CHAPTER 1
The Flimflam Man

n the early 1900s, as Rockefeller vied with Andrew Carnegie for the title of the world's richest man, a spirited rivalry arose between France and Germany, with each claiming to be Rockefeller's ancestral land. Assorted genealogists stood ready, for a sizable fee, to manufacture a splendid royal lineage for the oilman. “I have no desire to trace myself back to the nobility,” he said honestly. “I am satisfied with my good old American stock.” ¹ The most ambitious search for Rockefeller's roots traced them back to a ninth-century French family, the Roquefeuilles, who supposedly inhabited a Languedoc château—a charming story that unfortunately has been refuted by recent findings. In contrast, the Rockefellers’ German lineage has been clearly established in the Rhine valley dating back to at least the early 1600s.

Around 1723, Johann Peter Rockefeller, a miller, gathered up his wife and five children, set sail for Philadelphia, and settled on a farm in Somerville and then Amwell, New Jersey, where he evidently flourished and acquired large landholdings. More than a decade later, his cousin Diell Rockefeller left southwest Germany and moved to Germantown, New York. Diell's granddaughter Christina married her distant relative William, one of Johann's grandsons. (Never particularly sentimental about his European forebears, John D. Rockefeller did erect a monument to the patriarch, Johann Peter, at his burial site in Flemington, New Jersey.) The marriage of William and Christina produced a son named Godfrey Rockefeller, who was the grandfather of the oil titan and a most unlikely progenitor of the clan. In 1806, Godfrey married Lucy Avery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, despite the grave qualms of her family.

Establishing a pattern that would be replicated by Rockefeller's own mother, Lucy had, in her family's disparaging view, married down. Her ancestors had emigrated from Devon, England, to Salem, Massachusetts, around 1630, forming part of the Puritan tide. As they became settled and gentrified, the versatile Averys spawned ministers, soldiers, civic leaders, explorers, and traders, not to mention a bold clutch of Indian fighters. During the American Revolution, eleven Averys perished gloriously in the battle of Groton. While the Rockefellers’　“noble” roots required some poetic license and liberal embellishment, Lucy could justly claim descent from Edmund Ironside, the English king, who was crowned in 1016.

Godfrey Rockefeller was sadly mismatched with his enterprising wife. He had a stunted, impoverished look and a hangdog air of perpetual defeat. Taller than her husband, a fiery Baptist of commanding presence, Lucy was rawboned and confident, with a vigorous step and alert blue eyes. A former schoolteacher, she was better educated than Godfrey. Even John D., never given to invidious comments about relatives, tactfully conceded, “My grandmother was a brave woman. Her husband was not so brave as she.” ² If Godfrey contributed the Rockefeller coloring—bluish gray eyes, light brown hair—Lucy introduced the rangy frame later notable among the men. Enjoying robust energy and buoyant health, Lucy had ten children, with the third, William Avery Rockefeller, born in Granger, New York, in 1810. While it is easy enough to date the birth of Rockefeller's father, teams of frazzled reporters would one day exhaust themselves trying to establish the date of his death.

As a farmer and businessman, Godfrey enjoyed checkered success, and his aborted business ventures exposed his family to an insecure, peripatetic life. They were forced to move to Granger and Ancram, New York, then to Great Barrington, before doubling back to Livingston, New York. John D. Rockefeller's upbringing would be fertile with cautionary figures of weak men gone astray. Godfrey must have been invoked frequently as a model to be avoided. By all accounts, Grandpa was a jovial, good-natured man but feckless and addicted to drink, producing in Lucy an everlasting hatred of liquor that she must have drummed into her grandson. Grandpa Godfrey was the first to establish in John D.'s mind an enduring equation between bonhomie and lax character, making the latter prefer the society of sober, tight-lipped men in full command of their emotions.

The Rockefeller records offer various scenarios of why Godfrey and Lucy packed their belongings into an overloaded Conestoga wagon and headed west between 1832 and 1834. By one account, the Rockefellers, along with several neighbors, were dispossessed of their land in a heated title dispute with some English investors. Another account has an unscrupulous businessman gulling Godfrey into swapping his farm for allegedly richer turf in Tioga County. (If this claim was in fact made, it proved a cruel hoax.) Some relatives later said that Michigan was Godfrey's real destination but that Lucy vetoed such a drastic relocation, preferring the New England culture of upstate New York to the wilds of Michigan.

Whatever the reason, the Rockefellers reenacted the primordial American rite of setting out in search of fresh opportunity. In the 1830s, many settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut were swarming excitedly into wilderness areas of western New York, a migration that Alexis de Tocqueville described as “a game of chance” pursued for “the emotions it excites, as much as for the gain it procures.” ³ The construction of the Erie Canal in the 1820s had lured many settlers to the area. Godfrey and Lucy heaped up their worldly possessions in a canvas-topped prairie schooner, drawn by oxen, and headed toward the sparsely settled territory. For two weeks, they traveled along the dusty Albany-Catskill turnpike, creeping through forests as darkly forbidding as the setting of a Grimms’ fairy tale. With much baggage and little passenger space, the Rockefellers had to walk for much of the journey, with Lucy and the children (except William, who did not accompany them) taking turns sitting in the wagon whenever they grew weary. As they finally reached their destination, Richford, New York, the last three and a half miles were especially arduous, and the oxen negotiated the stony, rutted path with difficulty. At the end, they had to lash their exhausted team up a nearly vertical hillside to possess their virgin sixty acres. As family legend has it, Godfrey got out, tramped to the property's peak, inspected the vista, and said mournfully, “This is as close as we shall ever get to Michigan.” So, in a memorial to dashed hopes, the spot would forever bear the melancholy name of Michigan Hill.

Even today scarcely more than a crossroads, Richford was then a stagecoach stop in the wooded country southeast of Ithaca and northwest of Binghamton. The area's original inhabitants, the Iroquois, had been chased out after the American Revolution and replaced by revolutionary army veterans. Still an uncouth frontier when the Rockefellers arrived, this backwater had recently attained township status, its village square dating from 1821. Civilization had taken only a tenuous hold. The dense forests on all sides teemed with game—bear, deer, panther, wild turkey, and cottontail rabbit—and people carried flaring torches at night to frighten away the roaming packs of wolves.

By the time that John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839, Richford was acquiring the amenities of a small town. It had some nascent industries—sawmills, gristmills, and a whiskey distillery—plus a schoolhouse and a church. Most inhabitants scratched out a living from hardscrabble farming, yet these newcomers were hopeful and enterprising. Notwithstanding their frontier trappings, they had carried with them the frugal culture of Puritan New England, which John D. Rockefeller would come to exemplify.

The Rockfellers’ steep property provided a sweeping panorama of a fertile valley. The vernal slopes were spattered with wildflowers, and chestnuts and berries abounded in the fall. Amid this sylvan beauty, the Rockfellers had to struggle with a spartan life. They occupied a small, plain house, twenty-two feet deep and sixteen feet across, fashioned with hand-hewn beams and timbers. The thin soil was so rocky that it required heroic exertions just to hack a clearing through the underbrush and across thickly forested slopes of pine, hemlock, oak, and maple.

As best we can gauge from a handful of surviving anecdotes, Lucy ably managed both family and farm and never shirked heavy toil. Assisted by a pair of steers, she laid an entire stone wall by herself and had the quick-witted cunning and cool resourcefulness that would reappear in her grandson. John D. delighted in telling how she pounced upon a grain thief in their dark barn one night. Unable to discern the intruder's face, she had the mental composure to snip a piece of fabric from his coat sleeve. When she later spotted the man's frayed coat, she confronted the flabbergasted thief with the missing swatch; having silently made her point, she never pressed charges. One last item about Lucy deserves mention: She had great interest in herbal medicines and home-brewed remedies prepared from a “physic bush” in the backyard. Many years later, her curious grandson sent specimens of this bush to a laboratory to see whether they possessed genuine medicinal value. Perhaps it was from Lucy that he inherited the fascination with medicine that ran through his life, right up to his creation of the world's preeminent medical-research institute.

By the time he was in his twenties, William Avery Rockefeller was already a sworn foe of conventional morality who had opted for a vagabond existence. Even as an adolescent, he disappeared on long trips in midwinter, providing no clues as to his whereabouts. Throughout his life, he expended considerable energy on tricks and schemes to avoid plain hard work. But he possessed such brash charm and rugged good looks—he was nearly six feet tall, with a broad chest, high forehead, and thick auburn beard covering a pugnacious jaw—that people were instantly beguiled by him. This appealing façade, at least for a while, lulled skeptics and disarmed critics. It wasn't surprising that this nomad did not accompany his parents on their westward trek to Richford but instead drifted into the area around 1835 in his own inimitable fashion. When he first appeared in a neighboring hamlet, he quickly impressed the locals with his unorthodox style. Posing as a deaf-mute peddler selling cheap novelties, he kept a small slate with the words “I am deaf and dumb” chalked across it tied by a string to his buttonhole. On this slate, he conversed with the locals and later boasted how he exploited this ruse to flush out all the town secrets. To win the confidence of strangers and soften them up for the hard sell, he toted along a kaleidoscope, inviting people to peer into it. ⁴ During his long career as a confidence man, Big Bill always risked reprisals from people who might suddenly unmask his deceptions, and he narrowly escaped detection at the home of a Deacon Wells. The deacon and his daughter, a Mrs. Smith, pitied the poor peddler who knocked on their door one Saturday and sheltered him in their home that night. The next morning, when they invited him to church, Big Bill had to resort to some fancy footwork, for he always shied away from crowds where somebody might recognize him and expose his imposture. “Billy told [the deacon] in writing that he liked to go to church, but that his infirmity caused him to be stared at, so that he was abashed and would not go,” recalled a townsman. “He really feared that he might be exposed by someone.” ⁵ Seven months later, after the deacon and Big Bill had both moved to Richford, Mrs. Smith spotted the erstwhile deaf-mute at a social gathering and marveled at his miraculous recovery of speech. “I see that you can talk better than when I saw you last,” she said. Big Bill smiled, unfazed, his bravado intact. “Yes, I'm somewhat improved.” ⁶ When he arrived in Richford, the local citizens immediately got a taste of his fakery, for he wordlessly flashed a slate with the scribbled query, “Where is the house of Godfrey Rockefeller?” ⁷

Since he usually presented false claims about himself and his products, Bill worked a large territory to elude the law. He was roving more than thirty miles northwest of Richford, in the vicinity of Niles and Moravia, when he first met his future wife, Eliza Davison, at her father's farmhouse. With a flair for showmanship and self-promotion, he always wore brocaded vests or other brightly colored duds that must have dazzled a sheltered farm girl like Eliza. Like many itinerant vendors in rural places, he was a smooth-talking purveyor of dreams along with tawdry trinkets, and Eliza responded to this romantic wanderer. She was sufficiently taken in by his deaf-and-dumb humbug that she involuntarily exclaimed in his presence, “I'd marry that man if he were not deaf and dumb.” ⁸ Whatever tacit doubts she might have harbored when she discovered his deceit, she soon succumbed, as did other women, to his mesmerizing charm.

A prudent, straitlaced Baptist of Scotch-Irish descent, deeply attached to his daughter, John Davison must have sensed the world of trouble that awaited Eliza if she got mixed up with Big Bill Rockefeller, and he strongly discouraged the match. In later years, Eliza Rockefeller would seem to be a dried-up, withered spinster, but in late 1836 she was a slim, spirited young woman with flaming red hair and blue eyes. Pious and self-contained, she was the antithesis of Bill and probably found him so hypnotic for just that reason. Who knows what gloom hung around her doorstep that was dispelled by Bill's glib patter? Her mother had died when Eliza was only twelve—she had dropped dead after taking a pill dispensed by a traveling doctor—and Eliza was raised by her older sister, Mary Ann, leaving Eliza deprived of maternal counsel.

On February 18, 1837, despite the express opposition of John Davison, this most improbable couple—Bill was twenty-seven, Eliza twenty-four—were wed at the home of one of Eliza's friends. The marriage was a favorite gossip item among the Richford townspeople, who tended to spy guile on Bill's part. Compared to the Davisons, the Rockefellers were poor country folk, and it is very likely that Bill was entranced by reports of John Davison's modest wealth. As early as 1801, the frugal Davison had acquired 150 acres in Cayuga County. In John D.'s words, “My grandfather was a rich man—that is, for his time he was counted rich. In those days one who had his farm paid for and had a little money beside was counted rich. Four or five or six thousand was counted rich. My grandfather had perhaps three or four times that. He had money to lend.” ⁹

Most Richford residents believed that Big Bill's meeting with Eliza was less a random encounter than a premeditated bid to snare her father's money. A notorious cad who regarded every pretty young woman as a potential conquest, Bill had at least one serious romance that antedated his wooing of Eliza. As Ralph P. Smith, a longtime Richford resident, recalled, “Billy was unmarried when he came here, and it was supposed that he would marry Nancy Brown, who was his housekeeper, but he broke with her, settling a sum said to have been about $400 on her when he concluded to win the daughter of the rich John Davison, over at Niles, on the outskirts of Moravia.” ¹⁰ The story is corroborated by John D.'s cousin, Mrs. John Wilcox, who said, “Nancy Brown, of Harford Mills, was a beautiful girl, remarkably beautiful. William fell in love with her. She was poor. William would have money. Eliza Davison's father was to give her $500 when she married; so William married her.” ¹¹

This marriage, consummated under false pretenses, fused the lives of two highly dissimilar personalities, setting the stage for all the future heartache, marital discord, and chronic instability that would so powerfully mold the contradictory personality of John D. Rockefeller.

When Bill brought his bride back to the Richford house he'd built half a mile from his parents’ place, Eliza must have pondered the wisdom of her father's disapproval: Life promised to be hard and flinty in this rough-hewn homestead. Surviving photos of John D. Rockefeller's birthplace show a plain clapboard house set on a treeless slope, outlined bleakly against the sky. The rude dwelling looked like two attached boxcars, the austere simplicity broken only by a small awning over one door. However primitive the exterior, the snug house was solidly built out of timber from local forests. The main floor had two bedrooms and a living room, topped by a low sleeping loft and attic storage room; the little attached building served as a barn and woodshed. (This bucolic birth site of the future kerosene king was probably lit by sperm oil or tallow candles.) The grounds were much more ample than the house, as the fifty-acre lot included an apple orchard and a trout-filled stretch of Owego Creek, which bubbled along the bottom of the property.

Before long, Big Bill roughly disabused Eliza of any high-flown romantic notions she might have had about matrimony. Far from renouncing his girlfriend, Nancy Brown, he brought her into the cramped house as a “housekeeper” and began having children, alternately, by wife and mistress. In 1838, Eliza gave birth to their first child, Lucy, followed a few months later by Nancy's first illegitimate daughter, Clorinda. On the night of July 8, 1839, Bill and Eliza again summoned the midwife, this time to deliver a boy, who came into the world in a bare front bedroom measuring eight by ten feet. This child, born during Martin Van Buren's presidency and destined to become the country's foremost capitalist, would survive into the second term of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Like many other future magnates—Andrew Carnegie (born in 1835), Jay Gould (1836), and J. Pierpont Morgan (1837)—he was born in the late 1830s and would therefore come to maturity on the eve of the post–Civil War industrial boom. Several months after John's birth, Nancy Brown gave birth to a second daughter, Cornelia, which meant that Bill, lord of his own harem, managed to sire four children under one roof in just two years. Thus, the fiercely moralistic John Davison Rockefeller (appropriately named after Eliza's sober father) was sandwiched tightly between two illegitimate sisters, born into a situation steeped in sin.

Eliza couldn't have felt very comfortable with her in-laws. In general, the Rockefellers were a hard-drinking hillbilly clan, sociable and funny, fond of music, liquor, and uproarious good times, and adhering to a coarse frontier morality. As the strong matriarch, Lucy was the conspicuous exception, and Eliza drew close to her while frowning upon many of her more dissipated in-laws. During the Richford period, Bill's younger brother, Miles Avery Rockefeller, deserted his wife and decamped to South Dakota with Ella Brussee, a young woman who had done domestic work for Eliza. In a move that prefigured a future stratagem for Bill, Miles entered into a bigamous marriage with Ella and adopted his middle name as his new surname. Such re-created lives were common at a time when America had a vast, unmapped frontier and numerous sanctuaries from the law.

For a callow farm girl fresh from home, Eliza proved unexpectedly tolerant of Nancy Brown. Contrary to what one might expect, she pitied this intruder, perhaps considering the cramped ménage à trois fit punishment for having flouted her father's advice. As her niece observed, “Aunt Eliza loved her husband and she liked poor Nancy. But Aunt Eliza's brothers came down and made William put Nancy away.” ¹² In this period of Eliza's marriage, Mr. Davison is conspicuous by his absence, leaving one to wonder whether he had temporarily washed his hands of his disobedient daughter or whether, cowed by guilt and embarrassment, she had hidden her troubles from him. By one account, when Nancy grew quarrelsome after Bill's marriage, he seized the chance to expel his shrewish mistress from the packed household. Heeding the pleas from the Davisons, he posted Nancy and the two daughters to live with her parents in nearby Harford Mills. Family legend claims that Bill, who had a weak but not entirely dormant conscience, secretly deposited clothing bundles on her doorstep. Fortunately, the years with Bill didn't blight Nancy's life, for she married a man named Burlingame, bore other children, and furnished her first two daughters with a respectable upbringing. ¹³ From the skimpy documentary evidence, we know that Clorinda died young while Cornelia grew up into a tall, smart, attractive schoolteacher with a telling resemblance to Big Bill. Sometimes he acceded to her demands for money, but there were strict limits to Bill's generosity, and he would rebuff her when she became too clamorous. Cornelia married a man named Sexton and remained in the Richford area, but only a few local residents and Rockefeller relatives knew that she was John D.'s half-sister. ¹⁴ To her credit, Cornelia never tried to cash in on her kinship with the world's richest man, perhaps because it would unavoidably have advertised her illegitimacy. It is impossible to determine whether Rockefeller ever knew of the existence of his two illegitimate half-sisters.

The Nancy Brown affair wasn't the only indignity visited upon Eliza, for she was often abandoned by Bill during her three cheerless years in Richford. He remained a restless and defiant individualist who preferred life beyond the pale of society. Early in the marriage, he stayed put for a while, operating a small sawmill on Michigan Hill and dealing in salt, fur, horses, and timber, but he soon resumed the footloose life of a peddler, his trips cloaked in unfathomable mystery. Like a fugitive, he would depart furtively under cover of night and return after dark, weeks or months later, flinging pebbles at the window to signal his return. To tide over his family in his absence, he arranged for credit at the general store. “Give my family anything they want while I'm away,” he instructed Chauncey Rich, whose father, Ezekiel, had founded Richford, “and when I come back I'll settle.” ¹⁵ Never knowing when this credit might be canceled, Eliza became extremely frugal and drilled her children in thrifty maxims such as “Willful waste makes woeful want.”

When Bill returned home, a sudden, smiling apparition, he would be riding new horses, wearing fine clothes, and brandishing a thick wad of crisp bills. Before going to see Eliza, he would pay off Chauncey Rich so that he could confidently tell her everything was now squared away at the store. His seductive charm melted away whatever hostility his absence had aroused; it took time before his extended absences and repeated betrayals burned the romance out of her system, leaving a residue of stoic resignation. For the moment, whatever her anxieties or loneliness, she seemed girlishly lovelorn during his trips, still smitten with her flimflam man. “Just look at that moon!” she once sighed to a cousin when Bill was on the road. “Is William, miles and miles away, perhaps looking at it, too, at this moment? I do hope he is.” ¹⁶

On the road, Bill improvised ever more fanciful ways to make money. A crack shot, he made the circuit of shooting contests, often bringing home prize money. A glad-handing huckster, he sold rings and other knickknacks at fantastic markups. Mostly, though, he styled himself a “botanic physician” or “herbal doctor”—euphemisms faithfully parroted by some Rockefeller descendants. At a time when physicians still resorted to bleeding, blistering, and violent purgatives, and many rustic areas lacked access to medical care, such traveling salesmen filled a vacuum. Nevertheless, in William Avery Rockefeller one clearly detects the blarney and easy conviviality of the mountebank. Sometimes he peddled bottles of home-brewed elixir or patent medicines bought from druggists, but he scored his greatest success with natural medicines culled from Lucy's physic bush. Though his mother had a sincere interest in herbal remedies, Bill would grossly distort or exaggerate their properties. For instance, he harvested small, purplish berries from her garden that resembled small pills and would hawk them to farmers’ wives as a sovereign remedy for stomach troubles. His sales pitch went even further, for, as a Richford neighbor reported many years later, “he would warn them solemnly that they must not be given to a woman in a delicate condition, for they would surely cause abortion. Thereupon he would sell his pills at a high price. They were perfectly harmless, and he broke no law in selling them. He had remarkable imagination.” ¹⁷

The midnight rambles and peculiar commerce of William Rockefeller mystified the Richford citizenry. He both fired and troubled the imagination, generating so much gossip and speculation that they christened him Devil Bill. Rumors raced periodically through town that he was a gambler, a horse thief, a desperado. Though he seemed to operate on the edge of the law, people were delighted by his bluff humor and tall tales, if dismayed by his treatment of his family. “When he finally succeeded as a peddler he would dress up like a prince and kept everyone wondering,” said one town resident who participated in the guessing game about Bill's manifold sources of income. “He laughed a great deal and enjoyed the speculation he caused. He was not a drinking man and treated his family well when he was home, but everyone knew that he neglected the family by leaving them to shift for themselves for long months at a time.” ¹⁸ He frustrated those neighbors who ached for his comeuppance. After one prolonged absence of several months, when Eliza's bill at Chauncey Rich's topped a thousand dollars, the scuttlebutt said that Devil Bill had been arrested. Instead, like a country squire, he came trotting into town in a magnificent carriage, seated behind a team of splendid horses, diamonds glittering in his shirtfront. At the general store, he made a point of settling the tab with large bills. After such trips, Bill gathered friends and family around the dinner table and, while wolfing down heaps of food, would regale them with picaresque tales of his adventures among the western settlers and Indians. Devil Bill had a knack for weaving his experiences into spellbinding narratives, making Eliza and the children vicarious partners in his travels. As the chief casualty of Bill's peregrinations, Eliza received sympathy from her neighbors, who felt she was being abused by her husband. Yet she remained loyal to him, declined many opportunities to denigrate him, and carried herself with considerable dignity. ¹⁹

However overblown the frequent biographical claims about John D. Rockefeller's impoverished childhood have been, several people testified to the family's squalor in Richford. “I do not remember ever to have seen more pitiably neglected children,” one neighbor observed. “Their clothing was old and tattered, and they looked dirty and hungry.” ²⁰ It was a measure of Eliza's desperation that she sought relief in the home of her brother-in-law, Jacob Rockefeller, a bawdy, jolly, not infrequently besotted man. An oft-told tale about Jacob recounted how he won a five-dollar bet by staying sober during an entire trip to town. ²¹ Jacob's kindly wife became a second mother to the two toddlers, Lucy and John, darning their clothes and knitting them mittens from woolen homespun.

In this nightmarish situation, Eliza seemed to draw strength from adversity. One Richford native praised her as “a most excellent woman, but one who bore too heavy a burden at that time properly to look after her children. Her husband was away for long periods, and she had to look after their farm of sixty acres and try to make it pay their expenses. She did not know at what time the shopkeepers of the village might shut down on her credit, and she worked very hard.” ²²

When John D. later evoked his idyllic, sunlit boyhood in upstate New York, he blotted out Richford from these reveries. Just three when he left there, he retained only a few hazy memories of the place. “I remember very clearly the brook that ran near the front of the house and how careful I had to be to keep far away from it. I remember my mother vaguely at Richford and my grandmother, who lived half a mile or so up the hill.” ²³ One notes that Rockefeller's earliest memory was associated with caution and that he edited out the absentee father and inebriated grandfather while retaining the strong, enduring mother and grandmother. He always possessed an unusual, self-protective capacity to suppress unpleasant memories and keep alive those things that fortified his resolve.

As best we can tell, Rockefeller knew nothing of Nancy Brown and the seamy side of Richford existence, yet he carried through life a vague sense of an infernal place. “I shudder to think of what I should have been if I had remained in Richford all my life,” he later confided. “There were many men who hunt a little, fish a little, and drink whiskey a little, and only attain a little success in life, and all for the lack of a little religion.” ²⁴ Of his family's decision to leave Richford, Rockefeller offered an economic explanation that probably served as the standard cover story of his childhood: stingy soil. “The country there is beautiful,” Rockefeller would say, “but the settlers wasted their energy in trying to get the stumps out of the ground, and trying to make crops grow in the poor soil.” ²⁵ The true reason, of course, was Eliza's horror at the town's low moral tone, as reflected by its single church; she was probably also eager to remove the children from the influence of her boisterous, drunken Rockefeller in-laws and expose them to the steadier Davisons. By no coincidence, the Rockefellers moved to Moravia, three miles from the Davison farm, where Eliza could enjoy her father's presence during her husband's habitual absences.