Diamond Tires – the firm I wrote about last week – sold to B.F. Goodrich for $45 million.

The actual B.F. Goodrich? He’s from Chautauqua County.

But, ironically, he would have died before the company bearing his name ever manufactured a car tire.

“Dr. Benjamin Franklin Goodrich established the first rubber company west of the Allegheny Mountains, leading to Akron, Ohio becoming the rubber capital of the world,” an archived version of goodrich.com explained.

B.F. Goodrich’s grave at the Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, NY. Photo by Josh Cotton

But there’s more to the story before Goodrich became a rubber baron.

Goodrich was born in Nov. 1841 in Ripley, NY.

“Before becoming involved in the rubber industry, Goodrich attended Cleveland Medical College, known today as Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, where he specialized in surgery,” according to the Ohio Department of Veterans Services.

“Captain Goodrich then served as a battlefront surgeon for the Union Army in the Civil War. After the war, he left medicine and became involved in other pursuits, including working in some of Pennsylvania’s oilfields and opening a real estate office in New York City before reaching an agreement with Charles Goodyear to buy the Hudson River Rubber Company in partnership with J.P. Morris in 1869.”

That Goodyear name should sound familiar.

“The following year, Goodrich accepted an offer of $13,600 from the citizens of Akron to relocate his business there, founding what became the B.F. Goodrich Company in 1880,” that article explains.

According to Lake View Cemetery, where Goodrich is buried, Goodrich married Mary Marvin of Jamestown.

Findagrave information notes that the couple had four children but only two survived to adulthood – Isabella and David, who served with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War.

According to the archived version of Goodrich.com, Goodrich’s company became the first rubber company located west of the Allegheny Mountains. Its first product? A cotton-covered fire hose.

Why Akron? According to a WOSU public media article, Goodrich was lured to the city about 40 miles south of Cleveland by a pitch from the Akron Board of Trade. The city had a steady supply of labor, abundant access to water and railroads.

“The Board of Trade helped finance Goodrich’s move to Akron,” that article explained. “His company was soon making hoses, then bicycle tires and eventually thousands of rubber products. Just as the computer industry would flock to Silicon Valley a century later, the rubber industry began to grow in and around Akron as B.F. Goodrich became more and more successful.”

According to the Lake View Cemetery website, that list of products included belts for machinery, bicycle tires and bumpers for billiards tables.

Goodrich’s was an age of technological explosion.

A newspaper clipping I found online from UC Riverside, states that Goodrich was “said to be the first that was ever used to communicate with any manufacturing company…. This telephone is on a line connecting the original factory of the B. F. Goodrich Company at Akron, Ohio, with the home of Dr. Goodrich.”

Another source said that the phone was a gift from a friend.

That friend’s name? Alexander Graham Bell.

Goodrich died at the age of 46 in 1888 in Manitou Springs, Co. He was returned to Jamestown, where he was laid to rest in his wife’s family’s plot.

Henry Ford’s Model A wouldn’t be invented for another 15 years.

The Akron Times-Democrat announced the death in the Aug. 8, 1888 edition under the headline “A Prominent Citizen Gone.”

“News reached this city on Friday of the death of Dr. B.F. Goodrich, president of the Akron Rubber Works, which occurred early Friday morning at Manitou Springs, Col., where the Doctor had been in hopes of improving his health. He had been in ill health for sometime past and had recently returned from a European trip made with the same object in view; but the nature of the disease, lung trouble, rendered medical aid unavailing and change of climate also proved useless.

After the close of the war he engaged in the real estate business in New York but removed to Akron in 1870 to commence the manufacture of rubber goods. It is needless to say that from a rather small and unpretentious business in 1870 the Rubber Works have grown to be one of the largest of their kind in the entire industry and one of this city’s most substantial enterprises.

The success of the institution has been very largely due to the business push and tireless energy of Dr. Goodrich, who has been prominently identified with the city’s material advancement ever since his residence here.

As a citizen he was universally honored and respected and his death will cause sincere mourning in an unusually large circle of friends and acquaintances. He leaves a wife and three children.

The final dissolution came very suddenly, if reports can be trusted; and it is said that the day before his death he made a trip to Denver and returned somewhat worn out by the exertion.

The remains are on the way east and will be interred at Jamestown, N.Y.