Rockefeller’s Cleveland

John D. Rockefeller arrived in Cleveland in 1853 a boy of 14 and spent six decades in his adopted hometown. With the Standard Oil Company’s incorporation in 1870, Rockefeller became the city’s most well-known industrialist and, from 1885 to 1917, its foremost summer resident at his Forest Hill estate. Here he raised his children, laid the foundation of a financial and industrial empire, and established a commitment to charitable giving. At the end of the Civil War, Cleveland was a crucible from which would be cast the fortunes of many. None were greater than Rockefeller’s. Rockefeller’s Cleveland captures the visual panorama of a dynamic city that literally reinvented itself in the 1800s and in doing so emerged a major business and industrial center.