Interesting reading about Looney-Goodyear family connections. Regards, ///SteveL/// ==================== Posted as found on the web at: http://ah.bfn.org/a/forestL/goodyr/ Frank and Charles Goodyear: Their progenitor was Dr. Jabez Bradley Goodyear, born in 1816, in Sempronius, New York. He dropped the Jabez at the time of his marriage. His first occupation was that of tailor. In his mid-twenties, he spent two years traveling through the South, supporting himself by his trade before returning to New York where he was induced by his uncle, Dr. Miles Goodyear, president of the Cortland County, Medical Society, to start practicing medicine as early as 1843. Jabez graduated from Geneva Medical College in 1845 and married Esther Permelia Kinne. She had been born in Cortland in 1822 of New England stock, including an ancestor, who, in the best tradition of earnest Puritans, had come to America via Leyden, Holland, in 1635. They lived in Virgil but moved to a farm near Cortland where there two sons were born, Charles Waterhouse <http://ah.bfn.org/a/del/888/index.html> in 1846 and Frank Henry in 1849. Frank Goodyear Frank was a standard nineteenth century tycoon. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Holland in Erie County. As a boy he worked at Root & Keating's tannery as did brother Charles. Frank attended the district school and East Aurora Academy when his father was practicing medicine there. Later Frank taught in the district school. He then went to Looneyville in Alden as a bookkeeper for Robert Looney, a native of the Island of Man, who ran a farm, sawmill, general store, and feed and grain business and also owned vast timberlands in Pennsylvania. In 1871 Frank married the boss's daughter, twenty-year old Josephine. Next year her father died. Frank had already moved to Buffalo where he set up a coal and lumber business with help from the ubiquitous Elbridge Spaulding <http://ah.bfn.org/h/spauld/tc/tc.html>. Frank had arranged that Josephine's share in her father's estate should be timberlands. He threw himself into the lumber business, setting up several mills in his timberlands along the Western New York & Pennsylvania to Buffalo. In 1884 he bought more land in Potter County and built a sawmill at a town he renamed Austin, which became headquarters of his empire. He initiated temporary railroads, called tramways, to carry logs to his mills instead of floating them down on streams. His frantic pace brought on a nervous breakdown, during which he induced Charles to form E H. & C. W Goodyear and took a European rest cure. The story of their joint activities is that of two brothers who did not get along. The Achilles heel of the Goodyear empire was Frank's decision to expand the railroads servicing his sawmills into an interstate road, the Buffalo & Susquehanna, to link his mills and the coal mines in western Pennsylvania with the Buffalo &Susquehanna Iron Company <http://ah.bfn.org/h/lacksteel/index.html> which the Goodyears had formed in 1902 to operate blast furnaces south of Buffalo on Lake Erie. Two freighters, the /Frank H. Goodyear/ and the /S. M. Clement/, were built to carry ore from the company's mines in Minnesota and Michigan down to Buffalo. This was vertical integration, but it duplicated existing services with an inefficient railroad: