Standard Oil

Standard Oil was an American oil refining and marketing company founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller and partners in Cleveland, Ohio, which grew through aggressive consolidation into a trust controlling most American oil refining by the 1880s. Its dominance made it a central target of the antitrust movement, and in 1911 the United States Supreme Court, in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, found it guilty of anticompetitive practices and ordered it broken into 34 independent companies, several of which became the ancestors of later firms such as ExxonMobil and Chevron.