Frank Seiberling and the Birth of Goodyear

In the summer of eighteen ninety-eight, Frank Seiberling was approaching forty years old, unemployed, and running low on options. He had a wife, three children, and no prospect of work. Then he heard about a vacant strawboard factory in East Akron.

Seiberling borrowed thirty-five hundred dollars from his brother-in-law to buy the property. He put in another ten thousand dollars to equip it. And on August twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety-eight, he incorporated the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, naming it for Charles Goodyear, the man who had discovered vulcanization, the process of hardening rubber with heat and sulfur. Goodyear had died penniless in eighteen sixty. Seiberling gave him a legacy.

The first products were bicycle tires, carriage tires, rubber horseshoe pads, and poker chips. The automobile changed everything. Henry Ford was building cars. Seiberling's company was building tires. By nineteen sixteen, less than two decades after Seiberling had borrowed money to buy a secondhand factory, Goodyear was the largest tire producer in the world.

The company's growth reshaped Akron. Seiberling built Goodyear Heights beginning in nineteen twelve, a planned neighborhood of curving streets and craftsman bungalows designed to house his workers and keep them close to the factory. Landscape architect Warren Manning laid out the tree-lined blocks. The neighborhood was so thoughtfully designed that it later qualified as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places.

Seiberling himself lost control of Goodyear in a financial crisis in nineteen twenty-one and had to start over. He founded Seiberling Rubber Company and kept building. But the company he created on borrowed money endured. Goodyear's headquarters remains in Akron today, still one of the largest tire companies on earth.