It’s a good story. Big-city sagacity is pitted against country cunning. Final score: Country cunning — one; city sagacity — zero.
In 1904 “The History of Standard Oil” by Ida Tarbell was published. The book was hardly an homage, more a condemnation. It influenced public opinion and politicians. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt, the Trust Buster, took on Standard Oil. The United States Attorney General Charles Bonaparte filed as many as seven lawsuits in an effort to break up the reputed monopoly. John D. Rockefeller himself was subpoenaed.
First, Rockefeller fought the subpoena, then he ducked it, then he fled, and finally Rockefeller was arrested in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. True. Did the richest man in the world flee to a sophisticated European city or an exotic island? No. Did the man who could afford to go anywhere seek a tiny country from which he could fight extradition? No. Rockefeller fled to Pittsfield.
While the world press speculated about where he could be, Rockefeller was on a farm off West Street. This is the story of why he was there and how he was discovered.
Col. Ezra Parmelee Prentice was a Chicago lawyer who wished to be a country farmer. He had ideas about raising livestock and growing crops that would modernize both. What he sought was a farm to test his theories. Many prominent Chicagoans summered in Pittsfield, so Prentice found his way to Berkshire County.
Although Thomas Allen, the namesake of the great preacher, had a fine house on Park Square, he built a “summerhouse” a mile away on West Street. When he died his heirs sold Taconic Lodge to Henry C. Valentine, varnish-manufacturing tycoon and originator of Valspar. Valentine enlarged the property, cultivated many acres and renamed it Taconic Farm.
Summer 1907: Valentine rents the farm to Prentice and his wife with an option to buy, and therein hangs the tale. Prentice’s wife was Alta Rockefeller, daughter of J.D.
June 29, 1907: An old man sleeps in the first-class carriage. He is pale and thin, almost emaciated, and wears a collar and suit too big for him. The conductor decides not to wake him or ask him to move. The conductor believes he could not possibly be a first-class passenger but he is doing no harm. George Stokes, the newsboy on the New York New Haven line, also sees the old man. He agrees the poor old guy couldn’t possibly afford a Pullman ticket.
8:30 p.m., Pittsfield Train Station: Newsboy and conductor are surprised when the poor old man is met by a large black, chauffeur-driven car.
The thing about the country is not only does everybody know everybody, but often they are relatives. The conductor tells his cousin the postmaster. The postmaster knows the car; he sees it every day when the mail for Taconic Farm is collected.
The newsboy walks up to the Wendell Hotel, finds Alfred C. Daniels, a reporter for the Pittsfield Journal, and tells his tale. Both conductor and newspaper boy are telling a tale about the strangeness of life and how you can’t judge a book by its cover, but the reporter wonders, could it be him? Daniels doesn’t know that a few hours earlier, the Pittsfield telegraph office received a terse message: “He is coming tonight.”
June 30, 1907: Journal reporter Walter E. Lewis sees Prentice outside Backman’s Livery Stable. The night before in the Wendell Bar, Daniels told Lewis the tale so Lewis steps across and asks Prentice if, by chance, his father-in-law, John D. Rockefeller, is staying at Taconic Farm. The answer is quite a surprise:
“I will give anyone who can prove that $50,000,” Prentice says.
It is a classic non-denial denial. The Journal runs with the story. Reporters spill into Pittsfield. Exits to Taconic Farm are blocked. Police approach the house, knock, and Rockefeller himself answers the door. That is how the richest man in the world yields to the power of the president of the United States and accepts the subpoena from a local Berkshire policeman on the steps of a Pittsfield farmhouse.
