Joseph Crocker "Joe" Sibley was an American oil refiner and congressman from Pennsylvania.
Background
Joseph Crocker Sibley was born on Feburary 18, 1850 in Friendship, Allegheny County, New York, the son of Lucy Elvira (Babcock) and Joseph C. Sibley, a physician. He was the descendant of John Sibley who emigrated from England and settled in Salem, Massachussets, about 1634.
Education
In 1866, while he was at the Friendship academy preparing for college, his father died.
Career
Until 1871 the boy was variously occupied as school-teacher, farm worker, drugstore clerk, medical student, and, toward the end of the period, as clerk in the drygoods-store of his brother-in-law, Charles Miller, of Franklin, Pennsylvania.
When Miller's business failed, Sibley became Chicago agent of the Galena Oil Works of Franklin, in which Miller was a partner.
In 1873, after having lost his possessions in the Chicago fire, he returned to Franklin. There, after many trials, he made a signal oil superior in several respects to the oils then in use, and in 1875 he organized the Signal Oil Works, with himself as president, and arranged to have the new oil manufactured by the Galena Oil Works.
By 1879 the controlling interest in both these companies had been acquired by the Standard Oil interests. Sibley also made a new valve oil for locomotives, which, under the Standard Oil management, came into use on most of the railroads in the United States and on many in South America and Europe.
When in 1902 the Galena-Signal Oil Company was formed by a merger of the two companies, Sibley became a director of the new company, and he was chairman of its board of directors from 1905 to 1910 and remained on the board until 1913.
In 1879 Sibley, then a low-tariff Republican, was elected mayor of Franklin. In 1884 he left the party on the tariff question and began to vote the Prohibition ticket.
He had apparently no political ambitions until in 1892 a combination of Democrats, Populists, and Prohibitionists nominated him for congressman. Elected in a district normally Republican, he voted and spoke in Congress for free silver, becoming sufficiently prominent in its support to be mentioned by members of the Bimetallic League as a possible presidential candidate in 1896.
After his first term he was twice defeated for Congress, but in 1898 he was elected as a Democrat, and for three subsequent terms he was elected as a Republican. In 1906 he declined renomination; in 1910 he was nominated but was unable to campaign because of illness.
Throughout his career his interest in business and politics was paralleled by a passion for agriculture and stock-breeding. Miller and he owned jointly a large farm near Franklin, on which they conducted a profitable business. Sibley was a pioneer in breeding Jersey cattle for milk-producing records and was regarded in the nineties as one of the best judges of Jerseys in the United States.
On the stock farm were probably the first silo built west of the Alleghanies and the second DeLaval separator in the United States.
In later years, by demonstrations of methods at his "River Ridge Farm" three miles from Franklin, he helped to spread agricultural science among the farmers of northwestern Pennsylvania.
In 1910 he retired from business and devoted himself to study and experimental agriculture at his farm. He died on his farm.
Achievements
Membership
He was active in national agricultural and breeding associations, was for a time a member of the state board of agriculture.
Connections
On March 17, 1870, he was married to Metta Evalina Babcock of Friendship, New York. They had two children. After the death of his first wife in 1911 he was married, on December 6, 1913, to Ida L. Rew.