Business
Dr. David M. Harkness had a younger brother, Dr. Lamon G. Harkness, who was also 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 with his uncle Lamon. Stephen worked for a time in harnessmaking but in 1855 he set up a distillery in Monroeville, Ohio that was a success. In 1864 Stephen formed a partnership with Wm. Halsey Doan to provide crude oil to refineries and that made him a rich man.
In 1866 he sold his Monroeville businesses and moved to Millionaires Row in Cleveland. He organized a bank, The Euclid Avenue National Bank and was president of Belt Mining Company. There, he also invested heavily with Henry Flagler and JD Rockefeller in Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler, the firm that became Standard Oil. Harkness became its second largest shareholder; the company's 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 was active in the development of Cleveland, Ohio. He collaborated with Charles Brush and JD Rockefeller to build the Cleveland Arcade one of the first enclosed shopping malls in the United States, modeled after the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Italy.
Read more about this topic: Stephen V. Harkness
Famous quotes containing the word business:
“Is there something in trade that dessicates and flattens out, that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there is. It is not due to trade but to intensity of self- seeking, combined with narrowness of occupation.... Business has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life,—chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is hard to say which is the greatest fool: he who tells the whole truth, or he who tells no truth at all. Character is as necessary in business as in trade. No man can deceive often in either.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)