Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/300

 burg it was Charles Lockhart, a man interested in petroleum before the Drake well was struck, who had begun oil operations on Oil Creek in March, 1860, who had carried samples of crude and refined to Europe as early as May, 1860, who had built one of the first refineries in Pittsburg, and who was easily the largest refiner there in 1874 when Mr. Rockefeller bought him up. In Philadelphia, the largest refiner in 1874 was W. G. Warden of the Atlantic Refining Company, and it was he whom Mr. Rockefeller wanted. In New York it was the concern of Charles Pratt and Company, one of the three largest concerns around Manhattan—the concern to which H. H. Rogers belonged. Charles Pratt had been in the oil and paint business since 1850, and he had become a refiner of petroleum at Greenpoint, Long Island, in 1867. Before Standard Oil was known outside of New York the fame of Pratt's Astral Oil had gone around the world. Mr. Pratt's concern was rated at the same daily capacity as Mr. Rockefeller's (1,500 barrels) in the spring of 1872, when the latter wiped up the Cleveland refineries and grew in a night to 10,000 barrels. Mr. Vandergrift, who united his interests with Mr. Rockefeller's in 1874 and 1875, had been a far better known man in the oil business and controlled much greater and more varied interests up to South Improvement times. When he went into the Standard he controlled the largest refinery on Oil Creek, the Imperial, of about 1,400 barrels. He was president of a large system of pipe-lines, and he was a member of one of the largest oil-producing concerns of the time—the H. L. Taylor Company.

There is no doubt but that Mr. Rockefeller had plenty of brains in his great trust. It was those who had done business with him who were the first to point this out when critics declared that the concern could not—or must not—live. "There is no question about it," W. H. Vanderbilt told the Hepburn Commission in 1879, "but these men are smarter than I am