Henry Huttleston Rogers

Henry Huttleston Rogers (January 29, 1840 – May 19, 1909) was an American industrialist and financier who built his wealth in oil refining, rising to a leadership role at Standard Oil. He was also deeply involved in the gas, copper, and railroad industries, and counted Mark Twain as a close friend.

Rogers got his start in oil with Charles Pratt in 1866, after developing a better method for separating naphtha from crude oil during refining. John D. Rockefeller bought out Rogers and Pratt in 1874, and Rogers quickly climbed the ranks at Standard Oil. He championed the use of very long pipelines to move oil instead of relying on railway cars, building on existing pipeline technology. During the 1880s, he expanded into copper, steel, banking, railroads, and the Consolidated Gas Company, which supplied coal gas to major cities. By the 1890s, as Rockefeller stepped back from the oil business, Rogers became a dominant figure at Standard Oil. In 1899, he created the Amalgamated Copper trust, incorporated in New Jersey, which controlled an industry booming because the nation needed wire for its electric networks. His final major project was building the Virginian Railway to serve West Virginia’s coal fields. After 1890, he became a notable philanthropist and a supporter of Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington.

Rogers was born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, on January 29, 1840, the older son of Rowland Rogers, a former ship captain, bookkeeper, and grocer, and Mary Eldredge Huttleston. Both parents were Yankees descended from Mayflower Pilgrims. His mother’s family had originally spelled their name “Huddleston,” which often leads to misspellings of Rogers’ name. The family lived mostly in Fairhaven, a fishing village across the Acushnet River from New Bedford, except for a brief move to Mattapoisett during his early childhood. By the mid-1850s, whaling was fading in New England as whale oil gave way to kerosene and natural gas, and Rogers’ father, like many New England men, left the sea for other work. Rogers was an average student and part of the first graduating class of the local high school in 1856. He then worked for the Fairhaven Branch Railroad, an early version of the Old Colony Railroad, as an expressman and brakeman for three to four years, carefully saving his earnings.