Biography | John D. Rockefeller — Job Day on Merwin Street

On the morning of 26 September 1855 a sixteen-year-old walked into a three-story brick warehouse on Merwin Street, a block from the Cuyahoga, and asked for work.

The firm was Hewitt & Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers on Cleveland's docks. The [Rockefeller Archive Center](https://rockarch.org/resources/about-the-rockefellers/john-d-rockefeller-sr/) identifies his initial position as assistant bookkeeper.

No wage was mentioned. He hung his coat and sat down at the ledger the same afternoon.

Three months later Tuttle handed him fifty dollars for the trial period. On 1 January 1856 the pay became twenty-five dollars a month as assistant bookkeeper. He rose to cashier and bookkeeper before starting a commission-business partnership in 1859.

He kept that date for the rest of his life. In 1913 a flag still went up at Forest Hill on the anniversary. He called it Job Day and treated it as more important than his birthday.

The building is gone. The existing point refers to the Heritage Park area near Merwin Avenue; it should not be read as a verified footprint of the demolished warehouse.

What the job taught him was not oil. It was freight rates, credit, the difference between a posted price and a collected one, and how a warehouse on a river keeps score. Cleveland in 1855 was a transfer point between the canal, the lake, and the new railroads. A boy who wrote a clean hand could see the whole Midwest move through one set of books.

In March 1859 he left to start a commission house with Maurice B. Clark. The oil years came later. The habit of counting began on this street.

If you walk Merwin today you will find a park, a river, and restaurants where produce once sat in barrels. The warehouse does not survive. The date does.

Photo: Rockefeller at eighteen, public domain, from Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, via Wikimedia Commons.