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The Rockfellers’ steep property provided a sweeping panorama of a fertile valley. The vernal slopes were spattered with wildflowers, and chestnuts and berries abounded in the fall. Amid this sylvan beauty, the Rockfellers had to struggle with a spartan life. They occupied a small, plain house, twenty-two feet deep and sixteen feet across, fashioned with hand-hewn beams and timbers. The thin soil was so rocky that it required heroic exertions just to hack a clearing through the underbrush and across thickly forested slopes of pine, hemlock, oak, and maple.
Names: Rockefeller family
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As best we can gauge from a handful of surviving anecdotes, Lucy ably managed both family and farm and never shirked heavy toil. Assisted by a pair of steers, she laid an entire stone wall by herself and had the quick-witted cunning and cool resourcefulness that would reappear in her grandson. John D. delighted in telling how she pounced upon a grain thief in their dark barn one night. Unable to discern the intruder’s face, she had the mental composure to snip a piece of fabric from his coat sleeve. When she later spotted the man’s frayed coat, she confronted the flabbergasted thief with the missing swatch; having silently made her point, she never pressed charges. One last item about Lucy deserves mention: She had great interest in herbal medicines and home-brewed remedies prepared from a “physic bush” in the backyard. Many years later, her curious grandson sent specimens of this bush to a laboratory to see whether they possessed genuine medicinal value. Perhaps it was from Lucy that he inherited the fascination with medicine that ran through his life, right up to his creation of the world’s preeminent medical-research institute.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Lucy
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By the time he was in his twenties, William Avery Rockefeller was already a sworn foe of conventional morality who had opted for a vagabond existence. Even as an adolescent, he disappeared on long trips in midwinter, providing no clues as to his whereabouts. Throughout his life, he expended considerable energy on tricks and schemes to avoid plain hard work. But he possessed such brash charm and rugged good looks—he was nearly six feet tall, with a broad chest, high forehead, and thick auburn beard covering a pugnacious jaw—that people were instantly beguiled by him. This appealing façade, at least for a while, lulled skeptics and disarmed critics. It wasn’t surprising that this nomad did not accompany his parents on their westward trek to Richford but instead drifted into the area around 1835 in his own inimitable fashion. When he first appeared in a neighboring hamlet, he quickly impressed the locals with his unorthodox style. Posing as a deaf-mute peddler selling cheap novelties, he kept a small slate with the words “I am deaf and dumb” chalked across it tied by a string to his buttonhole. On this slate, he conversed with the locals and later boasted how he exploited this ruse to flush out all the town secrets. To win the confidence of strangers and soften them up for the hard sell, he toted along a kaleidoscope, inviting people to peer into it. During his long career as a confidence man, Big Bill always risked reprisals from people who might suddenly unmask his deceptions, and he narrowly escaped detection at the home of a Deacon Wells. The deacon and his daughter, a Mrs. Smith, pitied the poor peddler who knocked on their door one Saturday and sheltered him in their home that night. The next morning, when they invited him to church, Big Bill had to resort to some fancy footwork, for he always shied away from crowds where somebody might recognize him and expose his imposture. “Billy told [the deacon] in writing that he liked to go to church, but that his infirmity caused him to be stared at, so that he was abashed and would not go,” recalled a townsman. “He really feared that he might be exposed by someone.” Seven months later, after the deacon and Big Bill had both moved to Richford, Mrs. Smith spotted the erstwhile deaf-mute at a social gathering and marveled at his miraculous recovery of speech. “I see that you can talk better than when I saw you last,” she said. Big Bill smiled, unfazed, his bravado intact. “Yes, I’m somewhat improved.” When he arrived in Richford, the local citizens immediately got a taste of his fakery, for he wordlessly flashed a slate with the scribbled query, “Where is the house of Godfrey Rockefeller?”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Godfrey Rockefeller · Richford · Deacon Wells · Smith · Uncle Billy
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Since he usually presented false claims about himself and his products, Bill worked a large territory to elude the law. He was roving more than thirty miles northwest of Richford, in the vicinity of Niles and Moravia, when he first met his future wife, Eliza Davison, at her father’s farmhouse. With a flair for showmanship and self-promotion, he always wore brocaded vests or other brightly colored duds that must have dazzled a sheltered farm girl like Eliza. Like many itinerant vendors in rural places, he was a smooth-talking purveyor of dreams along with tawdry trinkets, and Eliza responded to this romantic wanderer. She was sufficiently taken in by his deaf-and-dumb humbug that she involuntarily exclaimed in his presence, “I’d marry that man if he were not deaf and dumb.”Whatever tacit doubts she might have harbored when she discovered his deceit, she soon succumbed, as did other women, to his mesmerizing charm.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Richford · Moravia · Niles
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A prudent, straitlaced Baptist of Scotch-Irish descent, deeply attached to his daughter, John Davison must have sensed the world of trouble that awaited Eliza if she got mixed up with Big Bill Rockefeller, and he strongly discouraged the match. In later years, Eliza Rockefeller would seem to be a dried-up, withered spinster, but in late 1836 she was a slim, spirited young woman with flaming red hair and blue eyes. Pious and self-contained, she was the antithesis of Bill and probably found him so hypnotic for just that reason. Who knows what gloom hung around her doorstep that was dispelled by Bill’s glib patter? Her mother had died when Eliza was only twelve—she had dropped dead after taking a pill dispensed by a traveling doctor—and Eliza was raised by her older sister, Mary Ann, leaving Eliza deprived of maternal counsel.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Mary Ann Rockefeller Rudd · John Davison
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On February 18, 1837, despite the express opposition of John Davison, this most improbable couple—Bill was twenty-seven, Eliza twenty-four—were wed at the home of one of Eliza’s friends. The marriage was a favorite gossip item among the Richford townspeople, who tended to spy guile on Bill’s part. Compared to the Davisons, the Rockefellers were poor country folk, and it is very likely that Bill was entranced by reports of John Davison’s modest wealth. As early as 1801, the frugal Davison had acquired 150 acres in Cayuga County. In John D.’s words, “My grandfather was a rich man—that is, for his time he was counted rich. In those days one who had his farm paid for and had a little money beside was counted rich. Four or five or six thousand was counted rich. My grandfather had perhaps three or four times that. He had money to lend.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · John Davison · Rockefeller family · Richford · Davison · Davisons · Cayuga County
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Most Richford residents believed that Big Bill’s meeting with Eliza was less a random encounter than a premeditated bid to snare her father’s money. A notorious cad who regarded every pretty young woman as a potential conquest, Bill had at least one serious romance that antedated his wooing of Eliza. As Ralph P. Smith, a longtime Richford resident, recalled, “Billy was unmarried when he came here, and it was supposed that he would marry Nancy Brown, who was his housekeeper, but he broke with her, settling a sum said to have been about $400 on her when he concluded to win the daughter of the rich John Davison, over at Niles, on the outskirts of Moravia.” The story is corroborated by John D.’s cousin, Mrs. John Wilcox, who said, “Nancy Brown, of Harford Mills, was a beautiful girl, remarkably beautiful. William fell in love with her. She was poor. William would have money. Eliza Davison’s father was to give her $500 when she married; so William married her.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · John Davison · Nancy Brown · Richford · Moravia · Mrs. John Wilcox · Niles · Harford Mills · Ralph P. Smith · Uncle Billy · Uncle William
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This marriage, consummated under false pretenses, fused the lives of two highly dissimilar personalities, setting the stage for all the future heartache, marital discord, and chronic instability that would so powerfully mold the contradictory personality of John D. Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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When Bill brought his bride back to the Richford house he’d built half a mile from his parents’ place, Eliza must have pondered the wisdom of her father’s disapproval: Life promised to be hard and flinty in this rough-hewn homestead. Surviving photos of John D. Rockefeller’s birthplace show a plain clapboard house set on a treeless slope, outlined bleakly against the sky. The rude dwelling looked like two attached boxcars, the austere simplicity broken only by a small awning over one door. However primitive the exterior, the snug house was solidly built out of timber from local forests. The main floor had two bedrooms and a living room, topped by a low sleeping loft and attic storage room; the little attached building served as a barn and woodshed. (This bucolic birth site of the future kerosene king was probably lit by sperm oil or tallow candles.) The grounds were much more ample than the house, as the fifty-acre lot included an apple orchard and a trout-filled stretch of Owego Creek, which bubbled along the bottom of the property.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Richford · Owego Creek
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Before long, Big Bill roughly disabused Eliza of any high-flown romantic notions she might have had about matrimony. Far from renouncing his girlfriend, Nancy Brown, he brought her into the cramped house as a “housekeeper” and began having children, alternately, by wife and mistress. In 1838, Eliza gave birth to their first child, Lucy, followed a few months later by Nancy’s first illegitimate daughter, Clorinda. On the night of July 8, 1839, Bill and Eliza again summoned the midwife, this time to deliver a boy, who came into the world in a bare front bedroom measuring eight by ten feet. This child, born during Martin Van Buren’s presidency and destined to become the country’s foremost capitalist, would survive into the second term of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Like many other future magnates—Andrew Carnegie (born in 1835), Jay Gould (1836), and J. Pierpont Morgan (1837)—he was born in the late 1830s and would therefore come to maturity on the eve of the post–Civil War industrial boom. Several months after John’s birth, Nancy Brown gave birth to a second daughter, Cornelia, which meant that Bill, lord of his own harem, managed to sire four children under one roof in just two years. Thus, the fiercely moralistic John Davison Rockefeller (appropriately named after Eliza’s sober father) was sandwiched tightly between two illegitimate sisters, born into a situation steeped in sin.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Lucy Rockefeller Briggs · Nancy Brown · J. P. Morgan · Andrew Carnegie · Jay Gould · Franklin D. Roosevelt · Nancy · Cornelia · Clorinda · Martin Van Buren · Civil War · John
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Eliza couldn’t have felt very comfortable with her in-laws. In general, the Rockefellers were a hard-drinking hillbilly clan, sociable and funny, fond of music, liquor, and uproarious good times, and adhering to a coarse frontier morality. As the strong matriarch, Lucy was the conspicuous exception, and Eliza drew close to her while frowning upon many of her more dissipated in-laws. During the Richford period, Bill’s younger brother, Miles Avery Rockefeller, deserted his wife and decamped to South Dakota with Ella Brussee, a young woman who had done domestic work for Eliza. In a move that prefigured a future stratagem for Bill, Miles entered into a bigamous marriage with Ella and adopted his middle name as his new surname. Such re-created lives were common at a time when America had a vast, unmapped frontier and numerous sanctuaries from the law.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · Richford · United States · Ella Brussee · Miles Avery Rockefeller · Lucy · South Dakota · Miles · Ella
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For a callow farm girl fresh from home, Eliza proved unexpectedly tolerant of Nancy Brown. Contrary to what one might expect, she pitied this intruder, perhaps considering the cramped ménage à trois fit punishment for having flouted her father’s advice. As her niece observed, “Aunt Eliza loved her husband and she liked poor Nancy. But Aunt Eliza’s brothers came down and made William put Nancy away.” In this period of Eliza’s marriage, Mr. Davison is conspicuous by his absence, leaving one to wonder whether he had temporarily washed his hands of his disobedient daughter or whether, cowed by guilt and embarrassment, she had hidden her troubles from him. By one account, when Nancy grew quarrelsome after Bill’s marriage, he seized the chance to expel his shrewish mistress from the packed household. Heeding the pleas from the Davisons, he posted Nancy and the two daughters to live with her parents in nearby Harford Mills. Family legend claims that Bill, who had a weak but not entirely dormant conscience, secretly deposited clothing bundles on her doorstep. Fortunately, the years with Bill didn’t blight Nancy’s life, for she married a man named Burlingame, bore other children, and furnished her first two daughters with a respectable upbringing. From the skimpy documentary evidence, we know that Clorinda died young while Cornelia grew up into a tall, smart, attractive schoolteacher with a telling resemblance to Big Bill. Sometimes he acceded to her demands for money, but there were strict limits to Bill’s generosity, and he would rebuff her when she became too clamorous. Cornelia married a man named Sexton and remained in the Richford area, but only a few local residents and Rockefeller relatives knew that she was John D.’s half-sister. To her credit, Cornelia never tried to cash in on her kinship with the world’s richest man, perhaps because it would unavoidably have advertised her illegitimacy. It is impossible to determine whether Rockefeller ever knew of the existence of his two illegitimate half-sisters.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Nancy Brown · Richford · Cornelia Brown Burlingame Sexton · Davison · Nancy · Davisons · Cornelia · Harford Mills · Clorinda · Burlingame · Uncle William
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The Nancy Brown affair wasn’t the only indignity visited upon Eliza, for she was often abandoned by Bill during her three cheerless years in Richford. He remained a restless and defiant individualist who preferred life beyond the pale of society. Early in the marriage, he stayed put for a while, operating a small sawmill on Michigan Hill and dealing in salt, fur, horses, and timber, but he soon resumed the footloose life of a peddler, his trips cloaked in unfathomable mystery. Like a fugitive, he would depart furtively under cover of night and return after dark, weeks or months later, flinging pebbles at the window to signal his return. To tide over his family in his absence, he arranged for credit at the general store. “Give my family anything they want while I’m away,” he instructed Chauncey Rich, whose father, Ezekiel, had founded Richford, “and when I come back I’ll settle.” Never knowing when this credit might be canceled, Eliza became extremely frugal and drilled her children in thrifty maxims such as “Willful waste makes woeful want.”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Nancy Brown · Richford · Chauncey Rich · Michigan Hill · Ezekiel
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When Bill returned home, a sudden, smiling apparition, he would be riding new horses, wearing fine clothes, and brandishing a thick wad of crisp bills. Before going to see Eliza, he would pay off Chauncey Rich so that he could confidently tell her everything was now squared away at the store. His seductive charm melted away whatever hostility his absence had aroused; it took time before his extended absences and repeated betrayals burned the romance out of her system, leaving a residue of stoic resignation. For the moment, whatever her anxieties or loneliness, she seemed girlishly lovelorn during his trips, still smitten with her flimflam man. “Just look at that moon!” she once sighed to a cousin when Bill was on the road. “Is William, miles and miles away, perhaps looking at it, too, at this moment? I do hope he is.”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Chauncey Rich · Uncle William
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On the road, Bill improvised ever more fanciful ways to make money. A crack shot, he made the circuit of shooting contests, often bringing home prize money. A glad-handing huckster, he sold rings and other knickknacks at fantastic markups. Mostly, though, he styled himself a “botanic physician” or “herbal doctor”—euphemisms faithfully parroted by some Rockefeller descendants. At a time when physicians still resorted to bleeding, blistering, and violent purgatives, and many rustic areas lacked access to medical care, such traveling salesmen filled a vacuum. Nevertheless, in William Avery Rockefeller one clearly detects the blarney and easy conviviality of the mountebank. Sometimes he peddled bottles of home-brewed elixir or patent medicines bought from druggists, but he scored his greatest success with natural medicines culled from Lucy’s physic bush. Though his mother had a sincere interest in herbal remedies, Bill would grossly distort or exaggerate their properties. For instance, he harvested small, purplish berries from her garden that resembled small pills and would hawk them to farmers’ wives as a sovereign remedy for stomach troubles. His sales pitch went even further, for, as a Richford neighbor reported many years later, “he would warn them solemnly that they must not be given to a woman in a delicate condition, for they would surely cause abortion. Thereupon he would sell his pills at a high price. They were perfectly harmless, and he broke no law in selling them. He had remarkable imagination.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Richford · Lucy
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The midnight rambles and peculiar commerce of William Rockefeller mystified the Richford citizenry. He both fired and troubled the imagination, generating so much gossip and speculation that they christened him Devil Bill. Rumors raced periodically through town that he was a gambler, a horse thief, a desperado. Though he seemed to operate on the edge of the law, people were delighted by his bluff humor and tall tales, if dismayed by his treatment of his family. “When he finally succeeded as a peddler he would dress up like a prince and kept everyone wondering,” said one town resident who participated in the guessing game about Bill’s manifold sources of income. “He laughed a great deal and enjoyed the speculation he caused. He was not a drinking man and treated his family well when he was home, but everyone knew that he neglected the family by leaving them to shift for themselves for long months at a time.” He frustrated those neighbors who ached for his comeuppance. After one prolonged absence of several months, when Eliza’s bill at Chauncey Rich’s topped a thousand dollars, the scuttlebutt said that Devil Bill had been arrested. Instead, like a country squire, he came trotting into town in a magnificent carriage, seated behind a team of splendid horses, diamonds glittering in his shirtfront. At the general store, he made a point of settling the tab with large bills. After such trips, Bill gathered friends and family around the dinner table and, while wolfing down heaps of food, would regale them with picaresque tales of his adventures among the western settlers and Indians. Devil Bill had a knack for weaving his experiences into spellbinding narratives, making Eliza and the children vicarious partners in his travels. As the chief casualty of Bill’s peregrinations, Eliza received sympathy from her neighbors, who felt she was being abused by her husband. Yet she remained loyal to him, declined many opportunities to denigrate him, and carried herself with considerable dignity.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · William Rockefeller · Richford · Chauncey Rich
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However overblown the frequent biographical claims about John D. Rockefeller’s impoverished childhood have been, several people testified to the family’s squalor in Richford. “I do not remember ever to have seen more pitiably neglected children,” one neighbor observed. “Their clothing was old and tattered, and they looked dirty and hungry.” It was a measure of Eliza’s desperation that she sought relief in the home of her brother-in-law, Jacob Rockefeller, a bawdy, jolly, not infrequently besotted man. An oft-told tale about Jacob recounted how he won a five-dollar bet by staying sober during an entire trip to town. Jacob’s kindly wife became a second mother to the two toddlers, Lucy and John, darning their clothes and knitting them mittens from woolen homespun.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Richford · Jacob Rockefeller · Lucy · Jacob · John
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In this nightmarish situation, Eliza seemed to draw strength from adversity. One Richford native praised her as “a most excellent woman, but one who bore too heavy a burden at that time properly to look after her children. Her husband was away for long periods, and she had to look after their farm of sixty acres and try to make it pay their expenses. She did not know at what time the shopkeepers of the village might shut down on her credit, and she worked very hard.”
Names: Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Richford
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When John D. later evoked his idyllic, sunlit boyhood in upstate New York, he blotted out Richford from these reveries. Just three when he left there, he retained only a few hazy memories of the place. “I remember very clearly the brook that ran near the front of the house and how careful I had to be to keep far away from it. I remember my mother vaguely at Richford and my grandmother, who lived half a mile or so up the hill.” One notes that Rockefeller’s earliest memory was associated with caution and that he edited out the absentee father and inebriated grandfather while retaining the strong, enduring mother and grandmother. He always possessed an unusual, self-protective capacity to suppress unpleasant memories and keep alive those things that fortified his resolve.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Richford · New York State
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As best we can tell, Rockefeller knew nothing of Nancy Brown and the seamy side of Richford existence, yet he carried through life a vague sense of an infernal place. “I shudder to think of what I should have been if I had remained in Richford all my life,” he later confided. “There were many men who hunt a little, fish a little, and drink whiskey a little, and only attain a little success in life, and all for the lack of a little religion.” Of his family’s decision to leave Richford, Rockefeller offered an economic explanation that probably served as the standard cover story of his childhood: stingy soil. “The country there is beautiful,” Rockefeller would say, “but the settlers wasted their energy in trying to get the stumps out of the ground, and trying to make crops grow in the poor soil.” The true reason, of course, was Eliza’s horror at the town’s low moral tone, as reflected by its single church; she was probably also eager to remove the children from the influence of her boisterous, drunken Rockefeller in-laws and expose them to the steadier Davisons. By no coincidence, the Rockefellers moved to Moravia, three miles from the Davison farm, where Eliza could enjoy her father’s presence during her husband’s habitual absences.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Nancy Brown · Rockefeller family · Richford · Moravia · Davison · Davisons
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John D. Rockefeller, right, at age thirteen, with brother William, eleven, and sister Mary Ann, nine. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mary Ann Rockefeller Rudd · Rockefeller Archive Center · Uncle William
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hen the Rockefellers moved thirty miles north from Richford to Moravia, they progressed from a backward, frontier settlement to a more sedate community with neat frame houses in the town center. Settled by the United Brethren in Christ—an evangelical denomination that later merged with the United Methodist Church—Moravia was already a stronghold of temperance and antislavery sentiment and boasted a hotel, general store, cotton mill, and Congregational church. Even today, Moravia is a quaintly authentic piece of Americana, with graceful, shady streets that have a companionable feel and houses with wide, friendly verandas.
Names: Rockefeller family · Richford · Moravia · Congregational · United Brethren · United Methodist Church
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The Rockefellers lived on the rural outskirts north of town. Around 1843, Bill put down a thousand dollars for a ninety-two-acre parcel of grassy upland that gently sloped down to Owasco Lake, one of the most picturesque of the Finger Lakes. He enlarged an existing house until it contained seven or eight rooms favored with superb views, framed by tall pines, of the bright blue lake set against a backdrop of wooded hills on the far shore. Barns stood across the road, and a smokehouse out back enabled the family to cure ham and bacon. For John D., this two-story clapboard house was a scene of enchantment and became his enduring emblem of pastoral beauty. In the summertime, he loved to pull yellow perch from the cold, clear lake, and even winters captivated him in spite of the bitter cold. The Rockefeller children slept in an unplastered upstairs room that was heated only by a stovepipe rising from the kitchen; snow flurries and sharp winter squalls pressed through cracks in the walls. “How the wind used to roar among the hemlocks by the shore of the lake!” Rockefeller remembered dreamily in his late seventies. In the predawn dark, the children were often awakened by the sharp chopping of woodcutters or the squeal of sleds on hard-packed snow. Eliza would stand at the foot of the stairs and call up to her eldest son, “Come, my son; time to get up and milk your cow!” To warm his feet in the dim, cold barn, John always stood on the steaming earth just vacated by the cow he was milking.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · Owasco Lake · Finger Lakes · John
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The first three Rockefeller children—Lucy, John, and William—had been born in Richford. Now, in 1843, with Big Bill again on the road during months of her pregnancy, Eliza gave birth to a second daughter, Mary Ann; two years later, twins arrived. The boy, Frank, was healthy, but Frances was sickly from birth and received some seventy visits from a local doctor before she died just short of her second birthday. Eliza tried to protect the seven-year-old John D. from this first lacerating brush with death, but it remained engraved on his memory. When he visited Moravia as an old man in his eighties, he pointed to a field and explained that “when Frances was buried I was sent over to that field to pick stones, so that I should not know.” He later exhibited an unacknowledged dread of death, and Eliza was perhaps the first to intuit it.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · William Rockefeller · Frank Rockefeller · Mary Ann Rockefeller Rudd · Lucy Rockefeller Briggs · Frances Rockefeller · Richford · Moravia · John
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In Moravia, William Avery Rockefeller acted like a strange amalgam of solid citizen and engaging ne’er-do-well. As in Richford, the townsfolk goggled as he sped by on swift horses, decked out in smart clothes, and his prodigal spending sometimes fostered the impression that he was the town’s richest man. Mary Ann later dismissed the “ridiculous” stories of their childhood poverty. “We always had plenty to eat and wear, and every reasonable kind of comfort. We were not rich, of course—far from it; but we had enough to eat and use and save—always.” Moravia was the golden period of John’s boyhood when his father briefly aspired to gentility. One neighbor even labeled Bill “about the most notable man in the community.” Since the region was rich in pristine pine forests, he organized a legitimate and quite successful logging business. Before dawn, guided only by starlight and lanterns, he and his work gangs carted logs to the lakeside by bobsled, then floated them up to Auburn, situated at the lake’s northern tip. In a sudden burst of civic spirit, Bill helped to select the site for the town school by counting the revolutions of his buggy wheels as he drove through town, then placing the school at the exact middle of the community; he persuaded local taxpayers to pay for it at a time when many people still thought families should educate their children at home. With the resourceful, go-getter attitude later transmitted to his son, Bill also stocked Owasco Lake with pickerel and even headed the local temperance committee. “That’s the kind of man he was,” boasted John D. “He’d get a thing done while his neighbors were beginning to talk about it.” The Moravia period revealed an important truth about Bill: He had an underlying craving for respectability and probably didn’t plan to spend his whole life as a floating charlatan, preying on the gullible.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Mary Ann Rockefeller Rudd · Richford · Moravia · Owasco Lake · Auburn · John
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Bill never deigned to dirty his hands with farmwork, of course, which he considered beneath his dignity. He hired a railroad worker named Hiram Odell to work the farm and look after his family during his still-frequent wanderings. As Bill instructed him, “Their mother ain’t strong enough to manage ’em and they need some managing. Do just what you think is right for ’em.” While Odell cultivated the garden in his spare time, Eliza assigned chores to the children. Drawing a string across the garden one day, she told the two oldest boys, “John, you take care of this side of the string, and, Will, this side is yours.” In contrast to his father’s disdain for manual labor, John—always a self-styled son of the common people—gloried in the rigors of country life, which, he came to believe, toughened him for later industrial struggle. His frugal boyhood hardened an already stoic nature and made him proof against later adversity.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Hiram Odell · John
EPUB paragraph 6 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
There was enough economic activity in the America of the 1840s to stimulate the fancy of any future mogul. Banks sprang up everywhere, canals cross-hatched the countryside, steamboats plied the rivers, railroads and telegraphs welded together the first national markets. Territorial expansion was in the air: Texas was annexed in 1845, and war with Mexico seemed inevitable. Though only dimly aware of such distant developments, John D. Rockefeller already seemed a perfect specimen of homo economicus. Even as a boy, he bought candy by the pound, divided it into small portions, then sold it at a tidy profit to his siblings. By age seven, encouraged by his mother, he was dropping gold, silver, and copper coins that he earned into a blue china bowl on the mantel. John’s first business coup came at age seven when he shadowed a turkey hen as it waddled off into the woods, raided its nest, and raised the chicks for sale. To spur his enterprise, Eliza gave him milk curds to feed the turkeys, and the next year he raised an even larger brood. As an old man, Rockefeller said, “To this day, I enjoy the sight of a flock of turkeys, and never miss an opportunity of studying them.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · United States · Texas · Mexico · John
EPUB paragraph 7 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Despite Rockefeller’s roseate memories, early photos of him tell a much more somber tale. His face was grim, expressionless, lacking boyish joy and animation; the skin is drawn, the eyes blank and devoid of luster. To other people, he often seemed abstracted, and they remembered him with a deadpan face trudging along country roads, lost in thought, as if unraveling deep problems. “He was a quiet boy,” said one Moravia resident. “He seemed always to be thinking.” In many respects, John was forgettable and indistinguishable from many other boys. When he later dazzled the world, many former neighbors and classmates struggled to summon up even a fuzzy image of him. He was a slow learner but patient and persistent and, like J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould, exhibited a terrific head for math. “I was not an easy student, and I had to apply myself diligently to prepare my lessons,” said Rockefeller, who described himself accurately as “reliable” but not “brilliant.” For thirty weeks per year (rural children needed time off for farm chores), he attended the one-room schoolhouse established by his father, a spare white building with a pitched roof and windows adorned with dark shutters. Discipline was harsh and exacting: When students misbehaved, the teacher menacingly held a slate over their heads. If Rockefeller didn’t excel in class, it might have been in part because he lacked the bright boy’s exhibitionism, the yearning for gold stars; always inner-directed and indifferent to the approval of others, he was therefore free of a certain boyish vanity.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · J. P. Morgan · Jay Gould · Moravia · John
EPUB paragraph 8 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that there was something extraordinary about the way this stolid boy pinpointed goals and doggedly pursued them without any trace of childish impulsiveness. When playing checkers or chess, he showed exceptional caution, studying each move at length, working out every possible countermove in his head. “I’ll move just as soon as I get it figured out,” he told opponents who tried to rush him. “You don’t think I’m playing to get beaten, do you?” To ensure that he won, he submitted to games only where he could dictate the rules. Despite his slow, ponderous style, once he had thoroughly mulled over his plan of action, he had the power of quick decision.
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EPUB paragraph 9 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Although he was generally grave and devoted much time to books, music, and church, he had a sly wit, the sort that curled up unexpectedly around the edges of a sentence. As his sister-in-law said, “He had a quick sense of humor, though one might say he was soberly mirthful. His appreciation was keen, but I do not recall him as ever laughing loudly. But I do remember the quick lighting up of his eyes, and the dimples that showed in his cheek when he heard or saw anything amusing.” His sister Mary Ann remembered him as an inveterate tease. “He would plague us all with his jokes, always with a straight, solemn face.” Rockefeller always had a droll sense of fun, but it was often obscured behind a mask of gravity.
EPUB paragraph 10 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
John D. Rockefeller was drawn to the church, not as some nagging duty or obligation but as something deeply refreshing to the soul. The Baptist church of his boyhood provides many clues to the secrets of his character. As a young man, he was raised on a steady diet of maxims, grounded in evangelical Protestantism, that guided his conduct. Many of his puritanical attitudes, which may seem antiquated to a later generation, were merely the religious commonplaces of his boyhood. Indeed, the saga of his monumental business feats is inseparable from the fire-and-brimstone atmosphere that engulfed upstate New York in his childhood. Even his father, wont to flirt with the devil’s company, knew many hymns by heart and urged his children to go to church; he once offered John five dollars to read the Bible cover to cover, thus creating an early, unintentional association between God and money. Always an iconoclastic, outlaw spirit, Bill never actually joined a church—that would have been going too far—so John identified religion with his beloved mother, who found in the Bible a balm for her troubled spirit.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · New York State · John
EPUB paragraph 11 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
John attended a Sunday school a short distance from their hilltop house and remembered the teacher as a formerly profane man who had repented and become an earnest Christian. The boy saw religion less as a system of otherworldly rewards than as a means for moral reformation on earth. Since Bill was often away, Eliza coaxed a Presbyterian neighbor into dropping off her and the children at the Baptist church on Sunday mornings. As the family huddled together in a pew, Eliza encouraged the children to drop pennies into the collection plate; Rockefeller later cited his mother’s altruism as the genesis of his philanthropy. Early in life, he learned that God wanted his flock to earn money and then donate money in a never-ending process. “I was trained from the beginning to work and to save,” Rockefeller explained. “I have always regarded it as a religious duty to get all I could honorably and to give all I could. I was taught that way by the minister when I was a boy.” The low-church Baptists didn’t prohibit the accumulation of wealth but did oppose its vain, ostentatious display, setting up a tension that would be threaded throughout Rockefeller’s life.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · John
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.