Chapter Twenty-One

Forest Hill

"Rockefeller, John D., book‑keeper, h 35 Cedar"

​

—Cleveland City Directory, 1857

The richest man in the history of the world lived for nearly 40 years in a palatial manor on a grand wooded estate in old Euclid Township. He raised his children in old Euclid Township. He lies buried today in old Euclid Township.

*

Celebrated John D. Rockefeller, Sr. biographer Ron Chernow spoke to the scope of Rockefeller's wealth in a 1998 interview:

"His net worth peaked in 1913 at $900 million, which, if you translate into contemporary dollars, is $13 billion, which does not sound like very much, but it doesn't begin to tell the whole story, for a number of reasons. He had $900 million in 1913. The entire federal budget in 1913 was $715 million, so he could have personally paid for every federal employee in expense and had money left to spare. The total accumulated national debt that year was $1.2 billion, so he could have retired three quarters of the total national debt. Rockefeller made this statement in 1917: he had given away so much money, he said that, if he had kept the money, by 1917, he would have been worth $3 billion, which would be more than $30 billion today, and would put him in second place behind [Microsoft Corporation co‑founder] Bill Gates [the richest man in the world in 1998]. But Bill Gates' wealth only represents one half of one percent of the gross national product. Rockefeller's wealth represented two and a half percent of the gross national product, which is why people claim, with some justice, that John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in American history."

Business school libraries can and have been filled with excellent and famous biographies of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and histories of the Standard Oil Company and its fortunes, literal and figurative. A religious man, mild in his habits, methodical and plodding in his accumulation, Rockefeller and his descendants become fascinating alongside the freedom, danger and ironic constraint their enormous wealth brought them: His alopecia, and wigs for every day of the week, each infinitesimally longer than the last, to give the illusion of growth; Spelman College and the University of Chicago; Rockefeller Center in New York City; the Cloisters museum and MOMA; Riverside Church; the original World Trade Center, destroyed in 2001; one grandson a governor of Arkansas, another a governor of New York and Vice President of the United States; a great grandson a senator from West Virginia, another eaten by cannibals. Plus Ludlow and Attica. Those books have been written. This essay cannot improve upon them, nor will it attempt to. Its scope is smaller, its scale more intimate.

          The richest man, ever, lived in old Euclid Township, at the top of the sled hill in Forest Hill Park.

*

Oil did not make Rockefeller rich. He was already rich, just 31 with a mansion on Cleveland's famous Millionaires' Row, when he founded Standard Oil with his brother and three other partners in 1870. He'd first come to Cleveland—to Strongsville, actually—in the tow of his rakish father, at the age of 14, in 1853. He and his brother, William, boarded in the city, and the two took advantage of the free education available at Central High School, at Euclid Avenue and Erie Street, now East 9th. At Central he met Cettie, Laura Celestia Spelman, his future wife. There had been hope of further education, but no money. John was compelled to leave Central a mere two months before graduation and settle for a summer course in accounting and penmanship at E. C. Folsom's Commercial College, on the northwest corner of Public Square. At age 16, he pounded Cleveland's pavement—the real city only spanned from the Cuyahoga River to about what's now East 15th Street then—and was taken on as a bookkeeper at Hewitt & Tuttle, commission merchants and bulk produce, Merwin Street, on the East Bank of the Flats. Within two years Tuttle had left, and Rockefeller was doing a partner's job, though without one's pay. He started his own business, with a classmate from Folsom's, called Clark & Rockefeller, at 32 River Street, now West 11th, in the Warehouse District. He was 19.

*

When Edwin Drake discovered oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, Rockefeller wanted nothing to do with it. Not at first.

          Hordes flocked to Pennsylvania to drill, and those who found oil indeed got rich, but those who did not went bust, and most did not. Rockefeller liked a sure thing, and wildcatting was just too risky. If he could have known that every well he drilled would strike, he might have rushed to the oilfields. He couldn't, of course, but what he could know was that every lucky driller who did hit would need his oil refined. In the early days, petroleum was made not into gasoline for cars, which did not yet exist, but into kerosene, for lighting. Kerosene provided an excellent replacement for the world's dwindling supply of the previous dominant lighting fuel, whale oil, the source of which, by the mid‑19th century, had been hunted to near extinction. Demand for kerosene light in a rapidly industrializing country was great, and in refining Rockefeller saw the way to jump into the oil business and be among the winners every time. In the next few years Clark & Rockefeller took on new partners and changed names several times, from Clark & Gardner to Andrews, Clark & Co. Though his name had left the marquee, Rockefeller remained deeply enmeshed with each new entity, and, in 1863, Andrews, Clark & Co. bought a kerosene refinery, the Excelsior Oil Works, down in the Flats on the banks of Kingsbury Run.

          While the Civil War raged and his brother Franklin fought at Chancellorsville, Rockefeller paid for a substitute, bought a diamond engagement ring for Cettie, and married her in 1864. They bought a house next door to his parents' on Cheshire Street, now East 19th, down by the current Cleveland State University campus. By then the members of Andrews, Clark & Co. were having disagreements. They decided to split, and Rockefeller won the refinery in the dealings, reforming with Andrews, Clark partner Samuel Andrews into Rockefeller & Andrews in 1865. Shortly after, brother William came aboard, and they became Rockefeller & Co. They bought the land across from Excelsior for another kerosene refinery, and called it the Standard Works. Rockefeller and Cettie's first child, Bessie, was born on Cheshire Street. Two years later, they moved further down Euclid Avenue into Millionaires' Row, Rockefeller buying an existing brick mansion at Case Avenue, now East 40th Street, for $40,000. He was already among the richest men in Cleveland, and not yet 30‑years‑old.

          By 1869, Cleveland—favorably positioned near the Pennsylvania oil fields, and on the major east‑west transportation routes, the north‑south ones having been devastated by the Civil War—was the leading oil refining center in the world. In July of that year, two important things happened shaping the life of John D. Rockefeller and the history of Euclid Township. First, Lake View Cemetery opened, outside the city on a picturesque hillside above Euclid Avenue, among winding ravines of the pretty country stream which was the west branch of Dugway Brook. Next, the Rockefellers' second child, a daughter, Alice, was born, but sadly she died the following year, aged just 13-months. The Rockefellers laid Baby Alice to rest in the new cemetery in the country out beyond the Mayfield Road, and this may have been the first time Rockefeller encountered the landscape that would become the venue for a large portion of his life and his family's. The hillside above Euclid Avenue, actually the Portage Escarpment, had a broad view across the vineyards of the lake plain, with Lake Erie beyond. The wooded slope among streams with the blue lake on the horizon reminded Rockefeller of one of his boyhood homes at Owasco Lake in western New York. How often he visited or how sentimental Rockefeller actually felt about the land are not known, but it clearly stayed with him, as events would soon reveal. In the meantime he busied himself making history.

          On January 10, 1870, Rockefeller, his brother William, his longtime business partner Samuel Andrews, and investors Henry Flagler and Stephen Harkness, chartered the Standard Oil Company, petroleum refiners. They took up offices in the Cushing Block, on the south side of Euclid Avenue, just off Public Square, in Cleveland. The company owned just the two refineries then, Excelsior and Standard, but in just two years and a half they'd own nearly every one in Cleveland.

          Standard Oil entered into a collusion with the railroads, vital in the nascent oil business. Through a shell they called the South Improvement Company—benevolent‑sounding enough in the time of Reconstruction—Rockefeller and his partners made secret agreements with the shippers to raise the transportation rates for oil, squeezing all producers, Standard included. Standard, however, through the South Improvement Company, received a rebate of the inflated cost, effectively raising the rates for all competitors while keeping Standard's low, even discounted. Unable to compete, and baffled how Standard could, competitor after competitor was forced to sell out to Rockefeller, and by the end of 1872 Standard Oil controlled over 80 percent of Cleveland's refining capacity. The coup made Rockefeller notorious for ruthlessness in business. It earned him many lasting enemies, and came to be known as "The Cleveland Massacre." But people's bad opinion of him never seemed to bother Rockefeller much, particularly those whom he'd bested in business. In 1873, Standard Oil moved out of their rented offices in Cushing into a new building, their own, the Standard Block, 346 Euclid Avenue.

          While oil refining became Rockefeller's primary business, it was never his only one, and he was always willing to have a go at any project that interested him which he thought might prove profitable. One such was way out past pretty Lake View Cemetery. In 1873 Rockefeller acquired land above Euclid Avenue, even further east of the cemetery, in the southwest corner of the original Euclid Township. He joined with several other investors to build a water cure sanatorium at the point of a plateau carved from the escarpment by two quiet streams, with the peaceful name of Forest Hill.

          The building the partners erected there was four stories high, wrapped with double-decker porches and bristled with decorative flourishes. A later critic labeled it "a monument of cheap ugliness" and marveled "that anyone not compelled to do so would live under its shadow." And even a more sympathetic source granted it was an "ungainly Victorian confection... a wilderness of porches and gables, turrets and bay windows, covered with gingerbread detail."

          Rockefeller and his partners' timing proved unlucky, however, as an economic depression began the same year Forest Hill opened. When the venture failed, Rockefeller bought it out from the other partners. Then, in one of the more curious chapters of his business career, he attempted to run it himself for several seasons as a summer resort. A few Cleveland businessmen stayed there with their families, enjoying the lake vistas and the fresh country air, thinking themselves the Rockefellers' guests, which they were of a kind, but were surprised later to receive a bill for the visit. Some others who were more aware of the nature of the place expected Cettie to serve them as their hostess, which Rockefeller could not abide, and which more than anything led to him abandoning the resort project in 1877. He liked the building however, and loved the land, and they were out of the city and close to Baby Alice in Lake View Cemetery next door. So he kept it, and Forest Hill became first his summer home, and eventually his primary residence in Cleveland.

*

Heading east from the city, at Doan Brook and what is now University Circle, Euclid Avenue turns to the northeast, and from a horse carriage or one of the streetcars that ran regularly along it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the wooded Portage Escarpment rose to one's right, with the scattered small houses and vineyards of the lake plain sloping gently away to the left. Soon one passed the iron gates of Lake View Cemetery. A little beyond, Superior Road coming down from the Heights marked the edge of the Rockefeller property, and, shortly after, one came to a sign carved into neatly trimmed grass on a bare spot on the hillside reading "Forest Hill." Several yards past the sign, a gatehouse stood where Forest Hills Boulevard now meets Euclid Avenue, guarding access to a gravel carriage road, which led up the hill, and disappeared into the woods.

          If permitted entrance—if—one travelled up and deeper among the trees, crossing several small stone bridges over gullies cut by the east branch of Dugway Brook. Soon the large white house would begin to appear through the trees, above and to one's left, at the point of a plateau between the east branch of Dugway and a smaller tributary run of it further north and east, unofficially known as Rockefeller Brook.

          As it crested the hill, the carriage drive emerged from the forest into the open, and approached the house from the rear and the west, and a clear view of the manor could be had for the first time. It was uncharacteristically ostentatious for Rockefeller. However, he hadn't designed it as his home. It had originally been a resort hotel. Frugality a habit from his humble origins, Rockefeller always preferred to buy and adapt existing structures rather than wastefully demolishing perfectly good buildings and constructing new ones from scratch, even for his homes. And the front porches offered a fine panorama over the vineyards of rural East Cleveland to the lake.

          The manor had 55 rooms, and its own telegraph wire, very rare at the time, over which Rockefeller could continue to conduct business in the afternoons after returning home for lunch, which he frequently did. Ron Chernow noted that, despite its size and the flourishes remaining from its former life as a hotel, for millionaire industrialists of the time its decor was remarkably restrained, with Rockefeller utilizing it as a practical home for himself and his family more than as a showplace of trophies to impress wealthy friends. "Rockefeller loved the large, spacious rooms with their unobstructed views," Chernow wrote, and, "[f]ond of the light and air, he stripped away the curtains and wall hangings and flooded the house with sunshine, adding a glassed‑in porch. He even had a huge pipe organ installed in one parlor." Rockefeller had several houses, in several states, including several right in Cleveland, but the one at Forest Hill was his favorite. He called it the Homestead, and he raised his family there.

          Even the critic who so derided Homestead had to admire the Forest Hill estate. "...if Mr. Rockefeller knows nothing or at least cares nothing for beauty in buildings," she wrote, "he has the love of noble land. At Forest Hill the park of over 400 acres is one of great loveliness—rolling wooded hills, shady ravines, fine fields, with splendid trees—the whole cared for with more than intelligence. There is something like affection gone into the making of this beautiful spot."

          Shaped roughly like a grand piano, with the notable exceptions of some tracts with valuable frontage on Euclid Avenue which the Rockefellers were never able to acquire, the estate sprawled up the escarpment over the boundary of East Cleveland into Cleveland Heights, between Superior Road and Lee Boulevard, from down on Euclid Avenue up to Mayfield Road. A quarry pre‑dating Rockefeller produced Euclid Bluestone at the southeast end near Mayfield, from which the oil tycoon derived much of the stone he used for the many small bridges and other constructions on the estate, as well as gravel for carriage and horse paths. Earthen dams on Rockefeller Brook created two small shallow ponds. The larger one, on the property's edge just south of Lee, became the family's boating lake. A boathouse with a windmill behind it was located on its west bank, and on hot, pre‑air‑conditioning days Rockefeller and his family often swam in it. In the winter they skated on it, with Rockefeller sometimes inviting neighbors for skating parties. He was a serious Baptist, and one story tells of Rockefeller having his workers flood the lake in preparation for a skating party the next day after midnight, so no work would be done on the sabbath. The little lakes also provided ice for the estate, which workers cut and stored under hay in nearby barns. Properly stored and looked after, it could remain frozen well through the summer months, until winter returned and more could be had.

          Live animals also lived at Forest Hill. A small dairy farm near the quarry off Mayfield Road supplied the house with milk and eggs, from which expert chefs produced a multitude of dishes. And, though so unlike his father in many ways, Rockefeller had inherited his love of fine horses. He kept several at Forest Hill, in a complex of stables north of what is now Glenmont Road in East Cleveland. The estate had its own kite‑shaped half‑mile horse track, on the plateau behind the house above Rockefeller Brook.

          Rockefeller found great joy and relaxation in improving Forest Hill, laying out and supervising the construction of miles of wooded paths. The place was the scene of frequent hikes, fishing, and lawn tennis. Every summer it hosted a picnic for the Sunday school teachers from Rockefeller's beloved Baptist church in Cleveland, on Huntington Street—now called East 18th—and Euclid Avenue. In the bicycle craze in the last decade of the 19th century, Rockefeller laid out bike trails, and delighted in a somewhat dangerous nighttime game with his children, whereby he attached a handkerchief to the back of his coat as a flag to follow in the moonlight, and they pedaled after, chasing him through the winding paths. Rockefeller so enjoyed cycling that he used to give bicycles to guests who let him teach them to ride.

          Around the same time he fell in love with bicycling, John D. Rockefeller introduced the game of golf to Cleveland. Famous in his retirement as an avid amateur golfer, Rockefeller built what was perhaps the first course in Northeast Ohio—a personal nine holes on the plateau behind the Homestead. Often emulated as the world's richest man, his enthusiasm for the game did much to make it fashionable among the wealthy and strivers.

          With Baby Alice resting in Lake View, Rockefeller had three surviving daughters—Bessie, Alta and Edith—growing into their teen years when he began the project at Forest Hill. In 1874, when it was still in its first life as the water cure sanatorium, Cettie gave birth to a son, long‑awaited after four daughters, and the other crucial figure in the history of Forest Hill. John D. Rockefeller, Junior would, decades later, recall among his earliest memories Black waiters serving guests at Forest Hill during its brief hotel period, an image which obviously left an impression on a young boy of privilege in a deeply segregated post‑Civil War society.

          At the secluded country estate, the Rockefeller children were what today would be called home‑schooled, though by the finest private tutors, with lessons in the basics of letters and numbers, supplemented with languages, particularly French, as well as music. For fun, the children tobogganed down the vast sloping lawn in front of the house in the winters, and in Father's stables each had her and his own pony. As Junior grew, Rockefeller Senior initiated his son's education in business management by putting him in charge of sugar production from Forest Hill's numerous maple trees. Junior kept meticulous records, of the numbers of trees tapped, and the pounds of sugar they yielded. In his teens, he graduated to keeping the payroll of the employees of the estate. He was also put to physical work by his father, cutting wood, planting and moving trees, burning brush, and breaking stone in the quarry for Forest Hill's numerous gravel paths.

          Undoubtedly feeling pressures from his parents' somewhat puritanical Baptist moral code, and an increasing awareness of his father's and soon his own importance in the world, in his teen years Junior suffered several periods of nervous collapse. Attributed to a disorder conceived of at the time as "neurasthenia," a sort of overwork of the brain, he became unable to function in his normal regimens, and retreated for weeks, months and whole seasons to Forest Hill, where he was cared for by his mother. The physical labor there in the estate's small farm and quarry, and the modification and maintenance of its grounds, as well as riding, hiking and swimming, were understood to be restorative, and were, apparently, in the long run, successful. One major episode occurred in 1887, when Junior was 13. A second, more serious breakdown took place in 1891. The details are sketchy, but it appears that Junior, then age 17, had fallen in love with a girl named Bessie Dashiell (not to be confused with Junior's own sister, coincidentally also called Bessie). But Junior's sweetheart was injured on a family vacation, and when the injury failed to heal, it was discovered that she had cancer. The case is actually somewhat famous among historians of early cancer medicine, both for the presence of the Rockefellers, and for the physicians involved, and the innovative techniques they attempted in Bessie's treatment. Eventually, her arm had to be amputated, and Junior spent long hours with her during her final months, before she died in January 1891. Her passing sent him into a serious depression, and another extended retreat at Forest Hill.

During Bessie's illness, Junior had been in the midst of preparations for the entrance examinations for Yale, which he failed, no doubt the grief of that winter contributing. He eventually attended Brown University in Rhode Island, where he met Abby Aldrich, daughter of that state's senior senator, whom he would marry, but not for a decade after Bessie's death. The senator, Junior's father‑in‑law, Nelson Aldrich, was prominent in the Republican Party, as his namesake grandson, Nelson Rockefeller, would be by the 1960s.

*

The recreations and pastoral seclusion of Forest Hill could not keep the outside world entirely at bay. First off, there remained Rockefeller's irrepressible father.

          Their difficulties went well beyond the usual frictions between father and son. William Avery Rockefeller, Senior—Big Bill, also known as Devil Bill—was a shameless con man, literally a snake oil salesman, an itinerant fraud, maybe a horse thief, an unlicensed and unqualified doctor, a notorious womanizer, and a bigamist. He traveled around the southern Great Lakes, pretending to be deaf so he could listen in to peoples' conversations, and later use the information they'd revealed thinking themselves "in private" to cheat them. He bedazzled Rockefeller's mother, Eliza, the pious Baptist daughter of John and Cynthia Davison, and they married in Niles, New York, in 1837. With psychopathic disregard for his legal wife, he kept his mistress, Nancy Brown, in their very house, and fathered two children with her, Cornelia and Clarinda, John D. Rockefeller's illegitimate half sisters, at the same time Eliza was bearing John and his older sister, Lucy. Bill finally put Nancy away, but the life on the edge of the law he'd dragged his family into led them to relocate from Richford, New York, where John was born, to Moravia, above Owasco Lake, where, in 1848, Bill allegedly raped a woman, Ann Vanderbeak. He was not charged with the crime until a year later, simultaneous to his father-in-law suing him for money Bill borrowed and never repaid. Bill moved the family to Owego and left them there, seeking more remote places further west ahead of both the law and his in‑laws. Some time around 1850, his sister Sara Ann had married William Humiston, and they'd begun a farm in Strongsville, Ohio, south of the growing lake port of Cleveland. Late in 1852 or early 1853, Bill moved his family yet again, this time to his sister's place in Strongsville, near today's intersection of Pearl Road and Whitney, just north of the Turnpike, and thus Cleveland came to be home to the greatest fortune in history.

          As John and his brother boarded in Cleveland, attending Central High, their father appeared and disappeared, and the family home continued to move again and again, from Strongsville to Parma, then into the city for good, starting in a rented house on Perry Street, now East 22nd, near Prospect, again down near what's now Cleveland State. In 1855, as John was finishing Folsom's and starting at Hewitt & Tuttle, Bill finally abandoned his first family for good, though he would remain erratically involved with their affairs for the next 50 years. When John was forced to drop out of Central, abandon his plans for university, and settle for the course at Folsom's, it was likely because it coincided with Bill entering into a bigamous marriage with a young Canadian woman named Margaret Allen, age 20—Eliza was 43; Bill was 45—whom he met on one of his patent medicine tours through southern Ontario sometime around 1851. Bill was starting a new family and couldn't spare the money to support the one he already had.

          From Perry Street, the family, without Bill, moved to another rented house, at 35 Cedar Street, another portion of today's East 22nd, still near present Cleveland State. Two years later, John received word one day from his father that Bill had purchased a lot at 33 Cheshire Street, now the southwest corner of East 19th and Carnegie, near today's Wolstein Center, and left money in a bank account that John was to use to build the family a house on it. John, age 19, retrieved the money, used it as instructed for materials, and engaged contractors. The budding millionaire drove such a bargain that the builders he hired lost money on the job.

          His father settled out West, as much as Big Bill ever settled. He assumed the name William Levingston, and continued keeping multiple residences and selling quack remedies to credulous farmers on the frontier. Terrified of scandal, and more material concerns, the Rockefeller men conspired for decades to keep Bill's identity, alleged crimes, and often his very existence, a secret.

          Despite all this, from time to time, Big Bill would materialize in Cleveland—obstreperous, unexpected, and demanding—at Forest Hill, or at the Standard Oil offices downtown. These surprise visits from the man who was Rockefeller's own darkest secret must have been harrowing, but Rockefeller provided Bill with the hospitality he expected, and endured his discomfort at not only his father's mere presence, but also his rough manners and bawdy tongue. Once or maybe twice a year, Bill would appear with fine clothes and horses, bearing expensive and rambunctious gifts for his grandchildren, and proceed to disrupt everyone's lives (unnerving his sons and his wife—yes, still his wife!—Eliza, though delighting young Junior and his sisters) for several days, before disappearing again without goodbyes, or any idea where he'd come from or gone. In the summer of 1885, he showed up at Forest Hill and gave Junior a gun, and taught him and his sister Bessie how to shoot. Eliza, whom John and his brothers still kept in her old Cheshire Street house, initially declined to join the reunited family at Forest Hill during that visit, claiming "a stitch in her side." She relented, however, and did spend at least one day in her nominal husband's company that summer. When Eliza died in 1889, Bill skipped the funeral, and John told the officiating minister just to refer to his mother in the service as a widow.

          Among Bill's most extraordinary visits took place in late summer 1902, when Bill—92 by then, obese and riddled with gout, but still utterly shameless, still radiating confidence and charm—invaded Forest Hill, and induced John and his semi‑estranged brother Frank, the Civil War veteran with whom Bill had always been closer, to gather up Bill's old Strongsville pals and host a turkey shoot. Bill taunted his son and host before the guests, needling him with suggestions of underhanded business practices, yet refusing with a mischievous twinkle to reveal what he himself was doing or where he was living. Throughout the visit, Big Bill remained "[p]rofane, independent and jovial, his wit as keen as ever, and he poured out stories old and new until the Strongsville men grew tired of laughing." John endured it, patiently, certainly with mixed feelings. It was one of the last times he would see his father.

          William A. Rockefeller, Sr., living with his bigamous second wife under his assumed name, finally died in Illinois in 1906. In 1908, his story was hunted down and revealed to the nation by the Hearst newspapers. No public comment on it was ever made by any member of the Rockefeller family, though John and his brothers and brothers‑in‑law worked for years to construct meticulous legal structures to ensure that neither their father's extra wife nor any of her family could ever claim any portion of the Rockefeller fortune. Bill and Margaret Allen had no children together. Clorinda Brown, Bill's first daughter with his live‑in mistress, died young. Her sister Cornelia, John D. Rockefeller's half‑sister, never made any claims.

*

There was also Ida Minerva Tarbell.

          With so many things and people associated with the Rockefellers, the word legendary is often applied. Tarbell, too, in her field, is legendary. A pioneer among professional women in America, Ida Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists, among the most famous of the "muckrakers" of the late 19th and early 20th century, progressive reporters who investigated and exposed public greed and corruption. From November 1902 to October 1904, McClure's Magazine published Tarbell's 19‑part exposé history of Standard Oil. With each new issue, month by month for two years, the series threw light on many ethically questionable and sometimes quasi‑legal means by which John D. Rockefeller had meticulously gathered his fortune. Tarbell had an agenda. Back in the 1870s, her father had been one of the early oil men in Pennsylvania driven under by Rockefeller and his South Improvement Company scheme. In 1905 the Tarbell series was assembled and published as a book, filling two volumes. In July and August of that year, McClure's capped off the run with a two‑part "character sketch" of Rockefeller himself, written by Tarbell. For the pieces she had fairly stalked him, travelling to Cleveland and attending services at his Euclid Avenue Baptist Church for a chance to get in the same room with Rockefeller and observe him. The attacks in the character sketches were personal. Referring to his recently developed alopecia which had robbed the tycoon of the confident bushy moustache he had worn all of his adult life, a characteristic physical description depicted him as a nearly inhuman creature, warped by avarice:

"Indeed the greatest loss Mr. Rockefeller sustained when his hair went was that it revealed his mouth. It is only a slit—the lips are quite lost, as if by eternal grinding together of the teeth—teeth set on something he would have. It is at once the cruelest feature of his face—this mouth—the cruelest and most pathetic, for the hard, close‑set line slants downward at the corners, giving a look of age and sadness. The downward droop is emphasized by deep vertical furrows running from each side of his nose. Mr. Rockefeller may have made himself the richest man in the world, but he has paid. Nothing but paying ever ploughs such lines in a man's face, ever set his lips to such a melancholy angle. The big cheeks are puffy, bulging unpleasantly under the eyes, and the skin which covers them has a curiously unhealthy pallor. It is this puffiness, this unclean flesh, which repels, as the thin slit of a mouth terrifies."

She went on to describe Rockefeller as "money‑bent," positing that his only joy derived from "a good bargain." Tarbell lauded his famous frugality, then quickly turned it to "parsimony." She speculated that his love of golf was merely part of a scheme to remain healthy so as to live as long as possible just so he could go on making money. The pieces dripped hatred, and the public devoured them. McClure's Standard Oil series sold thousands upon thousands of issues.

          Probably most rattling of all Tarbell's revelations was the story of Rockefeller's family's early days in Strongsville and Cleveland, and their origins in western New York. Though she learned of and noted Big Bill's long absences from his family, and reputation as a "trickster" and a "quack doctor," and alluded to but never explicitly published the 1849 rape allegation against him, neither Tarbell nor her colleagues ever located or fully exposed William Rockefeller, Sr. Those worse revelations would come.

*

Privacy at home, and downright secrecy in business, had always been key Rockefeller habits, if not tactics, or weapons, holdovers from shame about his father's bigamy, abandonment and shady business life, as well as Rockefeller's own ruthless business practices. Ida Tarbell's history of Standard Oil and her slanted character studies of him may have been among Rockefeller's worst fears come true, and they hurt him personally, though he steadfastly refused to respond in any way to the reports, and likewise forbade his people from doing so either.

          In the wake of the McClure's series, the publication of the complete history in volumes, and the appearance of the scathing character sketches, in the summer of 1905 several wealthy Cleveland businessmen, including Rockefeller's Euclid Avenue neighbor, Euclid Township-born Charles F. Brush (about whom this essay will have much more to say very shortly), were lunching at the swanky Union Club downtown. They surely would have read the Tarbell pieces, and assumed that Rockefeller had as well, despite his refusal to acknowledge them. Someone noted that that month, September 1905, marked the fiftieth anniversary of Rockefeller's career in business. It had been on September 26, 1855, that he had been taken on as bookkeeper at Hewitt & Tuttle. Rockefeller marked the date every year as a kind of second birthday, his birth in business, and in celebration flew a special flag for it every September 26 at Forest Hill. The Cleveland businessmen seized upon the coming anniversary as an opportunity to congratulate Rockefeller and show their continuing support.

          At three p. m. on September 26, 1905, 500 visitors—the city's elite—gathered on Euclid Avenue before the gatehouse of Forest Hill. Rockefeller and Cettie welcomed them there (it couldn't have been a surprise, that large a gathering, and Rockefeller ready to entertain them; however if anyone could have, Rockefeller could). On a beautiful early autumn day, the throng meandered up the wooded paths to the house, and mingled leisurely on Homestead's veranda and sprawling lawn. Among the organizers of the event were Andrew Squire, corporate attorney and co‑founder of the prominent and well‑connected Cleveland firm Squire, Sanders & Dempsey—whose descendent still operates in Cleveland as Squire Patton Boggs. Another was Liberty Holden, also a wealthy lawyer and owner of the Plain Dealer. After refreshments and socializing, Squire, Holden and Rockefeller all made speeches. Squire quoted Horace, and spoke of Cleveland's central role in the nation's manufacturing, noting Rockefeller's part in building it into that place. He acknowledged Standard Oil's shift to New York—Standard had moved headquarters from Cleveland to the foot of Manhattan at 26 Broadway in 1885, a building still there, with "SO" carved into the cornices—and expressed his pleasure that, despite it, Rockefeller retained Cleveland as his home. He praised Rockefeller's devotion to family life, and told the oil king, "We trust we shall have you passing your summers here for many years." Holden, for his part, remembered Rockefeller's generosity donating the land along Doan Brook for Rockefeller Park—the current route of Martin Luther King Boulevard and site of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens—just a few years earlier in 1897. Perhaps obliquely acknowledging the ongoing attacks on Rockefeller, Holden said "...it is always the tree which bears the fruit that gets the clubs," and called him "one of the great men of the age."

          Rockefeller thanked them all for coming, and for his part remembered himself as a boy from the country who came to Cleveland fifty‑two years previous and was welcomed. He wished the younger businessmen in the assembled crowd success, and urged them toward philanthropy:

"Don't think that mere money getting is all there is in this world," Rockefeller told his guests. "Turn your thoughts to higher things; turn them to the channels of usefulness; keep your minds looking forward to a determination of what shall come out of your business career. What shall the fruitage of your work be? Hospitals, churches, schools, asylums—anything and everything for the betterment of your fellows. In doing this you will enjoy your business life. Then you will go into it with vigor, and at the end, when you spend the quiet days, as I am now doing under these oaks, you will have great joy."

*

When Standard Oil moved headquarters to Manhattan in 1885, Rockefeller bought a spacious townhouse on Fifth Avenue at 4 West 54th Street. Brother William also purchased an estate, north of the city on the Hudson River near Tarrytown, marking the family's entry into Westchester County, another important locale in the Rockefeller story. These New York homes were more than mere conveniences or extravagance. Though generous by millions, Rockefeller lamented every penny spent unnecessarily, and splitting residency among multiple states allowed him to avoid taxes. Traveling by train comfortably overnight, Rockefeller successfully divided the year between New York and Ohio for decades.

          In his tenure as master of Forest Hill, Rockefeller was generous with his grounds, adopting a liberal attitude to his neighbors strolling through, particularly during the months of his absences. However, as time passed, Rockefeller was compelled to fence off more and more of the estate.

          There were benign intrusions. A game developed among neighborhood boys where they dared each other to run onto the magnate's grounds and steal a swim in his little lake, which was very close to the estate's boundary on Lee Boulevard. These romps came to an end with the purchase of two large Great Danes.

          Then there were those less benign. In late 1910, an intruder with a revolver entered Forest Hill after Rockefeller had returned to New York for the winter, and fought a gun battle with a groundskeeper and an East Cleveland policeman just beside the house. The man fled across the golf course and was not caught. In 1914, shortly after the violent breaking of the strike at the Rockefeller‑owned mine in Ludlow, Colorado, intruders reported to be members of the Industrial Workers of the World, or "Wobblies," the labor group formed in the early 20th century whose supporters included Helen Keller, Eugene O'Neill and Dorothy Day, penetrated the Forest Hill grounds and attacked the house with rocks, smashing a dozen windows. No one was hurt, but such an attack was disturbing as the IWW frequently made threats to blow up the house, as well as Rockefeller's homes in New York.

          Rockefeller summered at Forest Hill and wintered in New York, though he frequently escaped south to Ormond Beach, Florida, where his old partner, Henry Flagler, had created a warm weather golf resort in the 1890s. In the summer of 1913, Cettie, then 74, took ill, and the family and their doctors cared for her at Forest Hill. By the fall and their normal time to decamp for the East, she still had not improved, and the doctors advised against travel until her strength increased. Rockefeller and the family remained in Cleveland later than usual into the winter, hoping Cettie would rally, but she remained weak. On February 1, 1914, Rockefeller passed the day on which Cuyahoga County declared its tax listings. The county tax commissioners, two men history would recognize as incredibly short sighted named John Fackler and William Agnew, declared Rockefeller a year‑round resident of Ohio, and sent him a tax bill for $1.5 million for property not just in Ohio but also New York. When Rockefeller refused to pay, the county added a delinquency penalty, and sent him a new bill, this one for $2.25 million. Leaving his wife, Rockefeller finally went ahead to New York to strengthen his claim of non‑residence. Cettie followed before the end of the month, though it was an exceedingly hard trip for her.

          That fall, with Cettie still ill, Rockefeller and his wife passed their 50th wedding anniversary. Rockefeller hired a brass band to serenade her in her sick bed with Mendelsohn's Wedding March from A Midsummer Night's Dream. His entire life, family was extremely important to Rockefeller, surely a reaction to his father's behaviors. The serenade was a touching gesture of genuine love from a long and, by all accounts, highly successful marriage. But it was nearing an end.

          With the tax situation still roiling, Rockefeller did not return to Cleveland as usual that year, and it ended with Cettie making little encouraging improvement. In the winter of early 1915, perhaps having grown complacent after more than a year of Cettie in her new diminished condition, Rockefeller travelled south to Ormond Beach where, on March 12, he received word that back in New York his wife had suffered a heart attack and died.

          Rockefeller returned and they held Cettie's funeral at the family's estate on the Hudson in Westchester County. Still under the cloud of the tax dispute with Cuyahoga County, for the spring and summer they stored her body in a vault in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in nearby Tarrytown, New York. At the beginning of August, Cettie's body was transported to Cleveland in secret, and she was laid to rest in Lake View, close to Eliza, with a space between for John, who wished to spend eternity nestled between the two women who had meant the most to him. No one seriously expected they'd be waiting more than 20 years.

          Following Cettie's burial in Lake View next door, Rockefeller finally returned to Forest Hill. The New York Times reported that his friends and his employees at the estate said they found him a man wracked with grief. "The attendants tell... how the changed master broke down and cried at his first breakfast at Forest Hill," the Times reported, "because of the vacant chair. Mr. Rockefeller used to play golf on his Forest Hill course with keen delight almost every day. He plays but seldom now, and without the old‑time zeal."

          The fall of 1915 brought state elections in Ohio, and a new governor, Frank Willis, who recognized what an asset Cleveland and the state had in being home to the world's richest man. On assuming office, Willis promptly fired the aggressive tax commissioners, cancelled Rockefeller's tax bill, and scrambled to repair relations. But the experience had already embittered Rockefeller. He'd long been aware that his enormous wealth not only brought the obvious advantages, but also made him a target. He was always deeply angered when he felt exploited by those with whom he did personal business simply because of his superlative ability to pay. When, he felt, Cuyahoga County sprang a trap on him, with his wife on her death bed, he didn't forgive. He had several houses in several states, all of them beautiful and grand. After Cettie's death and the tax dispute, Rockefeller abandoned Cleveland, and with it Forest Hill.

          Not long after, Homestead burned.

*

Rockefeller was golfing in Lakewood, New Jersey, when an aide came to inform him that his house at Forest Hill in Cleveland had been destroyed. The fire began about 10:40 p.m. the night before, December 17, 1917, and spread quickly. The Ohio Fire Marshall's Inspector told Cleveland Plain Dealer reporters that his investigators had found empty cans of coal oil in the ruins of the house, and fresh tracks leading away from it in the snow. Two men had recently been fired from the estate, and had quarreled with the head groundskeeper over the firing and their pay. The Inspector said he had two definite suspects, whose arrests were imminent once they were found. The New York Times reported essentially the same, but added that the two men sought lived "in an Italian district on the east side," a reference to the nearby Little Italy neighborhood on Mayfield Road, walking distance from the estate, and indeed home to many Forest Hill employees.

          But then there is a bizarre and frustrating silence about the fire in the news record. No reporting follows of arrests or charges or trials through the following year, which presumably would have after a violent attack on the home of one of Cleveland's—the country's, the world's—most prominent citizens. The alleged crime took place near Christmas, and amidst a great deal of news about the United States' new involvement in the First World War. It's possible that the suspects were never apprehended, and that coverage of the story simply languished for want of new developments and with other events to fill the pages. The Ohio Fire Marshall's office was contacted for this essay in 2014, but replied that they don't retain records on investigations going back nearly a century.

          The Homestead, where the Rockefeller children had grown up, had become for the family in the intervening years the depository for their mementoes. The Plain Dealer reported:

"Employees on the estate yesterday related reminiscences to show that the ruined structure was the favorite home of Mr. Rockefeller. It was there, they pointed out, that he kept sacred possessions that were acquired years ago in the early married life of the Rockefellers... Forest Hill was the treasure house of toys and playthings that his children played with years ago when the Rockefeller fortune was being acquired. Daguerreotypes and keepsakes that had been in the possession of the family since the childhood of Mr. Rockefeller were to be found in the collection of valuables in the destroyed building. Chests, furniture and pieces of antique that had been treasured by Mrs. Rockefeller were stored away and these were consumed by the flames. John Hottois, 86, for thirty‑nine years a gardener at Forest Hill, said that Mr. Rockefeller took keen enjoyment in displaying the children's keepsakes and the 'family album' to visitors. 'I believe Mr. Rockefeller would rather have lost his oil paintings than his old home.' said Hottois."

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