Rockefeller was the second of six children born in
Richford, New York, to
William Avery Rockefeller (
November 13,
1810
May 11,
1906) and Eliza Davison (
September 12,
1813
March 28,
1889). Genealogists trace his roots back to French
Huguenots who later fled to
Germany in the 1600s.
[7][8] His father, a
traveling salesman who the locals referred to as "Big Bill", was a sworn foe of conventional morality who had opted for a vagabond existence. Throughout his life, William Avery Rockefeller expended considerable energy on tricks and schemes to avoid plain hard work.
[9] Eliza, a homemaker and devout Baptist, struggled to maintain a semblance of stability at home as William was frequently gone for extended periods. Young John D. Rockefeller's contemporaries described him as articulate, methodical, and discreet.
When he was a boy, his family moved to
Moravia, New York and, in 1851, to
Owego, New York, where he attended Owego Academy. In 1853, his family bought a house in
Strongsville, a town close to
Cleveland. In September 1855, when Rockefeller was 16 he got his first job as an assistant
bookkeeper. Working for a small produce commission firm called "Hewitt & Tuttle", the full salary for his first three months' work was $50. At that time he promised when he retired he would give one tenth of his money to charity.
In 1859, Rockefeller went into the produce commission business with a partner,
Maurice B. Clark. Their firm, Clark & Rockefeller, built an
oil refinery in 1863 in "The Flats", then Cleveland's burgeoning industrial area. The refinery was directly owned by Andrews, Clark & Company, which was composed of Clark & Rockefeller, chemist Samuel Andrews, and M. B. Clark's two brothers. In February 1865, in what was later described by oil industry historian
Daniel Yergin as a "critical" auction, Rockefeller bought out the Clark brothers for $72,500, and established the firm of Rockefeller & Andrews.
In 1866, John D. Rockefeller's brother, William, built another refinery in Cleveland and he was brought into the partnership. In 1867,
Henry M. Flagler became a partner, and the firm of
Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler was established. By 1868, with Rockefeller borrowing heavily and reinvesting most of the profits while controlling cost and utilizing his refineries' waste, the company owned two Cleveland refineries and a marketing subsidiary in
New York, and it was the largest oil refiner in the world.
[10][11] Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler was the predecessor of the Standard Oil Company.