Standard Oil
American oil company (1870–1911)
Standard Oil Company was a corporate trust in the petroleum industry that existed from 1882 to 1911. The origins of the trust lay in the operations of the Standard Oil Company (Ohio), which was founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller. The trust was born on January 2, 1882, when a group of 41 investors signed the Standard Oil Trust Agreement which pooled their securities of 40 companies into a single holding agency managed by nine trustees. The original trust was valued at $70 million. On March 21, 1892, the Standard Oil Trust was dissolved by order of the Supreme Court of Ohio, and its holdings were reorganized into 20 independent companies that formed an unofficial union referred to as "Standard Oil Interests." In 1899, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey acquired the shares of the other 19 companies and became the holding company for the trust.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Standard Oil” as american oil company (1870–1911). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as american oil company (1870–1911). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1882, 1911, 1870 and 1892.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Standard Oil”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Standard Oil primary sources, Standard Oil archive and Standard research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Standard Oil”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Standard Oil” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.