Ancestors

Eli Emory Hendrick

Eli Emory Hendrick was born at Plymouth, Wayne County, Michigan, on 9 May 1832. His father, Peter Hendrick, had come to Michigan from Pennsylvania by way of Ohio and cleared land in Wayne County. His mother, Maria, died in November 1833, when Eli was eighteen months old. He had an older sister, Eliza Jane, and an older brother, Edmund. His father married again, and a half-brother, Franklin, was born in 1836.

At eleven he was carrying the U.S. mail on horseback between Plymouth, Ann Arbor and Wayne. The 1850 census lists him, aged eighteen, in his father's household at Plymouth. He worked as a clerk and then as a wood-turner with his brother, making hay rakes and barrel staves. In 1853, at Plymouth, he married Caroline P. Hackett, a New York-born woman two years younger than he was.

The panic of 1857 ended the turning business. Eli went into stave-making in western Michigan and ran a cooperage, a barrel works, at Davenport, Iowa. Then he sold a governor for steam engines, the device that keeps an engine running at a steady speed. His first daughter, Mary Emma, was born in Michigan about 1860.

In the winter of 1861-62 he bought a recipe for lubricating oil for ten dollars. It proved worthless, so he worked out a formula of his own. He sold it to a rolling mill in Toronto for fifty dollars. Then he went to the Pennsylvania Coal Company at Scranton, whose gravity railroad carried coal over the mountains from its mines. He proved to the company that his oil cut their oil bill in half. Galena oil followed.

Oil stocks boomed in 1864. Eli was involved in the Great Northern Oil Company, and when he found its promoters quietly selling their own shares, he sold his too. He built refineries at Franklin, Pennsylvania, in the oil country, and at Carbondale, in Lackawanna County. His half-brother Franklin drowned in the Allegheny River at Franklin in 1864. His second daughter, Lillian Belle, was born in Pennsylvania in 1865. In 1879 he sold the refineries to Standard Oil for about $100,000, plus $10,000 a year for ten years, and spent two years superintending Standard's refineries in New York.

His second business began at Carbondale. In 1876 he started punching metal screens there, and by 1879 he had a machine shop. It grew into the Hendrick Manufacturing Company, organized in 1885 and incorporated in 1901. The company made perforated metal screens, sheets punched through with holes, and by World War II it was the largest maker of them in the country. Eli also held patents on drying gunpowder, on refrigeration and on recovering paraffin, and he was president of the Los Angeles Ice and Cold Storage Company.

In 1893 Carbondale elected him mayor, and he served one term. His house stood on about ten acres known as Hendrick's Park. The 1880 census found the household there: Eli, oil refiner; Caroline; the two daughters; and Caroline's sister Mary A. Grow with her husband, the Rev. W. B. Grow, a Baptist minister.

Both daughters were educated at home by a private tutor, Professor William T. Colville of Kenyon College. Mary Emma went to Vassar and married A. P. Trautwein, president of the Carbondale Machine Company. Lillian went to the Packer Institute in Brooklyn and married Professor Colville himself. By 1897 Colville was treasurer of the Hendrick company "and the confidential assistant of his father-in-law."

Caroline died at the Hotel Hanover in Philadelphia on 13 March 1895, with Eli beside her. He died at Carbondale on 25 October 1909, aged 77. He was buried in Maplewood Cemetery, Carbondale, where Caroline already lay. Their remains were later moved, with those of the Rev. and Mrs. Grow, to Willow View Cemetery in Clifford Township, Susquehanna County. There a rock-faced HENDRICK family monument stands over the plot, and his flat stone reads "ELI E. HENDRICK / 1832 - 1909."

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Cite: Heirology, "Eli Emory Hendrick (1832-1909)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/eli-emory-hendrick-1832-1909-b1a030.