Standard Oil Trust Issued to and signed by H.C. Folger, Jr. - Stock Certificate

Stock issued to and signed on stub by H.C. Folger, Jr. Also signed by H.M. Flagler and W.H. Tilford.

Henry Clay Folger Jr. (June 18, 1857 – June 11, 1930) was president and later chairman of Standard Oil of New York, a collector of Shakespeareana, and founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Henry Clay Folger Jr. was born in New York City to Henry Clay Folger Sr. of Nantucket, Massachusetts and Eliza Jane (Clark) Folger of New York, the oldest of their eight children. He was a first cousin six times removed of Benjamin Franklin and a nephew of J. A. Folger, the founder of Folger Coffee. He is descendant of Peter Foulger (the maternal grandfather of Benjamin Franklin) and Mary Morrill Foulger.

He prepared at Adelphi Academy, Brooklyn, New York, where he was acquainted with Charles Pratt, the businessman and president of the Adelphi board of trustees who became a mentor to Folger. At Adelphi, Folger was schooled in art, chemistry, classics, and recitation, and was elected president of the school's literary association. He then attended Amherst College with Charles Millard Pratt, a close friend who was the son of Folger's mentor from the Adelphi Academy. To fund his education, Folger participated in many oratorical essay contests; he won prizes for competitions in 1876 and 1879, the latter of which paid for his junior year of school. Folger modeled his rhetorical style on Daniel Webster's. He identified a Shakespeare-related essay contest as the origin of his obsession with the Bard. Emily, however, later attributed the origin of Folger's fascination with Shakespeare to an 1879 lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose elegant and eloquent delivery sounded Shakespearean to the college student. Folger was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1879. After Amherst, he attended Columbia Law School from 1879 to 1881, and was admitted to the bar in 1881.

Beginning in 1881, he worked for the Standard Oil trust of John D. Rockefeller, getting his start in the oil business as a clerk at Charles Pratt & Company, a refinery owned by Charles Pratt, the father of his Adelphi and Amherst classmate Charles Millard Pratt. The Pratt Company was already associated with Standard Oil at that time. Folger quickly showed his prowess as a mathematician and statistician; his management of data on oil processing led to a promotion in 1886, when he became the secretary of Standard Oil's manufacturing committee. In 1890, Folger wrote Petroleum: Its Production and Products in Pennsylvania, an article for Chambers's Encyclopaedia about the oil business.

Folger's assets increased in 1899, when he was promoted to chairman of the manufacturing committee, the same year that Standard Oil of New Jersey became the central holding company for the Standard Oil Trust, which dissolved after the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The stock Folger held in Standard Oil of New Jersey would contribute significantly to Folger's ability to collect Shakespeareana. In 1908, he was elected assistant treasurer of Jersey Standard, and joined its board of sixteen directors, managing the company's finances and compiling production data. That year, Folger was also elected to Jersey Standard's executive committee.

The 1911 Supreme Court decision to break up the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey monopoly resulted in the election of Folger as president of the second-largest company formed from the dissolved Jersey Standard, the Standard Oil Company of New York, or Socony. Folger also owned significant amounts of stock in the Magnolia Petroleum Company, a Texan company that became a fully owned subsidiary of Socony in 1925. He retired as president in 1923, but stayed at Socony as the first chairman of its board of trustees until 1928, when he officially retired to devote all of his attention to plans for his Shakespeare Library. Folger was succeeded as president by Herbert L. Pratt, another son of Charles Pratt.

In 1956, the Folger Shakespeare Library received Folger's walnut desk from Socony Mobil Oil. Since that year, it has been used by the Library's director.

Henry Clay Folger met Emily Clara Jordan in the early 1880s at a meeting of the Irving Literary Circle in Brooklyn. Both were close, respectively, with the Pratt siblings Charles and Lillie. Early in their relationship, Henry and Emily connected via Shakespeare. At an 1882 picnic held by the Irving Literary Circle, Charles and Lillie prompted the two to each give a toast; Emily drew from Othello. while Henry quoted from As You Like It. She was born in 1858 and was educated at Vassar College. They married on October 6, 1885 at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Emily had spent her teenage years. The Folgers had no children. They lived in rented houses in Brooklyn throughout most of their lives, moving to Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1895 and to 24 Brevoot Place in 1910, but later purchased an estate in Glen Cove, Long Island in 1929.

The Folgers took annual vacations to The Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, where Henry enjoyed participating in golf tournaments in his later years. Though the Folgers had no children, they considered their collection to be their descendants, and Henry was known to refer to his rare books as "the boys."

Folger was an avid collector of Shakespeareana, assembling the world's largest collection of First Folio editions of Shakespeare's plays. The first rare book Folger acquired was a 1685 copy of the Fourth Folio, purchased in 1889 for $107.50. He purchased his first original copy of the First Folio four years later, in 1893. Unlike other wealthy collectors of the period, like Henry E. Huntington and J.P. Morgan, Folger favored "imperfect" copies of rare volumes, with their marginalia and other markings. Following this trend, his Folio collection was marked with diversity in provenance and condition. He preferred to purchase Early Editions of books published between 1567 and 1606, in addition to manuscripts of the period. Based on their collective knowledge of Latin and French, and Emily's proficiency in German, the couple also favored rare volumes published on the Continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The couple was less interested in art collection, and many of the Shakespeare-related paintings they purchased were misattributed to artists like Thomas Gainsborough.

The Folgers chose items to purchase from booksellers' catalogues, which were initially perused and marked up by Emily, before she passed them on to Henry, who kept an extensive and precise list of items he intended to bid on. If possible, he inspected an item personally before purchasing it. He also avoided consulting scholarly experts about rare volumes, preferring his own and Emily's expertise, as she received an M.A. from Vassar College in 1896 for a thesis on Shakespeare. Folger used professional booksellers as middlemen at auctions, believing that the concealment of his identity would keep prices low. Due to the growing size of the collection and their concern for fireproofing, eventually few of the Folgers' acquisitions were stored in their living space. They kept an extensive card catalog at home in Brooklyn, and when traveling, took a smaller, annotated set of check lists along with them. The collection itself was stored among several fireproof warehouse companies throughout Manhattan, in specially-designed wooden cases originally meant to hold two five-gallon cans of oil each. Frederick Fales, a co-worker of Folger's at Standard Oil, initially designed and ordered these air-tight wooden cases for company use. Some of the most valuable items were kept in bank vaults, or in a safe in Folger's office.

Folger financed a half-century of collecting with his Standard Oil salary and extensive investments in the company. His high placement at Standard Oil also allowed him to take out loans with his friend Charles Millard Pratt, John D. Rockefeller, and even his wife, to fund his purchases. He generally paid for items in cash, a strategy that earned him the favor of many booksellers who needed immediate funds. Folger also preferred to purchase whole collections, like the Halliwell-Phillipps collection, acquired in 1908, because bulk purchases drove down prices of individual items.

In 1909, Folger established a Shakespeare Prize at Amherst; winning students won a cash prize, and their essays joined Folger's collection and currently reside in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger also made donations to Amherst College's library, contributing many duplicate volumes purchased at auction to the College. The most valuable of these donations were two leaves from a Gutenberg Bible.

Early in his career at Standard Oil and as a collector, Folger doubted that he would eventually have the funds to build a memorial or library for his growing collection, and in 1895 he offered to sell it to John D. Rockefeller, who refused. Before he acquired the funds for what was to become the Folger Shakespeare Library, Folger also debated selling the collection to a university.

Toward the end of World War I, Folger and his wife began searching for a location for his Shakespeare library. Among the sites he and Emily considered were Amherst and Nantucket, Massachusetts, the University of Chicago, New York City, and Stratford-upon-Avon, before they settled on a Washington, D.C. site they discovered in 1918 during a layover in the city while traveling to Hot Springs. Folger spent nine years purchasing the fourteen row houses that occupied the block of East Capitol Street between First and Second Streets, which he would demolish to build his Library; thus, they did not make their choice of a site on Capitol Hill public until 1928. Soon afterwards, Congress passed a resolution allowing use of the land on East Capitol Street where the Folger Shakespeare Library now stands.

After the passage of this legislation, Folger hired Paul Philippe Cret as the Library's architect, suggested by Alexander Trowbridge, an architect who had married into the Pratt family and stayed on the project as consulting architect. Folger played an integral part in the design and execution of the Library's classical exterior and Tudor interior. The inclusion of an Elizabethan theater within the Library's main building was also Folger's idea, though he intended it as a venue for academic lectures rather than performances. Folger hired sculptor John Gregory to design the relief sculptures that appear on the building's facade. The cornerstone of the library was laid in 1930, but Henry Folger died soon afterward. The bulk of his fortune was left in trust for the library, with Amherst College as trust administrator. With additional funding from Emily Folger, the library opened in 1932 on April 23, the date traditionally believed to be Shakespeare's birthday. Folger's collection of Shakespearean works is considered one of the most important resources for scholars of the playwright.

Folger was a trustee of the Hamilton Trust Company, Brooklyn, New York, and a director of Seaboard National Bank in New York. In 1914 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Amherst. Outside of work, his great interests were his Shakespeare collection and, in later life, golf, which he often played with Rockefeller. He was a trustee of the Central Congregational Church in Brooklyn and established the Shakespeare Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

In a 1933 lecture delivered after his death, Emily identified King Lear as his favorite of Shakespeare's plays.

In May 1930, Henry Folger was admitted to St. John's Hospital in Brooklyn for surgery on an enlarged prostate. While recovering, he continued to work on the construction and development of his Shakespeare Library from his sickbed. He later had a second prostate operation prior to his death on June 11, 1930. His funeral was held at Brooklyn's Central Congregational Church, where he had been an active member. Reverend Samuel Parkes Cadman, who, along with his wife, had been close with the Folgers, gave Henry's eulogy. Henry's ashes were interred beneath the Folgers' copy of Shakespeare's funerary monument in what is now the Folger Shakespeare Library's Old Reading Room. His wife Emily died in 1936.

Henry Morrison Flagler (1830-1913) Through the grain and distillery business, he met John D. Rockefeller, in Bellevue, Ohio. After a business disaster as a salt manufacturer in Saginaw, Michigan, he moved to Cleveland and soon joined Rockefeller and chemist and inventor Samuel Andrews in forming Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler in 1867, which they were soon to develop into Standard Oil. By 1872, it led the American oil refining industry, producing 10,000 barrels per day. In 1877, Standard Oil moved its headquarters to New York City, and Flagler and his family moved there as well. He was joined by Henry H. Rogers, another leader of Standard Oil who also became involved in the development of America's railroads, including those on nearby Staten Island, the Union Pacific Railroad, and later in West Virginia, where he eventually built the remarkable Virginian Railway to transport coal to Hampton Roads, Virginia. Henry Flager's non-Standard Oil interests went in a different direction than Henry Rogers', however, when in 1878, on the advice of his physician, Flagler traveled to Jacksonville, Florida for the winter with his first wife, Mary (née Harkness) Flagler, who was quite ill. Two years after she died in 1881, he married again. Ida Alice (née Shrouds) Flagler had been a caregiver for Mary Flagler. After their wedding, the couple traveled to St. Augustine, Florida. Flagler found the city charming, but the hotel facilities and transportation systems inadequate. He recognized Florida's potential to attract out-of-state visitors. He returned to St. Augustine in 1885 and began construction on the 540-room Hotel Ponce de Leon. Realizing the need for a sound transportation system to support his hotel ventures, Flagler purchased the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Halifax Railroad, the first railroad in what would become known as the "Flagler System" or the Florida East Coast Railway. Flagler completed the 1150-room Royal Poinciana Hotel on the shores of Lake Worth in Palm Beach and extended his railroad to its service town, West Palm Beach, by 1894. The Royal Poinciana Hotel was at the time the largest wooden structure in the world. Two years later, Flagler built the Palm Beach Inn (renamed The Breakers Hotel in 1901) overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach. Flagler originally intended for West Palm Beach to be the terminus of his railroad system, but during 1894 and 1895, severe freezes hit the area, causing Flagler to rethink his original decision. Sixty miles south, the town today known as Miami was reportedly unharmed by the freeze. To further convince Flagler to continue the railroad to Miami, he was offered land in exchange for laying rail tracks from private landowners, including Julia Tuttle, who ran a trading post on the Miami River, the Florida East Coast Canal and Transportation Company, and the Boston and Florida Atlantic Coast Land Company. Flagler's railroad, renamed the Florida East Coast Railway in 1895, reached Biscayne Bay by 1896. Flagler dredged a channel, built streets, instituted the first water and power systems, and financed the city's first newspaper, The Metropolis. When the city was incorporated in 1896, its citizens wanted to honor the man responsible for its growth by naming it "Flagler". He declined the honor, persuading them to use an old Indian name, "Miami". He became known as the Father of Miami, Florida.

Wesley H. Tilford (1850-1909) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on July 14, 1850.  He went to Columbia College where he studied for a couple of years, but the call of business was too strong to allow him to wait for his bachelor's degree.  Attracted by the prospects of petroleum, Wesley gave up his college course, and entered as a clerk in the firm of his brother, Bostwick & Tilford, then doing business in Pearl Street. When the firm dissolved the two brothers joined in a partnership of their own under the title of John B. Tilford Jr. & Co., which did well from the start and continued to prosper until, at the period of the Eastern oil amalgamations, a substantial offer from the Standard Oil Company induced them to cast their fortunes with that vigorous organization. As has been said, those were busy formative times in the oil business, and the new recruit proved his mettle by the splendid success of his visit to the Pacific slope in 1878. He there organized the oil trade in California, Oregon, Colorado and the surrounding States. On his return to the East he was welcomed to a high place in the home office, taking charge of the vast transportation problem with vigor and effectiveness. And so, strong in the esteem and confidence of all his co-workers, he continued to the end.

Tilford, one of the Vice Presidents of the Standard Oil Company, left behind him a notable record of over thirty years in the service of the Company and of some years before that in a petroleum business with which his family was connected. ln his time he had passed through all grades of the merchandising of petroleum, filling post after post with loyalty, credit and acumen. For nine years before his elevation to the Vice Presidency in 1908, he had filled the office of Treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, and from 1892 onward he had been a Director. Despite this long and prominent career, few outside the oil business knew him, so unobtrusive was he by nature. He was a man of few words but of great grasp of affairs, particularly strong in organizing qualities, and gifted with fine and accurate judgment. ln addition he was a man of wide information and varied reading. He was courtly, kind-hearted and charitable. Ordinary qualities sharpened by business experience may carry a man safely through the details of an established business easily filling its place in the commercial economy; but to win and retain a leading place in a business ever growing, ever reaching out, ever conquering new worlds and gaining and holding new markets, called for qualities far beyond the ordinary, and it is the testimony of his associates that he always deserved his promotions. This is high praise from men themselves the peers of the giants of business in all ages and all times.

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