Samuel Milton "Golden Rule" Jones (1846–1904) was a Progressive-Era Mayor of Toledo, Ohio from 1897 until his death in 1904. Jones was famous for his outspoken advocacy of the proverbial ethic of reciprocity or "Golden Rule," hence his nickname. Jones was a well-known eccentric advocate of municipal reform. He oversaw implementation of a series of humane modifications of the city of Toledo's administration during his tenure as mayor. Early years Samuel Milton Jones was born on August 3, 1846, at Tŷ-mawr near Beddgelert in Caernarvonshire, Wales. Jones' family was impoverished when Samuel was 3 years old, they immigrated to the United States in search of economic opportunity, winding up in central New York state. Owing to the family's poverty, Jones was forced to work from a very young age and he received little formal education. After working for a time on his family's small farm, he left at age 14 to take work in a sawmill. From age 16 he began working summers aboard a steamship. When he was 18, Jones made his way to Titusville, Pennsylvania to try to find work in the booming oil industry of Western Pennsylvania. He was initially unsuccessful there and he returned to New York the next year, where he found employment and managed to save up a modest sum of money over the next three years. Business career Jones returned to Pennsylvania at the age of 22, where he began to speculatively invest his small nest egg in oil leases, from which he began to accumulate wealth. Jones then married, had three children,and spent the next 15 years in the Pennsylvania oil industry. Following the death of his wife and a child, Jones and his two surviving children left Pennsylvania for the oil fields of Ohio in 1886. It was there that he helped established the Ohio Oil Company, a firm which was later bought by Standard Oil Company, making Jones a wealthy man. In 1892, Jones moved to Toledo, Ohio, the first time that he had lived in a large city. The next year, the Panic of 1893 erupted, with the United States into a depression and millions of individuals thrown into the grips of poverty. As a man of considerable wealth Jones was not himself personally affected by the misery around him — with an estimated 7,000 people in Lucas County, Ohio rendered indigent and the city of Toledo forced millions