Biography
Archbold was born at Leesburg, Ohio, and educated in public schools. He moved to Pennsylvania by 1864.
In 1864 he went to the north-west Pennsylvania oil fields and spent eleven years in the oil industry there. When John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company began buying up refiners in this oil-rich region, many independent refiners felt squeezed out, and Archbold was among Standard's harshest and loudest critics.
However, Archbold was subsequently recruited by Rockefeller to Standard Oil where he became a director and served as its vice-president and president until its dissolution in 1911.
In 1885, Archbold purchased a large mansion in Tarrytown, New York. The estate, called Cedar Cliff, was located at 279 S. Broadway just across from the Carmelite Transfiguration Church.
In 1886, Archbold became a member of the board of trustees of Syracuse University, and was the board’s president from 1893 until his death in 1916. From 1893-1914, he contributed nearly $6,000,000 for eight buildings, including the full cost of the Archbold Stadium (opened 1907, demolished 1978; the Carrier Dome was built on this site), Sims Hall (men's dormitory, 1907), the Archbold Gymnasium (1909, nearly destroyed by fire in 1947, but still in use), and the oval athletic field. The entrance to the school's Hall of Languages building is inscribed "John D. Archbold College of Liberal Arts," but this is not the official name of Syracuse's liberal arts college.
In 1915 an attempt was made by anarchists and Industrial Workers of the World radicals to assassinate him at Cedar Cliff by planting a large dynamite bomb at the entrance to the estate. The bomb, which failed to go off, was discovered by Archbold's gardener. Police suspected that the attempted bombing was precipitated by the execution by firing squad of 'Joe Hill', alias Joseph Hillstrom in Salt Lake City, Utah the day before. Joe Hill was an IWW member, songwriter, and labor organizer who had been convicted of murder.
Archbold died of complications from appendicitis in 1916.
Read more about this topic: John Dustin Archbold
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