Frederick Taylor Gates

Frederick Taylor Gates (1853–1929) was an American Baptist clergyman, educator, and the principal business and philanthropic advisor to the major oil industrialist and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Sr., from 1891 to 1923.

Frederick Taylor Gates, son of Granville and Sarah Jane (Bowers) Gates, was born 2 July 1853 in Maine, Broome County, New York. Granville was a Baptist minister. Frederick's neighbor and uncle was Cyrus Gates a cartographer, abolitionist and local judge. He graduated from the University of Rochester in 1877 and from the Rochester Theological Seminary in 1880. From 1880 to 1888, he served as pastor of the Central Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He left the ministry and was appointed the secretary of the newly formed American Baptist Education Society where he championed a Baptist university in Chicago to fill a void that existed in Baptist education.

On January 21, 1889, Gates met the lifetime Baptist, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. He proved to be central to the suggestion and subsequent design of the funding plans for the creation by Rockefeller, Sr. of the Baptist University of Chicago; he subsequently served for many years as a trustee on its board.

Gates then became Rockefeller's key philanthropic and business adviser, working in the newly established family office in Standard Oil headquarters at 26 Broadway, where he oversaw Rockefeller's investments in a series of investments in many companies but not in his personal stock in the Standard Oil Trust.

From 1892 onwards, faced with his ever expanding investments and real estate holdings, Rockefeller Sr. recognized the need for professional advice and so he formed a four-member committee, later including his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to manage his money, and nominated Gates as its head and as his senior business adviser. In this capacity Gates steered Rockefeller Sr. money predominantly to syndicates arranged by the investment house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and, to a lesser extent, the house of J. P. Morgan.

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