Rockefeller Biographies
John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937)
John D. Rockefeller was born in upstate New York on a farm not far from Binghamton in the southern tier, a landscape of hills that he dearly loved. He was a descendant of Johann Peter Rockefeller, who arrived in North America from the German Palatinate in 1723. JDR's father, William Avery Rockefeller, was a trader dealing in such commodities as salt and timber. He married Eliza Davison in 1837, and John Davison Rockefeller was the couple's second child and eldest son.
By the time he was a teenager, JDR had moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, where he was baptized at Erie Street Baptist Church. He began in business at the age of sixteen as a clerk accountant for two Cleveland wholesale and shipping merchants. In 1858, JDR and a partner began their own shipping company, and by 1863 Rockefeller entered the oil refinery business. Petroleum had been discovered in Pennsylvania only four years earlier, and Cleveland, one of the early centers of oil refining, was on the brink of vast industrial expansion. In March 1864 Rockefeller married Laura Spelman, a young Cleveland woman with a strong political and religious background; her parents were staunch abolitionists and active in the Underground Railroad. In 1884 Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, for African American women, now Spelman College, was named in honor of her parents; JDR provided substantial financial support to the institution.
By 1870, when Rockefeller and his partners incorporated themselves as the Standard Oil Company, their refinery was producing more that fifteen hundred barrels of kerosene a day, destined for street and indoor lamps all over the country. Even before the gasoline engine opened up a completely new and almost limitless demand for refined petroleum, the market Standard Oil and its competitors fed was huge. At the end of the decade, Standard Oil had bought out or merged with twenty-two of its twenty-five Cleveland competitors, and it produced 33 million of the 36 million barrels of oil produced in the United States.
By the time JDR moved to New York City in 1884, Standard Oil was well on its way to becoming one of the largest corporations of its day, and he was soon to become one of the wealthiest men in the world. He remained a deeply religious and modest man, worshipping all his life within the Baptist faith in which he had been reared. His mother, whose favorite motto was "willful waste makes woeful want," instilled in Rockefeller a veneration for work and a profound sense of charitable obligation. Charity was an essential part of JDR's life from his youth; a strong religious impulse underlay and always informed his giving. Even when the affairs of Standard oil demanded nearly his full attention, JDR spent more and more time on philanthropy. By his death in 1937 at the age of ninety-seven, he had given over half his fortune to various philanthropic programs, among them the University of Chicago (which he principally funded) and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, now Rockefeller University (founded in 1901 in New York City). The institute's program of attacking the most serious diseases of mankind gave JDR his first experience funding directly the long-term work of academically trained scientists and physicians. In 1913 Senior set up his greatest philanthropic endeavor, the Rockefeller Foundation, "to promote the well-being and to advance the civilization of the peoples of the United States and foreign lands in acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, in the prevention and relief of human suffering, and the promotion of any and all elements of human progress." Today, with an endowment in excess of $2 billion, the Rockefeller Foundation remains one of the ten largest foundations in the United States. -- Henry Joyce
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960)
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was born in Cleveland and moved with his family to New York City in 1884. He was the last child and only son of John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller. As a teenager, Junior attended day schools in New York City and then, in 1893, entered Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. There he met Abby Aldrich, who became his wife in 1901. After his 1897 graduation, Junior began to work for his father at 26 Broadway, the well known New York City address of Standard Oil, where he learned skills in both business and philanthropy.
Building Kykuit, which he began when he was thirty-two years old, initiated Junior's lifelong involvement with building projects and historic preservation. He provided funds to restore Rheims Cathedral after it was damaged during the First World War, and Versailles, the palace of the kings of France. Closer to home, Junior bought and then donated to New York City sixty acres of land for the Cloisters in upper Manhattan, the Metropolitan Museum's medieval outpost, in 1935. He paid much of the building's construction cost and in 1938 donated a number of medieval sculptures and architectural fragments he had acquired from the American sculptor George Grey Barnard. (Three of Barnard's works, The Hewer, Rising Woman, and Adam and Eve, are at the base of the east terrace retaining wall at Kykuit.) The Cloisters collection include s the famed late fifteenth-century Unicorn tapestries, which once hung in his New York City home on West 54th Street.
The Cloisters was not the last nor the largest of JDR's building and restoration projects. His generosity made possible some of the nation's finest historic sites and national parks. He financed the formation and development of Colonial Williamsburg beginning in the mid 1920s and then, on this model, created Sleepy Hollow Restorations, the properties that form the nucleus of Historic Hudson Valley. Philipsburg Manor and Washington Irving's home, Sunnyside, opened in 1947, and Van Cortlandt Manor opened to the public in 1959. Junior also purchased more than ten thousand acres for Acadia National Park on Maine 's Mount Desert Island, where his family spent summers and where his son Nelson A. Rockefeller was born in 1908. His philanthropy also helped expand Wyoming 's Grand Teton National Park, Virginia 's Shenandoah National Park, and Tennessee 's Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Junior made significant contributions to help preserve both California 's redwood forests and the spectacular Palisades, the thirteen-mile stretch of cliffs between Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Nyack, New York, whose future had been threatened by intense quarrying.
Perhaps the most successful of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s building programs was New York City 's Rockefeller Center, the most widely known project that carries the family name. The original fourteen buildings, covering three blocks between 48th and 51st streets and between Fifth and Sixth avenues, were completed between 1930 and 1939. Rockefeller Center was the first realization of the twentieth-century ideal of a skyscraper city.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was also a significant collector of art. He added throughout his life to the group of rare Chinese porcelains he had initially purchased from the J.P. Morgan estate. Many of these pieces remain on display at Kykuit. -- Henry Joyce
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (1908-79)
Nelson Rockefeller was the third of the six children of John D. Rockefeller and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and one of the first generation of Rockefellers to be raised partly at Pocantico Hills. He and his brothers attended the Lincoln School, a division of the Teachers College of Columbia University. Nelson Rockefeller majored in economics at Dartmouth College, where he also studied art and landscape architecture. He graduated cum laude with a B.A. in 1930. Nelson determined at an early age not "just to work my way up in a business that another man has built." He forged a unique career in international development, philanthropy, business, and public service and was especially active in the broad field of public policy. He established a distinguished record serving three presidents between 1940 and 1958 in seven different appointments. He was among other things Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; Assistant Secretary of State under President Franklin D. Roosevelt; and Under Secretary of Health, Education an d Welfare and Special Assistant to the President on Foreign Affairs under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was four times elected Governor of New York State, serving from 1959 to 1973, and he was vice-president of the United States under President Gerald R. Ford from 1974 to 1977.
Taught by his parents to look for and appreciate beauty in all things, Nelson shared his mother's interest in modern painting and sculpture. He began to collect art in the early 1930s and soon afterward became a trustee of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. In 1957, he also founded the Museum of Primitive Art in New York City, whose collections later became part of the Metropolitan Museum.
When Nelson Rockefeller moved to Kykuit after his father's death in 1960, he brought part of his art collection with him and began to acquire new works to adorn the house and grounds. He commissioned a magnificent sculpture, Large Spiny, from Alexander Calder for one of the Kykuit terraces, and acquired others from such artists as Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, and David Smith for different parts of the garden. At his death he left the art collection that he had assembled in the galleries and the gardens at Kykuit to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. A major part of this collection represents the work of New York State artists of the 1960s and 1970s who had also been chosen to provide sculpture for the Albany Mall, now the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, the administrative and cultural complex Nelson Rockefeller developed for New York State in the 1970s.
Nelson Rockefeller's passion for art was matched only by his zeal to make art accessible to the public. He promoted the inclusion of art in public spaces, and, after retiring from public life, he established The Nelson Rockefeller Collection, Inc., which produced and marketed reproductions of selected pieces from his collection. -- Henry Joyce
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