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THE FIRST GREAT AMERICAN TRUST.
When Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877, America's first great industrial combination had become an established fact.

In that year the Standard Oil Company of Ohio controlled at least ninety per cent of the business of refining and marketing petroleum.

A new portent had appeared in our economic life, a phenomenon that was destined to affect not only the social and business existence of the every-day American but even his political and legal institutions.
It seems natural enough at the present time to refer to petroleum as an indispensable commodity.

At the beginning of the Civil War, however, any such description would have been absurd.