Henry Huttleston Rogers (January 29, 1840 – May 19, 1909) was an American industrialist and financier. He made his fortune in the oil refining business, becoming a leader at Standard Oil. He also played a major role in numerous corporations and business enterprises in the gas industry, copper, and railroads. He became a close friend of Mark Twain.
Rogers' success in the oil industry began with Charles Pratt in 1866, when he invented an improved process by which naphtha was separated from crude oil during oil refining. John D. Rockefeller bought his and Pratt's business in 1874, and Rogers rose rapidly in Standard Oil. He designed the idea of a very long pipeline for transporting oil, as opposed to using railway cars. In the 1880s, he broadened his interests beyond oil to include copper, steel, banking, and railroads, as well as the Consolidated Gas Company that provided coal gas to major cities. By the 1890s, as Rockefeller was withdrawing from the oil business, Rogers was a dominant figure at Standard Oil. In 1899, Rogers set up the Amalgamated Copper trust, based in Butte, Montana, that dominated an industry in high demand as the nation needed wire to build its electric networks. His last major enterprise was building the Virginian Railway to service the West Virginia coal fields. After 1890, he became a prominent philanthropist, as well as a friend and supporter of Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington.
Early life and education Rogers was born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, on January 29, 1840. He was the elder son of Rowland Rogers (a former ship captain, bookkeeper and grocer) and his wife, Mary Eldredge Huttleston. Both parents were Yankees and were descended from the Pilgrims who arrived in 1620 aboard the Mayflower. His mother's family had earlier used the spelling "Huddleston" rather than "Huttleston". (Consequently, Rogers' name is often misspelled.)
Except for a brief move to Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, during Rogers' early childhood, the family lived in Fairhaven, a fishing village across the Acushnet River from the whaling port of New Bedford. Fairhaven is a small seaside town on the south coast, bordering the Acushnet River to the west and Buzzards Bay to the south. In the mid-1850s, whaling was already an industry in decline in New England. Whale oil was soon replaced by kerosene and natural gas. Henry Rogers' father was one of the many men of New England who changed from a life on the sea to other work to provide for their families.
Rogers was an average student, and he was in the first graduating class of the local high school in 1856. Continuing to live with his parents, he was hired on with the Fairhaven Branch Railroad, an early precursor of the Old Colony Railroad, as an expressman and brakeman. He worked there for three to four years, while carefully saving his earnings.
Marriages and family
While vacationing in Fairhaven in 1862, Rogers married his childhood sweetheart, Abbie Palmer Gifford, who was also of Mayflower lineage. She returned with him to the oil fields where they lived in a one-room shack along Oil Creek, where her young husband and Ellis worked the Wamsutta Oil Refinery. While they lived in Pennsylvania, their first daughter, Anne Engle Rogers, was born in 1865. They had five surviving children together, four girls and a boy. Another son died at birth.
After the family moved to New York in 1866, Cara Leland Rogers was born in Fairhaven in 1867, Millicent Gifford Rogers was born in 1873, followed by Mary Huttleston Rogers (known as "Mai") in 1875.
Their son, Henry Huttleston Rogers Jr., was born in 1879 and was known as Harry. He lived in New York City and became a colonel in the New York Militia. He served on the Mexican border in 1916, and with the U.S. Army in France from 1917 to 1919 as a lieutenant colonel in the Field Artillery during the First World War. He was also a member of the Rhode Island Society of the Cincinnati.Members of the Rhode Island Society of the Cincinnati. 1924–1925.
Abbie Palmer Gifford Rogers died unexpectedly on May 21, 1894. Her childhood home, a two-story, gable-end frame house built in the Greek Revival style, has been preserved. It is made available for tours of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, where she and her husband grew up.
In 1896, Rogers remarried to Emelie Augusta Randel Hart, a divorcée and New York socialite. They had no children.
Career
In 1861, 21-year-old Henry pooled his savings of approximately US$600 with a friend, Charles P. Ellis. They set out to western Pennsylvania and its newly discovered oil fields. Borrowing another US$600, the young partners began a small refinery at McClintocksville near Oil City. They named their new enterprise Wamsutta Oil Refinery. Rogers and Ellis and their refinery made US$30,000 during their first year. This amount was more than the earnings of three whaling ship trips during an average voyage of more than a year's duration. When Rogers returned home to Fairhaven for a short vacation the next year, he was greeted as a success.
In Pennsylvania, Rogers was introduced to Charles Pratt (1830–91). Born in Watertown, Massachusetts, Pratt had been one of eleven children. His father, Asa Pratt, was a carpenter. Of modest means, he spent three winters as a student at Wesleyan Academy, and is said to have lived on a dollar a week at times. In nearby Boston, Massachusetts, Pratt joined a company specializing in paints and whale oil products. In 1850 or 1851, he came to New York City, where he worked for a similar company handling paint and oil.
Pratt was a pioneer of the natural oil industry, and established his kerosene refinery Astral Oil Works in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, New York. Pratt's product later gave rise to the slogan, "The holy lamps of Tibet are primed with Astral Oil". He also later founded the Pratt Institute.
When Pratt met Rogers at McClintocksville on a business trip, he already knew Charles Ellis, having earlier bought whale oil from him back east in Fairhaven. Although Ellis and Rogers had no wells and were dependent upon purchasing crude oil to refine and sell to Pratt, the two young men agreed to sell the entire output of their small Wamsutta refinery to Pratt's company at a fixed price. This worked well at first. Then, a few months later, crude oil prices suddenly increased due to manipulation by speculators. The young entrepreneurs struggled to try to live up to their contract with Pratt, but soon their surplus was wiped out. Before long, they were heavily in debt to Pratt.
Charles Ellis gave up, but in 1866, Henry Rogers went to Pratt in New York and told him he would take personal responsibility for the entire debt. This so impressed Pratt that he immediately hired him for his own organization.
New York, oil refining Pratt made Rogers foreman of his Brooklyn refinery, with a promise of a partnership if sales ran over $50,000 a year. The Rogers' family moved to Brooklyn. Rogers moved steadily from foreman to manager, and then superintendent of Pratt's Astral Oil Refinery. He accomplished and exceeded the substantial sales increase goal which Pratt had set when recruiting him. As promised, Pratt gave Rogers an interest in the business. In 1867, with Henry Rogers as a partner, he established the firm of Charles Pratt and Company. In the next few years, Rogers became, in the words of Elbert Hubbard, Pratt's "hands and feet and eyes and ears" (Little Journeys to the Homes, 1909). As their family grew, Henry and Abbie continued to live in New York City, but vacationed frequently at Fairhaven.
While working with Pratt, Rogers invented an improved way of separating naphtha, a mixture of hydrocarbon compounds produced during the distillation of crude oil, from the oil. He was granted U.S. Patent # 120,539 on October 31, 1871.
Fighting Rockefeller In the early 1871–1872, Pratt and Company and other refiners became involved in a conflict with John D. Rockefeller, Samuel Andrews, and Henry M. Flagler (of Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler, a Cleveland-based refining company) and the South Improvement Company. In developing what would become Standard Oil, Rockefeller, a manager of extraordinary abilities, and Flagler, an exceptional marketer, recognized that the costs and control of the shipment of crude oil would be key elements in competition with other refiners. With its combination of clever market manipulation, and hard-nosed dealings with the powerful Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), the South Improvement scheme was an example of the type of business tactics which Rockefeller and his associates used to become successful. Although Rockefeller became the target of many who decried Standard Oil's ruthlessness in subsequent years, the South Improvement rebate scheme was Flagler's idea.
South Improvement was basically a mechanism to obtain secret favorable net rates from Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) and other railroads through secret rebates from the common carrier. A "common carrier" is somewhat like a utility, inasmuch as it often has certain rights, powers and monopolies on its services beyond those normally afforded regular business enterprises. A common carrier was expected to serve the public good and treat its customers uniformly. Rates in that era were promulgated and published in what was called "tariffs" and were public information. The rebate scheme was done outside of that process. As an opposite effect, normally afforded "tariffs" were increased and charged to customers not privy to the scheme.
Newspapers were quick to publicize the issue. The injustice of the South Improvement scheme outraged many independent oil producers and owners of refineries. Rogers led the opposition among the New York refiners. The New York interests formed an association, and about the middle of March 1872 sent a committee of three, with Rogers as head, to Oil City to consult with the Oil Producers' Union. Working with the Pennsylvania independents, Rogers and the New York delegation managed to forge an agreement with the railroads, whose leaders eventually agreed to open their rates to all and promised to end their shady dealings with South Improvement.
Rockefeller and his associates quickly started another approach, which frequently included buying up opposing interests. Their dominance of the growing industry and the squeezing out of smaller competitors continued and expanded. But, the South Improvement incident prompted growing public sentiment to support governmental oversight and regulation of large businesses, including the railroads. Congress passed new antitrust laws, the administration created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), and the courts eventually ordered the breakup of the Standard Oil Trust in the early 20th century.
Combining forces: joining Standard Oil In 1874, Rockefeller approached Pratt with a plan to cooperate and consolidate their businesses. Pratt discussed it with Rogers, and they decided that the combination would benefit them. Rogers formulated terms, which guaranteed financial security and jobs for Pratt and himself. Rockefeller had apparently learned a lot about Rogers' talents and negotiating skills during the South Improvement conflict. He quietly accepted the offer on the exact terms Rogers had laid out. In this manner, Charles Pratt and Company (including Astral Oil) became one of the important independent refiners to join the Standard Oil Trust.