Leaves are dropping this November morning, and so are new digital collections. One of our new additions is a small collection of magazines published by the Standard Oil Company (Ohio) for its current and former employees, as well as dealers, distributors, and stockholders.
Standard Oil Company (Ohio), or Sohio, was created out of the 1911 antitrust dissolution of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Prior to the dissolution of the Standard Oil Company, the company's Ohio operations controlled up to twenty-one of Cleveland's twenty-six refineries, while the company as a whole controlled up to 90% of the nation's refining capacity and output.
In the aftermath of the disbanding of the company, the newly formed Standard Oil Company (Ohio) became an independent corporation that managed marketing operations and service stations in Ohio, as well as a single refinery in Cleveland, but held no oil reserves or pipelines. The company continued under this model until it was acquired by British Petroleum, a merger than began in 1968 with a 25% controlling interest and was completed in 1987.
A typical issue of The Sohioan contained updates about the lives of employees as well as news about corporate affairs and industrial relations issues. The magazine began publication in 1928 and remained in publication until at least 1980. Hagley Library's holdings of The Sohioan date from 1932 to 1945. They are an incomplete sampling of the publication's history, but have been digitized in their entirety.
To view this collection in our Digital Archives online now, click here!