Stephen V. Harkness.html



Stephen Vanderburgh Harkness (November 18, 1818 – March 6, 1888) was an American businessman from Cleveland, Ohio, who invested as a silent partner with oil titan John D. Rockefeller, Sr. in the founding of Standard Oil.

Born in Fayette, New York, he was the son of Dr. David Harkness and his first wife who died in 1820. His father relocated to the Western Reserve region of Northeast Ohio, settling in Milan where he remarried to Elizabeth Caldwell Morrison. David Harkness died in 1825 and his widow later retured to Seneca County, New York where she remarried to the Reverend Isaac Flagler, a Presbyterian minister in Milton, New York with whom she had a son, Henry Flagler. David Harkness had a younger brother, Lamon G. Harkness, who too was a doctor but who became a successful businessman in Bellevue, Ohio.

At age twenty-one, after finishing his apprenticeship as a harnessmaker, Stephen Harkness moved to Bellevue, Ohio. Harkness worked for a time in harnessmaking but in 1855 set up a distillery in Monroeville, Ohio. Very successful, within a few years he was a organized a bank and in 1864 formed a partnership with Wm. Halsey Doan to provide crude oil to refineries that made him a rich man. In 1866 he sold his Monroeville businessses and moved to live in Cleveland. There, he joined Henry Flager in investing in Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler, the forerunner of Standard Oil. Harkness becasme its second largest shareholder whose success made him enormously wealthy. Although Stephen Harkness was a silent partner, he was a member of Standard Oil's Board of Directors until his death in 1888.

Stephen Harkness married Laura Osborne in 1842 with whom he had sons, Lamon and William, and in 1853 to Anna M. Richardson. After his death, his wife, Anna M. Harkness, established the Commonwealth Fund which is a foundation dedicated to the improvement of healthcare. His son, Edward Harkness, was also a noted philanthropist. His sons (Anna was the mother of the second, Charles, and the third, Edward) helped found and sustain The Third Society, later known as Wolf's Head Society, at Yale University, in 1883. William, the eldest, was a member of the Class of 1881, Charles 1883 and Edward 1897. Including Anna, the family made possible the residential college system, the Memorial Quadrangle, Harkness Tower, William L. Harkness Hall, and the new or second hall for Wolf's Head Society in New Haven, CT.

Stephen V. Harkness is buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.

External links

• Biographical detail from Case Western Reserve University

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