Standard Oil

Five signatures in Cleveland

On 10 January 1870, John D. Rockefeller, Henry M. Flagler, Samuel Andrews, Stephen V. Harkness and William Rockefeller executed articles in Cleveland creating an Ohio corporation named the Standard Oil Company.

The articles reduced the enterprise to a spare formula: manufacturing petroleum and dealing in petroleum and its products, with its manufacturing establishment in Cleveland. The existing Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler partnership was dissolved and reconstituted as a joint-stock corporation.

A million dollars in ten thousand shares

Authorised capital was $1,000,000, divided into 10,000 shares at $100 par. Rockefeller held 2,667, Harkness 1,334, and Flagler, Andrews and William Rockefeller 1,333 each; Oliver B. Jennings held 1,000, and 1,000 went to the former partnership.

Jennings held stock but did not sign the articles, so the five legal incorporators and the initial body of shareholders were not the same group.

Not yet the trust

The corporation began with two Cleveland refineries. The sprawling interstate Standard Oil Trust was a separate legal organisation, created in 1882.

The founding articles say nothing about a nationwide monopoly, railroad rebates or the South Improvement Company; all of that belongs to later history.

Nor can the industry-wide decline in kerosene prices before 1870 be credited to a company incorporated at the very end of that period.