Shops, Submarines and Shipwrecks
Intriguing work done for the nation’s defense in World War I at Standard Oil’s Whiting refinery

Jerry Banik
July 2020

During a single, two-week period in April of 1917, German submarines known as U-boats were reported to have sunk one hundred and twenty-two commercial ships in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea.  As a result, the United States declared war on Germany.  Writing about the First World War, Standard Oil’s Stanolind Record magazine said, “When Pershing ordered the tanks to advance...it was gasoline that furnished the power.  It was government specification gasoline, much of it manufactured by the Standard Oil Company (Indiana).  Meanwhile...Red Crown gasoline hurtled ocean terriers through the waves in search of slinking U-boats.”

Today, among local residents, it’s common knowledge that Standard Oil’s Whiting refinery has been a major supplier of fuels and lubricants for U.S. and Allies’ defense efforts during times of war.  But during World War I it supplied much more than just petroleum products.

In 1917, once he had declared war, President Wilson set production priorities for the fight, and he created a body called the Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC).  The EFC had all of the president’s wartime authority to commandeer existing vessels and to build and operate all the new vessels deemed necessary for the war effort.  It seized commercial ships of enemy nations in the United States.  The owners of U.S. ships became operators for the EFC.  Even Great Lakes ships were pressed into service.  Calls for ships and more ships came from all over the world, and when the EFC called on Standard Oil, the Whiting refinery answered the call.  Maybe they couldn’t build ships in Whiting, but they could do the next best thing.  They took up the task of making parts for ships. 

But how do you do that in a refinery? 

Standard was able to do it because the Whiting refinery had a plant within the plant.  The plant within was composed of a blacksmith shop, a boiler shop and a machine shop.  The three were housed in a steel framed, glass sided building, 448 feet long by 206 feet wide, built just three years before the U.S. joined the war.  Standard said that visitors from across the country pronounced it to be, “the last word in modern shop construction and equipment.” 

When building the shops, foundations for its heavy machines had to be made by sinking casings deep into the ground and pouring concrete piles.  This was necessary because the shops were built atop what was once Berry Lake, which years earlier Standard Oil had drained and filled with sand from surrounding dunes. 

In peace time the shops were there to make and maintain the equipment and machinery that produced Standard’s gasoline and other petroleum products.  Once we were at war these new and perfectly equipped facilities were placed at the disposal of the Emergency Fleet Corporation. 

The blacksmith shop employed 75 men, professionals who did practically every class of forge and hammer work, tool dressing and steel treating.  The shop contained sixteen fires, ten furnaces, steam hammers, welding equipment, a power forging machine and a power wench for bending extra-heavy, eight-inch pipe.  Within days of the call from the Emergency Fleet Corporation the blacksmith shop was producing many of the forgings that the machine shop and boiler shop would need to craft parts for the EFC’s ships. Shown below are a view of the blacksmith shop with its gas and smoke hoods over oil and gas furnaces, and a second view in which two, twenty-five hundred pound steam hammers can be seen (click images to enlarge).

Soon the 750 men in the boiler shop were turning out water tanks, fuel tanks, deck hatches, iron stairways, ships’ ladders and various other pieces of equipment for government vessels.  They kept the boiler shop’s rolling machines running twenty-four hours a day, producing hundreds of tons of steel plate for war work. The left image below shows the interior of the great boiler shop, equipped with three, 10-ton electric overhead traveling cranes which ran the length of the building and continued outside. Among the machines in the boiler shop were 32-foot bending rolls that the Emergency Fleet Corporation put to good use. These can be seen in the photo on the right.

The machine shop employed 150 men.  They produced bilge pumps, thousands of sets of rivets and special deck fittings destined for America’s shipyards.  The shop’s 24/7 operation turned out rudder posts and stern frames weighing as much as ten tons each.  The men machined and fitted propeller blades and shafts, boat davits (cranes for lifting boats in and out of the water), water tight doors, ventilators, engine jacking devices and brass fittings. The machine shop is seen in the next two images. The shop’s overhead monorail system can be seen in the photo on the right. It handled castings from storage space outside the building to all of the machines inside, and from the machines to the erecting floor where all the machined parts were put together, then shipped.

The machine shop also made a complicated hand-steering device for a gunboat to be called the U.S.S. Wilmette.  You might ask, “What’s so special about that”?  Standard made parts for many ships.  But this was a ship with a past.  U.S.S Wilmette was the new name given to one of the most infamous ships in American history, a former Great Lakes excursion vessel called the S.S. Eastland. 

The Eastland was the ship that in 1915 was docked in the Chicago River loading passengers for a trip across Lake Michigan for a day of fun and picnicking at Michigan City.  She rolled over and drowned some 844 passengers and crew in what is the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck in Great Lakes history. 

After the disaster the Eastland was towed to the Chicago Shipbuilding Company on the Calumet River, just across the Indiana/Illinois line from Robertsdale, and sold to the U.S. Navy.  There, fitted with many parts fabricated at the Whiting refinery, she emerged as a gunboat and was christened, ”U.S.S. Wilmette”.

With the help of the Whiting refinery the Wilmette had been born out of a great tragedy and ended up having quite a life of her own.

In a 1921 training exercise she sank the German U-boat UC-97 in Lake Michigan!  Stationed for years at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, but never seeing combat action, the Wilmette sailed the Great Lakes until the end of the second World War.  She was used for teaching sailors how to man the guns of Navy ships and armed merchant vessels.  Indiana’s great writer Ernie Pyle briefly served on her.  In 1943 she was given the honor of transporting President Franklin Roosevelt and top Navy personnel on a 10-day cruise to Lake Superior’s Whitefish Bay to plan war strategies. The Wilmette was finally decommissioned in 1946 and scrapped shortly thereafter.

The UC-97 U-boat, shown above, did not have such a long and productive future. After being assigned to the United States at the end of the war by the terms of the armistice, the Navy brought it to Chicago via the St. Lawrence Seaway. Along the way it was exhibited at many stops in Canada and the U.S. as the Navy recruited sailors and raised money to pay off war debts. In 1921, after a final stop at Chicago’s Municipal Pier (now Navy Pier), the UC-97 was towed some twenty miles out into the lake and the Wilmette sent her to the bottom.

In 1992 a private salvage company located the submarine’s wreckage, upright, in 300 feet of water, and there she remains today.