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Cooke was born on August 10, 1821, in Sandusky, Ohio. He was named for John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. His father, Eleutheros Cooke, was an attorney, railroad investor, and real estate speculator. Jay Cooke attended local schools in Sandusky, Ohio. At the age of fourteen, Cooke became a clerk in a local store. When he was fifteen, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and took a position in a wholesale business. He lost his job due to the Panic of 1837 and returned to Ohio, where he settled in Bloomingville. He moved to Philadelphia Pennsylvania, where he accepted a position with a packet company. This company failed soon thereafter, and Cooke became a book keeper in a local hotel. On January 1, 1861, Cooke formed his own banking firm. To begin the work of Jay Cooke & Company, he borrowed three million dollars from the government of Pennsylvania. The company prospered as it acquired money for the federal government to finance Northern efforts during the American Civil War. Cooke helped develop a sound fiscal policy that provided the government with the necessary capital to win the war. Following the war, Cooke utilized the wealth that he acquired during the conflict to become involved in a number of other industries, including coal and iron mining, life insurance, and railroads. Cooke played a major role in financing the efforts of the Northern Pacific Company to build a transcontinental railroad. Cooke and his company became financially overextended, and his company failed at the beginning of the Panic of 1873. Cooke lost nearly all of his entire fortune. He regained his wealth through various investments during the late 1800s. Jay Cooke died on February 16, 1905.

Source: http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Jay_Cooke

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Amasa Leland Stanford was born March 9, 1824, in Watervliet, New York.  Due to the status and wealth of his family Stanford was able to attend school through his early 20s, lastly attending the Methodist Cazenovia Seminary before leaving the school in 1845 to begin a career in law. Stanford only remained a lawyer for two years before he opted to head west to set up a business with his five brothers rather than rebuild his office which burned in a fire in March, 1852. By July of that year he had arrive in San Francisco and in the fall he and his brothers were business owners in Cold Springs, east of Sacramento. Here Stanford became quite wealthy as their business thrived selling mining equipment and other supplies to miners. In the 1850s Stanford began to engage in politics. The Union Pacific was created directly as a result of the act and together they worked to complete the new line.  For Leland Stanford's part, he was elected governor of California in 1861, which provided serious leverage for the CP to be financed and constructed across the state. While building the CP turned out to take much longer and cost much more than originally envisioned it was completed on May 10, 1869 at Promontory, Utah and linking with the Union Pacific system.  Four years prior to this milestone the Southern Pacific had been established to connect San Francisco and San Diego, California. In September 1868, Stanford and the rest of the "Big Four" bought out the original founders of the SP and would combine the operations of the Central Pacific by 1870. Stanford became SP's president and remained so until 1890. However, outside of the railroad industry Stanford's most lasting legacy was the founding of Stanford University in March of 1885, named for his son Leland Stanford, Jr. who had died a year earlier. In the end, Stanford would bequeath millions in setting up the university, which opened in 1891. in 1893, Stanford passed away at the age of 69 due to heart failure.

Source: http://www.american-rails.com/leland-stanford.html

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Henry Clay, by-name The Great Pacificator or The Great Compromiser was born April 12, 1777, Hanover county, Virginia. Clay was born on a modest farm in Virginia during the American Revolution. He was the fourth of five surviving siblings. His father, a tobacco farmer and Baptist minister, died when Clay was four years old, but his mother remarried, and Clay’s youth was relatively comfortable. Clay proved a quick study and was admitted to the bar in 1797. The glut of lawyers in Richmond persuaded him to follow his family to Kentucky, where they had moved in 1791. Clay settled in Lexington in 1797 and soon had a thriving law practice. In 1821 he was the first attorney to file an amicus curie (“friend of the court”) brief with the U.S. Supreme Court. He was also possibly the first attorney to use a successful plea of temporary insanity to save from the gallows a client accused of murder. In 1799 Clay married Lucretia Hart, whose family’s wealth, along with Clay’s own industry, eventually made it possible for him to purchase a large farm outside Lexington. He named the farm Ashland after its many blue ash trees (Fraxinus quadrangulata). He enthusiastically promoted the abolition of slavery in Kentucky in the late 1790s, a distinctly unpopular and unsuccessful proposal. He died June 29, 1852, Washington, D.C.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Clay

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American railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington was born October 22, 1821, Harwinton, Conn. who promoted the Central Pacific Railroad's extension across the West. Born into a poor family, he worked as an itinerant peddler and became a prosperous merchant in Oneonta, N.Y., before moving to Sacramento, Calif., in the gold rush year of 1849.  During the actual construction (1863–69) of the Central Pacific Railroad, Huntington lobbied for the company in the east, working to secure financing and favorable legislation from Congress and the federal government. Huntington became president of the Southern Pacific–Central Pacific rail system in 1890 and thus controlled a vast empire of rail lines and agricultural landholdings in California until his death. Huntington died  August 13, 1900, Raquette Lake, N.Y.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Collis-P-Huntington

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American industrialist John Davison Rockefeller  was born July 8, 1839, in Richford, New York. His first real office job at age of 16, as an assistant bookkeeper with Hewitt & Tuttle. By the age of 20, Rockefeller, who'd thrived at his job, ventured out on his own with a business partner, working as a commission merchant in hay, meats, grains and other goods. At the close of the company's first year in business, it had grossed $450,000. With oil production ramping up in western Pennsylvania, Rockefeller decided that establishing an oil refinery near Cleveland, a short distance from Pittsburgh, would be a good business move. In 1863, he opened his first refinery, and within two years it was the largest in the area. In 1870, Rockefeller and his associates incorporated the Standard Oil Company. Standard’s moves were so quick and sweeping that it controlled the majority of refineries in the Cleveland area within two years. Standard then used its size and ubiquity in the region to make favorable deals with railroads to ship its oil. By 1882 he had a near-monopoly of the oil business in the U.S., but his business practices led to the passing of antitrust laws. Late in life, Rockefeller devoted himself to philanthropy. He died in 1937.

Source: https://www.biography.com/people/john-d-rockefeller-20710159