Biography | John D. Rockefeller — Born on Michigan Hill, Where the House Burned

The farmhouse is gone. What stands on Michigan Hill, four miles north of Richford, New York, is woods, a marker, and a pin.

John Davison Rockefeller was born here on 8 July 1839, the second child of William Avery Rockefeller and Eliza Davison Rockefeller.

Local accounts associate Michigan Hill's name with his grandfather Godfrey's intended westward journey.

The anecdote should not be treated as a verbatim record of his words.

The first house was a small unpainted clapboard dwelling on about fifty acres. It burned later. The Rockefeller family gave the surrounding land to New York State in 1980 so the hill would stay public.

William Avery was not a farmer. He was an itinerant trader who sold patent medicines and was often away. Eliza ran the household and the accounts. Those two facts mattered more to the boy than the scenery.

The family left Michigan Hill in 1843 for Moravia, then Owego, then Cleveland in 1853. Richford was a stage stop in hardscrabble country southeast of Ithaca, not a cradle of capital.

What the later myth flattened into "born poor on a farm" was more precise. He was born on a hill named for a journey that stopped short, in a house that did not survive, to a mother who kept the books and a father who did not stay.

Stand at the pin and you will not find a reconstructed parlor. You will find the same kind of second-growth woods that swallowed most of Tioga County's small farms. That absence is the point of the site.

The man who later counted every dime started on ground his family could not keep as a house, only as a name on a hill.

Photo: public-domain portrait of Rockefeller at eighteen, from his own Random Reminiscences, via Wikimedia Commons. The [New York Public Library](https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9b51c6ed-b31f-a26c-e040-e00a18061941) does hold an image catalogued as the house in which he was born; the attached photograph is a portrait.