Photograph of John D. Rockefeller walking with his signature below the photo on signature paper taped inside matboard.  The second photo is a cutout of Rockefeller from a publication and is provided as art reference only.  Back side has an image of another personality, unrelated.  

John D. Rockefeller was an American industrialist and philanthropist, founder of the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry and was the first great U.S. business trust.  After attending and later dropping out of Cleveland’s Central High School, he took a single business class at Folsom Mercantile College.  Working as a bookkeeper, he established his first enterprise, a commission business dealing in hay, grain, meats, and other goods. Sensing the commercial potential of the expanding oil production in western Pennsylvania in the early 1860s, he built his first oil refinery, near Cleveland, in 1863. Within two years it was the largest refinery in the area, and thereafter Rockefeller devoted himself exclusively to the oil business.  He also hired a stand-in soldier to serve for him in the Civil War as this practice was allowed by the U.S. government.  It granted draftees the ability to offer up a substitute.  He handed out dimes to strangers and it was said that he did this in part to instill habits of savings and thrift in people.  Many of them hung on to their famous “Rockefeller dimes” as a keepsake.  He donated over a half-billion dollars in his lifetime.