The purpose of this research is to examine the career of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the man who established the fabulously wealthy Rockefeller dynasty. John D. Rockefeller’s life was fairly typical of that of many other 19th-century Americans. In many other respects, it was a life that has never been equalled. John D. Rockefeller was born on July 8, 1839. One report of his childhood says that his first distinct recollections were of the rough farming country near the villiage of Moravia in western New York, where he lived from his fourth to his eleventh year; in 1843 his father paid $3100 for the ninety-two acre tract in Moravia township..

This farm country of western New York was practically wilderness. The Rockefellers were not frontiersmen in the sense that they had to fight off Indians, but they did live in the …