficult development.” Rockefeller’s solution was to send his younger brother William to New York City in 1866 to begin Rockefeller and Company which would overlook the exports of the refineries

This company gained a monopoly in the oil industry by buying competing refineries, creating companies for distributing, and marketing its products around the globe. The companies created were combined into the Standard Oil Trust in 1882. The Trust would come to control around 90 percent of the nation’s refineries and pipelines (history.com). Seventeen years after William launched Rockefeller and Company, John Rockefeller moved to New York. He and his family lived near Fifth Avenue, and soon enough, the strip near Rockefeller’s home was nearly all Standard Oil workmen (Chernow