South Improvement Company

Ayers Lombard & Company owned 100 cars on the Central in 1872, worth about $35,000, and in these they shipped the bulk of their oil.

The South Improvement Company maneuvers in the spring of 1872 completely stopped their shipping over that road, and in 1872 they sold their cars.

Mr. Lombard said in his testimony, We gave them the cars because the Standard Oil were getting the ascendancy so much over the New York roads that we could not get a rate of freight from the lower district and the Parker district where the bulk of the oil was produced at that time that would enable us to compete with them in the New York market.

So there was no use in owning the cars.

Driven off the Erie and Central, the firm made a running arrangement with Mr. Rockefeller for a year.

The Standard bought the cars and agreed to furnish Ayers Lombard & Company crude oil for a certain price at a certain time and take the refined oil from them at a fixed price.

This contract was made probably under the Refiners Association which Mr. Rockefeller succeeded in effecting in August 1872, after the failure of the South Improvement Company, which association, as we have already seen, took in fully four-fifths of the refining interests of the country.

The contract continued, Mr. Lombard said in testimony, for a year or more, and was then terminated by notice from the Standard Oil Company.

Ayers Lombard & Company owned 100 cars on the Central in 1872, worth about $35,000, and in these they shipped the bulk of their oil.

The South Improvement Company maneuvers in the spring of 1872 completely stopped their shipping over that road, and in 1872 they sold their cars.

Mr. Lombard said in his testimony, We gave them the cars because the Standard Oil were getting the ascendancy so much over the New York roads that we could not get a rate of freight from the lower district and the Parker district where the bulk of the oil was produced at that time that would enable us to compete with them in the New York market.

So there was no use in owning the cars.

Driven off the Erie and Central, the firm made a running arrangement with Mr. Rockefeller for a year.

The Standard bought the cars and agreed to furnish Ayers Lombard & Company crude oil for a certain price at a certain time and take the refined oil from them at a fixed price.

This contract was made probably under the Refiners Association which Mr. Rockefeller succeeded in effecting in August 1872, after the failure of the South Improvement Company, which association, as we have already seen, took in fully four-fifths of the refining interests of the country.

The contract continued, Mr. Lombard said in testimony, for a year or more, and was then terminated by notice from the Standard Oil Company.

Or sorry, keep the price too high and the supply low, and then people will go to other countries for their oil.

And so this is not a... revolution maybe for the time it might be it's not like they're controlling it to that level but there is something that comes up in the kind of the 1871 to 72 period called the south improvement company and so railway executives and again railways are playing a huge piece in this because how you move in the oil it's going over rail They didn't like what they called.

And again, it's the same thing that Rockefeller is talking about here.

It's not just the oil people who are talking about being coordinated.

But this doesn't even actually come into fruition because it kind of leaks out what's going on.

And most of the oil producers kind of freak out.

And the South Improvement Company kind of backs off and says, okay, we're not going to actually do this.

So just to kind of give you an idea, it is this preferential system that the railways and the oil companies are trying to look at doing and saying, hey, amongst us...

But while those physical tragedies definitely shaped her, the real turning point for her worldview, the thing that really put the iron in her spine, was an economic disaster that struck her family.

The South Improvement Company.

Exactly.

It was a deeply cynical scheme.

And amid all that mind numbing paperwork, she hits two absolute gold mines.

She does.

The first involves that Old South Improvement Company scheme we talked about earlier.

Standard Oil had actively tried to destroy every single printed copy of an 1873 book.