Standard Oil Company of Ohio: Mostly Gone But Not Forgotten

John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust is one of the most famous industrial organizations ever. The Trust controlled a lion's share of the production, transport, refining, and marketing of petroleum products in the United States and many other countries. Originally, this was an attempt to make money on the home lighting market which was converting from whale oil to kerosene.

The emergence of the automobile and its thirst for the formerly near worthless refining by-product called gasoline brought dizzying wealth to this industrial group. The 1911 decision to break up the Trust had the result of making the seperate pieces more valubale than the whole was, and stock prices rose sharply.

The break up of Standard Oil mirrors a more modern monopoly breakup - AT&T - The Bell System. Both developed a ubiquitous brand names: Bell for telephone service, Standard for oil. Like the "Baby Bells", many of the "Baby Standards" kept the old company name as they went into business for themselves. Unlike the various Bell companies, they were restricted from using Standard name in each other's territory, and defended the exclusive territorial rights to the name vigorously. Both the Bell companies and the Standards rose again to dominate the market, becoming more valuable than the original parent.

More Standard Oil Companies were created as some successor organizations declined to use the venerable Standard name in favor of pre-trust identities and the other Standards expanded into those marketing areas. As national advertising and travel blossomed, the various Standards ended up in competition, often adopting the names of smaller oil companies they purchased. The goal of this site is to track the history of the Baby Standards, discovering what became of the Rockefeller petroleum giant.

Read more here.