They would have nothing to do, they said bluntly, with any combination engineered by John D. Rockefeller. The representative withdrew and the case was considered. In the mean time conditions on the creek grew harder. All sorts of difficulties began to be strewn in their way — cars were hard to get, the markets they had built up were cut under them — a demoralising conviction was abroad in the trade that this new and mysterious combination was going to succeed; that it was doing rapidly what its members were reported to be saying daily: "We mean to secure the entire refining business of the world." Such was the state of things on the creek when in the early fall of 1875 an energetic young refiner and oil buyer well known in the Oil Regions, J. D. Archbold, appeared in Titusville as the representative of a new company, the Acme Oil Company, a concern which everybody believed to be an offshoot of the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland, though nobody could prove it. As a matter of fact the Acme was capitalised and controlled entirely by Standard men, its stockholders being, in addition to Mr. Archbold, William Rockefeller, William G. Warden, Frank Q. Barstow, and Charles Pratt. It was evident at once that the Acme Oil Company had come into the Oil Regions for the purpose of absorbing the independent interests as Mr. Rockefeller and his colleagues were absorbing them elsewhere. The work was done with a promptness" and despatch which do great credit to the energy and resourcefulness of the engineer of the enterprise. In three years, by 1878, all but two of the refineries of Titusville had "retired from the business gloriously," as Mr. Archbold, flushed with victory, told the counsel of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1879, when the state authorities were trying to find what was at work in the oil interests to cause such a general collapse. Most of the concerns were bought outright, the owners being convinced that it was impossible for them to do an independent business, and being unwilling to try combination. All down the creek the little refineries which for years had faced every difficulty with stout hearts collapsed. "Sold out," "dismantled," "shut down," is the melancholy record of the industry during these four years. At the end practically nothing was left in the Oil Regions but the Acme of Titusville and the Imperial of Oil City, both of them now under Standard management. To the oil men this sudden wiping out of the score of plants with which they had been familiar for years seemed a crime which nothing could justify. Their bitterness of heart was only intensified by the sight of the idle refiners thrown out of business by the sale of their factories. These men had, many of them, handsome sums to invest, but what were they to put them in? They were refiners, and they carried a pledge in their pockets not to go into that business for a period of ten years. Some of them tried the discouraged oil man's fatal resource, the market, and as a rule left their money there. One refiner who had, according to popular report, received $200,000 for his business, speculated the entire sum away in less than a year. Others tried new enterprises, but men of forty learn new trades with difficulty, and failure followed many of them. The scars left in the Oil Regions by the Standard Combination of 1875-1879 are too deep and ugly for men and women of this generation to forget them.
In Pittsburg the same thing was happening. At the beginning of the work of absorption — 1874 — there were between twenty-two and thirty refineries in the town. 51 As we have seen, Lockhart and Frew sold to the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland some time in 1874. In the fall of that year a new company was formed in Pittsburg, called the Standard Oil Company of Pittsburg. Its president was Charles Lockhart; its directors William Frew, David Bushnell, H. M. Flagler, and W. G. Warden — all members of the Standard Oil Company and four of them stockholders in the South Improvement Company. This company at once began to lease or buy refineries. Many of the Pittsburg refiners made a valiant fight to get rates on their oil which would enable them to run independently. To save expense they tried to bring oil from the oil fields by barge; the pipe-lines in the pool refused to run oil to barges, the railroad to accept oil brought down by barge. An independent pipe-line attempted to bring it to Pittsburg, but to reach the works the pipe-line must run under a branch of the Pennsylvania railroad. It refused to permit this, and for months the oil from the line was hauled in wagons from the point where it had been held up, over the railroad track, and there repiped and carried to Pittsburg. At every point they met interference until finally one by one they gave in. According to Mr. Frew, who in 1879 was examined as to the condition of things in Pittsburg, the company began to "acquire refiners" in 1875. In 1877 they bought their last one; and at the time Mr. Frew was under examination he could not remember but one refinery in operation in Pittsburg not controlled by his company.
Nor was it refiners only who sold out. All departments of the trade began to yield to the pressure. There was in the oil business a class of men known as shippers. They bought crude oil, sent it East, and sold it to refineries there. Among the largest of these was Adnah Neyhart, whose active representative was W. T. Scheide. Now to Mr. Rockefeller the independent shipper was an incubus; he did a business which, in his judgment, a firm ought to do for itself, and reaped a profit which might go direct into the business. Besides, so long as there were shippers to supply crude to the Eastern refineries at living prices, so long these concerns might resist offers to sell or lease.
Some time in the fall of 1872 Mr. Scheide began to lose his customers in New York. He found that they were making some kind of a working arrangement with the Standard Oil Company, just what he did not know. But at all events they no longer bought from him but from the Standard buyer, J. A. Bostwick and Company. At the same time he became convinced that Mr. Rockefeller was after his business. "I knew that they were making some strenuous efforts to get our business," he told the Hepburn Commission in 1879, "because I used to meet Mr. Rockefeller in the Erie office." At the same time that he was facing the loss of customers and the demoralising conviction that the Standard Oil Company wanted his business, he was experiencing more or less disgust over business conditions in New York. "I did not like the character of my customers there," Mr. Scheide told the committee. "I did not think they were treating us fairly and squarely. There was a strong competition in handling oil. The competition had got to be so strong that 'outside refiners,' as they called themselves then, used to go around bidding up the price of their works on the Standard Oil Company, and they were using me to sell their refineries to the Standard. They would say to refiners: 'Neyhart will do so and so, and we are going to continue running.' And they would say to us that the Standard was offering lower prices. I recollect one instance in which they, after having made a contract to buy oil from me if I would bring it over the Erie Railway, broke that contract for the 1-128th part of a cent a gallon. I sold out the next week." When Mr. Scheide went to the freight agent of the Erie road, Mr. Blanchard, and told him of his decision to sell, Mr. Blanchard tried to dissuade him. During the conversation he let out a fact which must have convinced Mr. Scheide more fully than ever that he had been wise in determining to give up his business. Mr. Blanchard told him as a reason for his staying and trusting to the Erie road to keep its contracts with him that the Standard Oil Company had been offering him five cents more a barrel than Mr. Scheide was paying them, and would take all their cars, and load them all regularly if they would throw him over and give them the business. It is interesting to note that when Mr. Scheide sold in the spring of 1875, it was, as he supposed, to Charles Pratt and Company. Well informed as he was in all the intricacies of the business — and there were few abler or more energetic men in trade at the time — he did not know that Charles Pratt and Company had been part and parcel of the Standard Oil Company since October, 1874.
Of course securing a large crude shipping business like Mr. Neyhart's was a valuable point for the Standard. It threw all of the refiners whom he had supplied out of crude oil and forced several of them to come to the Standard buyer — a first step, of course, toward a lease or sale. At every point, indeed, making it difficult for the refiner to get his raw product was one of the favourite manœuvres of the combination. It was not only to crude oil it was applied. Factories which worked up the residuum or tar into lubricating oil and depended on Standard plants for their supply were cut off. There was one such in Cleveland — the firm of Morehouse and Freeman. Mr. Morehouse had begun to experiment with lubricating oils in 1861, and in 1871 the report of the Cleveland Board of Trade devoted several of its pages to a description of his business. According to this account he was then making oils adapted to lubricating all kinds of machinery — he held patents for several brands and trade marks, and had produced that year over 25,000 barrels of different lubricants besides 120,000 boxes of axle grease. At this time he was buying his stock or residuum from one or another of the twenty-five Cleveland refiners. Then came the South Improvement Company and the concentration of the town's refining interest