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In 1843 William A Rockefeller moved his family to a farm near Moravia, Cayuga County. The reputation he had built up in Richford as a "sporting man" was duplicated in Moravia. He soon became the leader in all that was reckless and wild in the community, and was classed by the respectable and steady-going as a dangerous character on whom no doubt much was fastened that did not belong. It may be for this reason, as well as because of his frequent long and unaccounted for absences, that he is still classed popularly in Moravia as one of the gang who operated the "underground horse railroad" — and ran off horses from various parts of the country. There is absolutely no proof of this, but the conviction and sentence to the State prison, in 1850, of three of his closest pals for horse-stealing coupled with his bad reputation made many of his disapproving neighbors fix the crime equally on him, and to-day old men in Moravia nod their heads sagely and say, "He was too smart to be caught." There is an indictment against William A. Rockefeller for a more serious crime than horse-stealing in the records of the County, for 1849, and it is quite probable that he left Moravia under compulsion. At all events, about 1850 he again moved his family, which now consisted of his wife and five children, to Owego, New York. The family remained in Owego but three years, and then moved to Strongsville, Ohio, twelve or fifteen miles southwest of Cleveland. A year later they left Strongsville for a country settlement, about seven miles south of Cleveland, called Parma; and from there they went, in 1857, to Cleveland, moving into a comfortable brick house, which William A. Rockefeller had built for them. In the Ohio communities where he lived the legends of "Old Bill," as he is popularly spoken of to-day by his former acquaintances, are identical with those in Richford, Moravia, and Owego. They all remember him as a man who came home but rarely, who was supposed to sell some kind of medicine — a "cancer doctor," is the opinion of one, a "quack doctor," of another, and there are those who declare he was a gambler. In Ohio, as in New York, he always created a profound impression on his visits home, by his clothes, his good horse, and his crack shooting. "He was a rippin' good one," an old associate in Parma declares. "How he would shoot — bang-e-tee-bang — you'd thought there was a whole army around!" There are many sly winks at the occupations and morals of William A. Rockefeller by his old neighbors, but there is a universal verdict that he was a "good fellow," jolly, generous, and kindly. When William A. Rockefeller took his family to Ohio, his oldest son, John Davison, was a lad of fourteen years. A quiet, grave boy by all accounts, doing steadily and well the thing he was set at. Up to this time his training had been that of the ordinary country boy. He had gone to a district school a few months of the year, and the rest of the time had worked and played as a boy ordinarily does in a country settlement, chopping wood, caring for a horse, milking cows, weeding garden, raising chickens and turkeys. Nowhere does he seem to have made an impression, save by his silence and gravity. "He never mixed much with the rest of us," one old man tells you. "He seemed to be always thinking," says another. "He was different from his brothers and different from the rest of us," says a third. No doubt his mother had had much to do in shaping the boy's mind to serious living. Dominated as this daughter of a prosperous farmer probably was by a spirit of narrow and stern New England conventionality, she must have come to hate the lawless and suspicious ways of this likeable sinner, this quack-doctor horse-jockey, this loose-tongued rake she had married, and all the arrogant respectability within her must have risen in a fierce effort to save appearances, and to force these children of his into good and regular standing. There is a something in the fine, keen face of John D. Rockefeller's mother which recalls the face of Lætitia Ramolino, mother of Napoleon Bonaparte, and convinces one that she could not but have been a power with her boys, though there is little enough to go on in trustworthy tradition and records. That she kept her children in school and church is certain. Old friends of hers at Strongsville and Parma, Ohio, speak of her with profound respect — a good woman who made her boys do right, who did not allow them to read novels on Sunday, who "worried over saloons" in her vicinity. It is quite probable that it was her influence which persuaded her husband to send John to school in Cleveland soon after the family moved to Ohio. The boy spent a quiet year in the town studying diligently, so his former schoolmaster has testified, his only outside interest being in the Baptist Church and Sunday-school — to which he had been directed by a wise landlady. In 1855, after a year of study, young Rockefeller left school and began to look for work. It was a hard time in the West, the year of 1855, and it is quite possible that William A. Rockefeller had not been so successful as formerly in his wandering trade or trades, whatever they may have been, and that he felt it time for his son John to do something for himself. At all events, in the summer of that year, John D. Rockefeller made his first attempt to get a footing in business. The struggle and discouragement of the days he spent walking the streets of Cleveland looking for work made a deep impression on Mr. Rockefeller. Again and again in his later years he has referred to the experience in the little talks he has given at Sunday-school and church gatherings. Again and again he has expressed his lasting gratitude that finally he did find a position. It was a modest enough one, that of a clerk in a warehouse on the Cleveland docks. How modest, Mr. Rockefeller has frequently explained using as authority one of the few "documents" of his early life which he has seen fit to reveal to the public. This document is his first account book, "Ledger A" he calls it. It is not too much to say that this book has been more conspicuous than the Bible itself in the religious instruction which John D. Rockefeller has given for years to Baptist Sunday-schools. This is not strange, for in Mr. Rockefeller's own judgment its brief entries explain his success. The little book is most significant. No wonder, as he once told his Sunday-school class, holding up "Ledger A" to their attentive eyes: "You could not get that book from me for all the modern ledgers in New York, nor for all that they would bring. It almost brings tears to my eyes when I read over this little book, and it fills me with a sense of gratitude I cannot express." |
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