Baytown is so refined

On April 16, 1919, Humble Oil & Refining Co. engineers arrived in Baytown, armed with boots and blueprints.

Those boots were made for walking in soggy, muddy, marshy ground while blueprints were for a construction project envisioned by Humble Oil president Ross S. Sterling and the company directors. What better place to build an oil refinery, they decided, given the proximity to the Goose Creek oil field, Houston Ship Channel and the corporate headquarters in Houston.

Another advantage would be extending railroad tracks from Goose Creek to Baytown, making the plant accessible by land as well as by water.

And besides all that, the land was cheap, costing only $18 per acre.

As Walter Rundell Jr. wrote in his book, “Early Texas Oil,” the site of the Baytown refinery seemed to be “pre-ordained.”

But the location, albeit logical from a business/industrial standpoint, posed overwhelming problems in getting started – literally, in getting off the ground. Swamps had to be drained, trees had to be cleared and workers would have to cope not only with the mud and quicksand but with mosquitoes, grasshoppers and snakes.

Add Brahma cattle to the list of obstacles. A local choice because mosquito bites didn’t bother their thick skin, Brahma cattle came with the territory and continued to roam the grounds even after refinery construction got well under way. On a number of occasions, their surprise appearances terrified workers. Moooo…

No doubt the few people living in the area at the time thought Humble Oil was crazy for trying to build a refinery there. Whoever thought that one day the uninhabitable site would contain an oil refinery – the biggest, in fact, in the United States.

Sterling thought it, and he, with the help of like thinkers on his board, made it happen.

By July 1919, workers were ready to pour concrete and the following month, began building storage tanks, digging sewer lines and pipelines and laying brick.

Finding workers became difficult because oil field activity elsewhere in Texas had drained the labor force. Also, the humid climate and boggy terrain in Baytown turned off potential workers.

In other works, the company faced a labor shortage on top of all of the other stumbling blocks.

Undaunted, Humble Oil started hiring Mexicans and blacks who, because of their race, had been barred from working in oil fields in Texas.

By the end of 1919 at least half of the laborers building the refinery were Mexican.

Construction proceeded on schedule. By 1920 the machine shops were in operation and concrete installations for the filter house, boiler house and crude stills were nearly finished and atmospheric stills were going up.

On May 11, 1920, the first oil was pumped into a still, a big cause for celebration that inspired the annual tradition of Humble Day picnics for the employees and their families.

The official completion of the refinery was celebrated on April 21, 1921, to coincide with San Jacinto Day.

In a matter of months, after the refinery went on stream, more than 1,000 men came to work and brought their families. The population boom had begun.

Taking on the name of the refinery, a community grew up in that vicinity and eventually would become the largest unincorporated town in Texas. Baytown remained so until consolidation with Pelly and Goose Creek in the late Forties.

Unlike the naming of the consolidated city, choosing the refinery name never became an issue. Humble Oil leaders, when they learned that a trading post on Black Duck Bay had been called Baytown in the mid-1800s, decided they liked the sound of it. Besides, it fit. Baytown, after all, is a town of bays.

The name of the company has changed through the years -- from Humble to Enco to Exxon to ExxonMobil – but after nine decades, the refinery name endures.

© Wanda Orton Baytown Sun Columnist
"Wandering" August 3, 2012 columns

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