Rockefeller John Davison - Rockefellers Cleveland

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One

THE INDUSTRIAL CITY

The story of Clevelands ascent to industrial and manufacturing prominence in the 20th century has often been told, and within that story, nothing has captured the imagination more than the meteoric rise of the Standard Oil Company, its beginning in Cleveland, and its founder John D. Rockefeller. Of all the sites associated with this story that can be found in the city today, perhaps the most important is Merwin Street in the flats. Here were the docks that Rockefeller scoured looking for a job in 1855 and where he found employment at the age of 15 as a bookkeeper in the commission house of Hewett and Tuttle. Here on Merwin Street in 1865, Rockefeller and Samuel Andrews also located the office of the Excelsior Oil Works in the Sextons Block.

While most of the structural landmarks have long since disappeared in this historic area, the terrain, rail lines, river, and imprint of the streets are still easily discernible. The neck of land, crossed by Columbus Road and surrounded by the Cuyahoga River, was a teeming area of commerce crowded with lumberyards, commission and forwarding houses, grain elevators, warehouses, light industry, and the roundhouse of the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad. Here the Ohio and Erie Canal cut across the neck between James and West Streets not far from todays Center Street bridge and the Flat Iron Caf, and here the canal reached its northern terminus and canal basin at mile zero. This was Clevelands first central business district aptly described on an 1853 map as Gravity Place.

Rockefeller wrote of Hewett and Tuttle, The firm conducted a business with so many ramifications that the education was quite extensive. They owned dwelling houses, warehouses and buildings which were rented for offices and a variety of uses, and I had to collect the rents. They shipped by rail, canal and lake. There were many different kinds of negotiations and transactions going on, and with all these I was in close touch. Rockefeller credited what came after to what he learned on Merwin Street.

NORTH SIDE EUCLID AVE. The building in the middle with the arched entrance is the Arcade. Two buildings to the west is the Standard Block, headquarters of the Standard Oil Company. The six-story business block, built in 1873, was designed by architect Walter Blythe. Merchants shops were on the ground floor and offices above. On the far right is the Nottingham Block, which was the Halle Brothers Company store until it moved to East Twelfth Street in 1911.

STANDARD OIL WORKS. Refinery No. 1, formerly the Excelsior Oil Works, straddles the banks of Kingsbury Run where it emptied into the Cuyahoga River. The process of refining was one of distilling crude oil into kerosene for lighting and illumination. Initially gasoline was a by-product and discarded. Across the Cuyahoga River valley on the Heights can be seen Tremont.