So long, 2025! The clock doesn't strike midnight every day, so we're celebrating this special occasion with a January 1939 issue of The Sohioan, a magazine published by the Standard Oil Company (Ohio) for its subsidiaries' and divisions' 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.
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, and are an incomplete sampling of the publication's history, but have been digitized in their entirety.
A typical issue of the magazine contained updates about the lives of employees as well as news about corporate affairs and industrial relations issues. This issue included news about recent staff departures and arrivals, local news, celebrations, industrial accident reports, corporate retrospectives, industrial recreation opportunities, announcements about births and deaths among employees and their families, employee vacations, as well as office jokes and gossip.
To view Hagley Library's holdings of this publication, click here to view them online now in our Digital Archives.