Charles Pratt and Company

Charles Pratt and Company was an oil company that was formed in Brooklyn, New York, in the United States by Charles Pratt and Henry H. Rogers in 1867. It became part of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil organization in 1874.

Pratt, born in Watertown, Massachusetts, had come to New York around 1850-1851, where he worked for a company specializing in paints and whale-oil products. Pratt became a pioneer of the natural oil industry, and established his kerosene refinery Astral Oil Works in Brooklyn. Pratt's product later gave rise to the slogan, "The holy lamps of Tibet are primed with Astral Oil."

In the mid-1860s, Pratt met two aspiring young men, Charles Ellis and Henry H. Rogers in western Pennsylvania. Pratt had bought whale-oil from Charles Ellis in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, the young men's hometown. He purchased the entire future output of their small venture, Wamsutta Oil Refinery, at McClintocksville, near Oil City at a fixed price.

Ellis and Rogers had no wells and were dependent upon purchasing crude oil to refine and sell to Pratt. A few months later, crude oil prices suddenly increased due to manipulation by speculators. The young entrepreneurs and their Wamsutta Oil Refinery struggled to try to live up to their contract with Pratt, but soon their surplus was wiped out. Before long, they were heavily in debt to him.

Charles Ellis gave up, but in 1866, Henry Rogers went to Pratt in New York, and told him he would take personal responsibility for the entire debt. This so impressed Pratt that he immediately hired him for his own organization. In the next few year Rogers became, in the words of Elbert Hubbard, Pratt's "hands and feet and eyes and ears" (Little Journeys to the Homes, 1909).

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