Standard Oil’s Whiting Refinery 100 Years Ago

by Jerry Banik
March 2020

Above: You’ve come a long way, Baby!  Gas-oil hydrotreater at the Whiting refinery today.

Thanks to The Stanolind Record, a Standard Oil of Indiana monthly magazine published for its employees, there is a treasure trove of stories and images that give us a look at life in and around Whiting as far back as a century ago.  

Through it we can get a feel for the culture of a country that has just emerged from World War I as well as a look at a local industrial giant and the people who worked there.  We can read about servicemen returning from the war and those who did not return, about women in the workforce, about new immigrants seeking work and what their jobs were, about their lives outside of the workplace and how all those things helped shape our community. 

It was said of New York City in a classic movie and TV series, “There are eight million stories in the naked city.”  The Stanolind Record may have had a few less than eight million, but still it is a gold mine of information about the Whiting refinery and the people who lived and worked here over the course of  decades. 

Let’s start with the magazine’s inaugural edition of October, 1919 and see what the refinery looked like back then.

F.S. Cooke, Assistant Superintendent at the Whiting Refinery, proudly described the heart of the plant in 1919:  “As you look at the Pressure Stills, dingy cylinders sleeping row on row in brick and concrete beds, as like as pewter soldiers cast in the same mold, it is hard to realize that here is the being of one of the few great inventions of modern times.” 

Standard Oil in 1919 was understandably proud of this groundbreaking process pioneered in 1908 by two of Standard’s Whiting chemists, William Burton and Robert Humphreys.  “In 1913 the Standard Oil Company of Indiana at its Whiting plant started up the first of the two rows of Pressure Stills shown in the picture.  In this process it has given the means of producing enormously more gasoline than is present in the natural crude oil.”

The early batch processing method for “cracking” crude oil would soon be replaced by more and more efficient continuous cracking methods, and so the rows of stills and their smoke stacks are now long gone.

This photo and the three that follow appeared in the September, 1920 issue:  “Our intrepid cameraman will climb or go anywhere to get interesting pictures for The Record.  The above was snapped from the top of one of the giant smokestacks at the refinery.  In the lower right hand corner is seen the new sixth battery of continuous stills.”

Whiting’s proximity to Chicago, along with large parcels of cheap, “unusable” land and a growing number of railroad lines that passed through had made this an ideal location for John D. Rockefeller’s “world’s greatest refinery”.  An 1897 survey of Wolf Lake by Indiana’s Department of Geology and Natural Resources reported that the lake was surrounded or touched by no less than “ten great trunk lines of railway…and five belt lines…[which] pass around the city of Chicago, crossing and connecting with the twenty-four great trunk lines terminating in that city.”

Taken from atop one of the refinery’s tall smokestacks, the photo above reveals some of the railroad tracks that ran along the shore of Lake Michigan, and some of the many sidings needed for Standard’s railroad tank cars.  Rockefeller had already been making railroad tank cars via a holding company of his own for some time.  That enterprise eventually became the Union Tank Car Company after the federal government broke up the Standard Oil monopoly. 

The refinery’s boarding house camp for newly arrived workers in need of roofs over their heads can be seen at the top of the photo.

“The greatest refinery in the world is so enormous that it is almost impossible to get a comprehensive birds eye view of the entire works, even when one climbs to the top of a towering smokestack as our photographer did to take this picture.  It shows a little corner of the great refinery, looking towards the pressure stills.  In the upper left corner may be seen two roads diverging.  The one paralleling the pressure stills is Schrage Avenue; the other is Indianapolis Boulevard.”

“The reader is looking over the storage tanks towards Lake Michigan and the steel plant of the Marks Manufacturing Company in Indiana Harbor, which may be seen dimly in the distance.  The water around the tanks is the accumulation of cooling water from sprays which cool the tanks in hot weather.  The concrete building in the lower right hand corner is the boat pump house.” 

How many remember that the nearby Marktown community, now an isolated residential island listed on the National Register Of Historic Places, sprung from Marks Manufacturing?  Founded in 1888 by Clayton Mark, the company started out manufacturing well points, the small castings used for drilling wells.  He later bought 190 acres of marshland in Indiana Harbor and in 1916 built a steel mill to supply his own requirements for steel.  Many of his workers were immigrants from Europe, for whom he built Marktown, a comprehensive worker community that is often compared to the historic Pullman community in South Chicago for the workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company.  

And, yes, the Whiting Refinery had its own boat fleet. 

Records show that in the first ten-and-one-half-months of 1919 the Whiting refinery shipped more gasoline by boat than was exported in twelve months from the customs district of New York, and half as much as was exported from the entire United States during the same twelve month period.

In 1920 Standard’s Great Lakes Shipping Fleet consisted of two tanker steamships, the Renown and the W.P. Cowan, a tug named the Outagamie and a barge, unpretentiously named “Barge C”.   The fleet carried millions of gallons of gasoline and kerosene each year to ports throughout the Great Lakes, like Duluth-Superior port on Lake Superior, for storage and distribution throughout the northwest.  Thankfully none of Standard Oil’s  tankers ever met the fate of the Edmund Fitzgerald and others in Superior’s treacherous waters.  The Record described fleet shipments to Detroit by way of the Straits of Mackinac and Lake Huron: “The distance to Detroit and back is 1275 miles. In cold weather every foot of this trip means a battle, for the decks of the steamers are low when loaded and soon become covered with ice as the freezing waves break over them.  It takes brave and hardy men to carry on this work.  The winds of the Great Lakes are cold, and it is a cold that penetrates.”

The May, 1920 issue of The Record ran a story complete with photos detailing how Standard’s Barge “C” quickly carried an emergency shipment of 1,030,000 gallons of gasoline from Whiting across the lake and up the Chicago River, entering its North Branch and docking at Standard’s Cortland St. station, thereby saving Chicago from a major industrial tie-up. 

“The trip of Barge C under Capt. Leith in response to Chicago’s S.O.S. is an exploit of which the Company is proud.”