Henry Clay Folger

Henry Clay Folger Jr. was an American oil industry executive who spent his career rising through the Standard Oil organization. Born in 1857, he joined Charles Pratt and Company, a refinery allied with Standard Oil, as a clerk in 1881, and his skill with numbers and data analysis carried him steadily upward, becoming secretary of Standard Oil's manufacturing committee in 1886 and its chairman by 1899. After the 1911 Supreme Court decision dissolved Standard Oil into competing companies, Folger became president of Standard Oil Company of New York, known as Socony, and served as the first chairman of its board of trustees until retiring in 1928. He died in 1930. Folger devoted the wealth his oil career provided to assembling the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's First Folio editions, which became the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.