Whiting Was Standard Oil’s Second Choice
Why the First Choice Didn’t Work Out
John Hmurovic
July 2020
At the start of 1889, there was no evidence that anyone inside the Standard Oil Company had ever heard of Whiting, Indiana. Yet, by the end of that year, the company was building its most important refinery there. One event changed everything and put Whiting on the map.
In the 1880s, Americans moved west. “Washington is not a place to live in,” newspaper editor Horace Greeley wrote in 1865, at the end of the Civil War. “The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting, and the morals are deplorable. Go west, young man, go west, and grow up with the country.”
And so, they did. The 1880s was a decade of spectacular growth in mid-America. People moved from the east coast to places like Minneapolis, which grew by 251 percent in the 1880s, St. Paul by 221 percent, Duluth was up by 851 percent. There were similar jumps in Omaha, Sioux City, Kansas City, and Chicago, which was up 119 percent.
When people move, businesses move. They want to be where the market is. Standard Oil was quick to recognize that in the mid-1880s. The company made an aggressive push to sell its product to Midwestern industries as lubricants for machinery, to businesses as heating oil, and to everyday people as kerosene and oil lamps in those days before electricity. Oil was the “fuel of the future,” its marketing team said. It was a message that resonated with those who moved west. Oil was in demand in Milwaukee and Minneapolis, but Chicago topped them all.
A variety of Standard Oil products from the late 1890s or early 1900s are on display aboard this wagon, including Standard Oil Pure Spirits of Turpentine, Standard Oil Stove Gasoline, and Standard Oil Renown Engine Oil.
Ads for Standard Oil’s Eureka Harness Oil ran in such publications as the Farmers Almanac in the early 1900s, when horses still greatly outnumbered automobiles.
Although it was tapping into a booming market in the Midwest, Standard Oil had none of its major operations in that part of the country. Its main refinery was in Cleveland. It had no pipelines or storage tanks west of Ohio. The demand for its products was strong, but the supply was slow to arrive from the company’s refineries, and the cost to transport it there was also expensive. In 1888, Standard moved to solve that problem. The company’s first step was to build a pipeline from Lima. That pipeline reached Whiting in July 1888, running along the railroad tracks, but it didn’t stop there. Whiting was of no significance to Standard Oil. Like hundreds of other little communities along the way, it just happened to be on the route to Chicago.
Earlier, in April 1888, Standard bought fifty acres of land on Lake Michigan at the foot of 100th Street in Chicago at a cost of $100,000, in an area called Fleming Park, named after the man who owned the property. That was where the pipeline ended. At that site, they built five storage tanks. Each one was fifty feet tall and one hundred feet in diameter, and each could hold 30,000 barrels of oil. The plan was to store the oil there until it sold.
A common sight in the 1880s on the tracks which passed through Whiting, were these tank cars carrying oil from Standard Oil’s fields in Lima, Ohio, to the company’s storage facility at 100th Street in Chicago. Standard Oil created Consolidated Tank Lines in 1878 to ship oil from Lima to its western markets in the years before the Whiting refinery was built.
In this early 20th century postcard of the Whiting refinery, there are sand embankments built around the storage tanks to prevent spills from spreading. The storage tanks at Standard’s 100th Street facility did not have embankments, even though building them around tanks was a common Standard Oil practice at the time.
This sketch of Whiting in the early days of the Standard Oil Refinery shows what storage tanks of the 1880s looked like, and probably what the ones on 100th Street in Chicago looked like. This sketch also shows the barren sand terrain of Whiting at the time, and shows how close the refinery was built to the waters of Lake Michigan, seen in the top right corner of this sketch.
The company quickly discovered that plan did not do the job. Even with the storage tanks, there was not enough oil to meet the demand in Chicago and the Midwest. “A number of the manufacturers (in Chicago) are ready to take the oil as soon as the company can supply it to them,” a newspaper reported, even before the storage tanks were built. Standard Oil knew that it needed to build a refinery close to its Midwest market if it wanted to take advantage of the massive demand. And, the refinery needed to be huge.
The logical place to build it was at the foot of 100th Street in Chicago. The pipeline was already in place, and so were five storage tanks. The refinery could be built around them on the seventy-five acres of land that Standard bought up.
That was the plan going into January of 1889. Twenty days into the new year, plans began to change. On Sunday, January 20, 1889, there was a muffled boom as one of the tanks split open. No one knows for certain why or how it happened. One possible cause was that the iron used on the tank was old. It had been part of a tank that was dismantled at Standard’s Lima plant. The company, however, blamed poor workmanship. Whatever the cause, when it collapsed, the Chicago Tribune reported, “There followed a gliding rush, a snake-like movement over the swampy ground,” as around a million-and-a-half gallons of oil spread everywhere. It was, the newspaper said, “An oil flood.”
It was already common practice for Standard Oil to build embankments around its storage tanks to prevent spills from spreading, but there were none around the tanks in Chicago. There was, however, a huge natural sandbank that kept the oil from flowing into Lake Michigan. Snow on the ground also helped to control the spread.
The biggest fear was that the oil would catch fire. ”If it should catch,” a company official said, “our other tanks would go, and then there would be a time of it.” There was vacant land between the ruptured tank and the closest homes, which were about a half-mile away, but few felt comfortable. It was estimated that fifteen to twenty acres were covered with oil. “Twenty acres is a big space to keep clear of matches, cigar stumps, and other causes of conflagration…We will be lucky if it does not catch.” If it did, the other tanks would almost certainly catch on fire, and then the nearby homes would also be consumed by flames. The thought of that struck fear in local residents, many of whom clearly remembered the damage done by the Great Chicago Fire less than 18 years earlier.
The company stationed fifty men on the edges of the spill, to keep an eye on the situation and to deal with any problems that might arise. Although the oil never caught fire and never spread further, Standard Oil now had a public relations problem: The people around the 100th Street facility were angry about what happened. Not only did they live in fear of an explosion for several days, they also had to live with an awful smell in the air.
This old photo of the sweetening still at Standard Oil’s refinery in Lima, Ohio, appeared in a 2011 article in the Toledo Blade, celebrating the 125th year of oil production in northeastern Ohio. Lima and Whiting had a close connection in the 1880s. Standard’s refinery there was the westernmost Standard Oil facility before the Whiting refinery was built in 1889. The oil that was first processed by the new Whiting refinery came from the oil fields around Lima, and was known as Lima crude oil.
In its article, the Blade gives a brief history of the oil industry in that part of Ohio: “Lima paper mill owner Ben Faurot was first to drill for oil after hearing of discoveries of natural gas in Findlay. His strike in 1885 attracted the attention of John D. Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil Co. Mr. Rockefeller soon bought or leased much of the Lima oil field. Between the time of Mr. Faurot's strike and 1900, the Lima oil field was the leading producer of oil in the world, producing 190 million barrels. In 1886, Mr. Rockefeller's company began building what he named the Solar Refinery in Lima. Its main product in those early years was kerosene, which was replacing whale oil as a reliable fuel for lamps.”
Standard Oil used Lima crude oil at the time. Extracted from the ground in western Ohio, near the town of Lima, it had a notoriously bad odor to it. “If you got a drop on you,” wrote Standard Oil historian Paul Giddens, “you smelled like a rotten egg.” With the fields flooded with Lima crude oil, everything around 100th Street smelled like rotten eggs. The residents of that area made their feelings clear to Standard Oil: They did not want the company’s refinery in their neighborhood.
Standard Oil went to work on finding a new location, a search which quickly led to Whiting. By February, they already had sketches of the land to show to William Curtis at their Cleveland refinery. He immediately got to work on drafting blueprints.
One of the many reasons Whiting appealed to Standard Oil as a site for its refinery was the abundance of undeveloped land. Standard not only purchased all the available land to handle the refinery’s expected growth, but it created land where there was none. Berry Lake once existed on what is now the eastern side of the refinery, in the area of Marktown in East Chicago. Before the company filled it in, the lake was a popular leisure spot for its employees. This photo from the late 1800s, shows Standard Oil employees Colonel Lamereaux, Fred Weller, and William Curtis on the shores of Berry Lake.
Whiting was, according to Giddens, “a most uninviting spot.” There were a handful of people there at that time, but mostly the area was surrounded by sand dunes and marsh land. It was considered a wilderness. The land was plentiful and cheap because no one else wanted it. In 1871, you could buy an acre of land in Whiting for one dollar, “but anyone paying that much for it was considered crazy,” Giddens wrote.
That was one reason it appealed to Standard Oil: The cost of the land was low. There was also room for future expansion, and there were few people around who would complain about the smell. Just like the Chicago location, Whiting also had access to Lake Michigan, major railroad lines, and was right on Standard Oil’s main pipeline from the east. “It is out of the way,” according to the Chicago Tribune, “where it will annoy and endanger no one, and yet so near Chicago as to be practically a part of the city.”
Theodore Towle was sent from New York to Whiting to handle the purchase of land. Whiting postmaster Henry Schrage assisted by accompanying Towle as the Standard Oil man tried to convince landowners to sell. The first purchases cost the company $150 an acre. Towle knew that the price of land would skyrocket if owners knew that Standard Oil was the purchaser. The best attempts to keep that a secret were made, but prices kept rising for Standard. Towle’s initial purchases totaled three hundred acres.
Curtis completed the blueprints for the refinery, and by April 1889 the company set up a purchasing office in Chicago and installed a special telegraph line between it and Whiting. By May 5, 1889, workers were on the payroll to clear brush and trees, and the Chicago Tribune reported on Standard’s new refinery for the first time. “It has bought up a quantity of the sand land of Whiting, Ind., and there it intends to build the biggest refinery in the world.”
The first group of laborers that began work on May 5, consisted of seven men. They were supervised by W.A. Barstow. William P. Cowan had arrived before that. He was the superintendent of Standard’s Cleveland refinery, but was in Whiting to supervise the surveying of the land so construction could begin. Even before Barstow started clearing the land with his crew, Cowan had hired a man or two to help with his work. Within weeks of the May 5 start, according to U.G. Swartz, who wrote about the early days of the refinery, “the plant swarmed with men from one corner to another.”
Standard Oil was an extremely secretive company, so we don’t know when Whiting first figured into its plans. It may have been under consideration before the accident at Fleming Park, but there is no evidence of that. Standard Oil chemist William Burton told company historian Giddens that the company planned to build the refinery at Fleming Park, and early Whiting historian Swartz said the same. Neither historian gave any evidence that Whiting was under consideration before the tank collapsed in January 1889. After that accident, everything changed. The desolate sands and marshes of Whiting became industrialized, and just a few miles away, the Fleming Park site at 100th Street in Chicago, destined to be a refinery, instead became a peaceful park on the shores of Lake Michigan. Today, it is Calumet Park on Chicago’s southeast side.
The management and staff of the Standard Oil Whiting Refinery posed for a photo in front of the company’s main office on Front Street in 1897. Several of them, such as William Cowan and William Curtis, played a major role in the construction of the refinery in 1889.
Back row, left to right: J.J. Dees, R.M. “Bo” Andrus, A. Gettings, G. Ewing, W.P. Cowan, W.M. Burton, J.C. Compton, W.S. Rheem, William Curtis, J.E. Twitt, S.B. Johnson, W.R. Stenhouse, J.M. Atwell, Hoxie Moffett.
Third Row: George Hay, William Graf, J.F. Grady, Wilson.
Second Row: Morton Trout, J.T. Parker, Lew Emmel, T.P. Lesser, J.P. “Patsy” Kern, H. Tuller.
Seated: Carl Duffy, James Knight, Charles Mahlitz, William Waldorf.
Standing Alone on Left: John McKee.