Oliver’s War: An Adirondack Rebel Battles the Rockefeller Fortune

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*** Adirondack Center for Writing Best Book of Nonfiction (2007) ***

The true story of Oliver Lamora’s battle with William Rockefeller is told here for the first time. For a decade in the early 1900s, their saga gripped newspaper readers from coast to coast.

William Rockefeller was the brother of John D. Rockefeller. Together they built the Standard Oil Trust, the richest, most powerful corporation in American history.

The aging Lamora was a hunter, fisherman, and lumberjack all his life in the far northern Adirondack Mountains of New York State. He was surviving on a meager Civil War pension when William Rockefeller decided to build a grand mountain estate. Lamora’s home was in the dying village of Brandon, and Brandon was in Rockefeller’s way.

Some people moved, but Oliver didn’t. Soon a disagreement evolved into a running battle between two headstrong men of widely divergent backgrounds.

William Rockefeller had crushed many rivals in the oil, copper, banking, and railroad industries. No one had been able to resist against his power and money.

That is, no one until Oliver Lamora. While battling business rivals and government investigators, Rockefeller never wavered from trying to crush his poor mountain-man opponent.

And Oliver resisted in every way he knew how. He was a man of no financial means, but possessed the heart and grit of a pioneer. Here was a man who would not be cowed by the Rockefeller might.

Lamora fought to preserve a treasured way of life. When Rockefeller’s money, power, and influence were brought to bear, it turned into a fight for Oliver’s survival, and a man’s right to live free in the place of his choosing.

This is the story of Oliver Lamora, an Adirondack original.