Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/257

Rh to us," Mr. Rockefeller had told Mr. Morehouse. "We have facilities; we must have it. Any concern that starts in business we have sufficient money laid aside to wipe out" —and people believed him! The feeling is admirably shown in a remarkable case still quoted in Cleveland—and which belongs to the same period as the foregoing cases, 1878—a case which took the deeper hold on the public sympathy because the contestant was a woman, the widow of one of the first refiners of the town, a Mr. B, who had begun refining in Cleveland in 1860. Mr. B's principal business was the manufacture of lubricating oil. Now at the start the Standard Oil Company handled only illuminating oil, and accordingly a contract was made between the two parties that Mr. B should sell to Mr. Rockefeller his refined oil, and that the Standard Oil Company should let the lubricating business in Cleveland alone. This was the status when in 1874 Mr. B died. What happened afterwards has been told in full in affidavits made in 1880, and they shall tell the story; the only change made in the documents being to transfer them for the sake of clarity from the legal third person to the first, and to condense them on account of space.

Mrs. B's story as told in her affidavit is as follows:

"'My husband having contracted a debt not long prior to his death for the first time in his life, I, for the interest of my fatherless children, as well as myself, thought it my duty to endeavour to continue the business, and accordingly took $92,000 of the stock of the B Oil Company and afterwards reduced it to $72,000 or $75,000, the whole stock of the company being $100,000, and continued business from that time until November, 1878, making handsome profits out of the business during perhaps the hardest years of the time since Mr. B had commenced. Some time in November, 1878, the Standard Oil Company sent a man to me by the name of Peter S. Jennings, who had been engaged in the refining business and had sold out"