Episode 2 of 2
Signing of the Standard Oil Trust Agreement
- When
- January 2, 1882
- Where
- United States
Forty-one investors signed the Standard Oil Trust Agreement on January 2, 1882, pooling securities from forty companies into a single holding agency managed by nine trustees.
The agreement created a single holding agency managed by nine trustees, including John and William Rockefeller. This structure allowed the consolidation of industrial activity across state lines, bypassing restrictions on out-of-state corporate holdings. The origins of the trust lay in the operations of the Standard Oil Company (Ohio), founded in 1870.
Sources
- Standard Oil Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-30
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.