Samuel Grandin (1800-1888) was born in Sussex County, New Jersey where he was educated only until age 8 or 10, and then left school to apprentice as a tailor and follow his family in mercantile work.

John Livingston and William James worked in the lumber business early on and at the general store in Tidioute.

Their younger brother Elijah Bishop, left home in early adulthood and went to work for the Hyde Bros. Lumber Company in Hydetown, Crawford County, Pennsylvania.

Days after the Drake well came in, news reached the Grandin General Store in Tidioute approximately 20 miles away.

[4] John Livingston then recruited his brother William James and after that first unsuccessful attempt, they dug several more wells that were then successful and turned extremely profitable.

However, since funding for the railroad ceased in 1873, so did the construction, and this land was thousands of acres of uninhabited prairie and wilderness in the Dakota Territory and beyond with no finished railway to reach them.

At Fargo he hired an experienced Colonel and together they trekked fifty miles north in the Red River Valley to the government railroad land.

Considering what could be done with the land, John Livingston noted the rich surface soil and thick clay sub-soil, and recognized the good conditions for growing more wheat.

(The town they put up became Grandin, North Dakota) Knowing little about farming and interested in getting back to the banking, oil and lumber businesses in Pennsylvania, John Livingston contacted Oliver Dalrymple, a land speculator also from Pennsylvania who was cultivating half a section [320 acres (130 ha)] of wheat in nearby Minnesota, the largest known farm in the area at the time.

The Grandin Brothers hired Dalrymple to get a corporate wheat farm up and running on a large portion of their land.

Not a single year passed where their profits did not exceed the original amount owed to them by Jay Cooke & Company.

[8] After amassing sizable fortunes, the Grandin Brothers began to slowly reduce the Grandin Farm holdings, by selling off half sections [320 acres (130 ha)]and full sections [640 acres (260 ha)] at a time, in then developed North Dakota, for vastly more than they originally paid for them.