The rise and fall of the Standard Oil Refinery in Casper. . .and an observation on the lack of personal observation to contemporary events.

 The Standard Oil Refinery at its peak.

Recently I posted this item on our website dedicated to memorials, even though I was admittedly not really sure if it belonged there. The text and the photos for that entry appear below, but as noted following that, this caused me to ponder another topic.

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Some Gave All: Standard Oil Refinery Building, Casper Wyoming:

Headquarters for the former Standard Oil Refinery in Casper Wyoming. 
This building, with additional new construction is now a branch of
branch of tbe University of Wyoming's Wyoming
Technology Business Center.

Every once in awhile I'll have some of these photos, taken for one of my blogs, that I end up not being sure what to do with. This is an example of that.

I took these sometime during the summer of 2015, while down on the Platte River Commons pathway.  I was probably riding my bicycle down there.  After that, I didn't put them up as I wasn't quite sure where they belonged.  My original thought was that they should go on Painted Bricks, our blog dedicated to signs painted on buildings, but there aren't any signs painted on this building, and the old Standard Oil sign has been removed.  Having said that, there is a major sidewalk feature here, and I do put sidewalk features on our Painted Bricks blog, so there will probably be an entry there after all.

Instead, I decided to put this up here because of this somewhat sad memorial at this location.

Now, there were people who died one way or another at the refinery over the many years it was in operation, but this monument is simply to people who worked there from 1913 up until it closed in 1991.  When it closed, it came somewhat close to being a mortal blow to the city, which was already really hurting at that time.  Having said that, the decline of the refinery, which had at one time been enormous and one of the prime economic engines of the city, was obvious for years.

When the refinery was operating, this building was on the edge of the refinery, along the old Yellowstone Highway, prior to that highway being moved across the river. As a kid I must have ridden as a passenger in my parents vehicle past it countless times.  I can remember it quite well, and frankly it looks newer now than it did then.

I don't know when the building was built, but as the refinery opened in 1913, chances are that it was right around then.  The substantial refinery, now a golf course, was a major Natrona County employer and its closure really nearly ended an era in the town.  The town had three refineries up until about that time, but only one of them, the  Sinclair refinery, remains today.  The Standard Oil refinery was the largest of the three.

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Okay, that's all well and good, but in re-reading this, what it made me realize is the strange phenomenon of not really noticing the importance of something while it is actually occurring.  That is, I was a witness to the last days of the refinery, but it didn't make the impression on me that it really should have, given that it had been such a major feature of the town's existence up until then. And I was an adult at that time.

Now, part of that was due to the long, slow and fairly apparent decline that was in fact going on with the refinery. And it was also due to the fact that it came at a point in time during which we were already in a decade long slump here and all economic news was by default bad news.  But not everyone was similarly lacking in reaction to the event.  Indeed, I can recall some people being quite mad.  It's an interesting situation to look back on it.

 The Franco American Refinery in Casper, waste oil from which was handled as late as the 1980s.  It was closed by 1910.

The Standard Oil Refinery was not the first refinery in Casper. The Franco American Refinery, which is located near where the city recreational facilities are now located, has that distinction.  That refinery was already closed, although barely so, when Standard built its refinery in 1913.  That refinery went on to be a large refinery, by Wyoming standards, and in its heyday it had facilities on both sides of the North Platte River.  

It's odd to think that I've missed mentioning this so far, as the refinery was a really big deal in town, and it was a really big deal in the era which this blog was formed to study. So this is a pretty significant omission to date.  We've dealt with a lot of Western themes here, but this refinery was already here in the end final area of the "Old West" here in Wyoming, keeping in mind that the Old West in Wyoming kept on later than in other areas, and arguably into the 1920s really.  Suffice it to say, the era that this blog supposedly focuses on, 1900 to 1918 or so, includes the opening era of the Standard Oil Refinery.

And indeed, Casper has always identified more with the oil industry than with agriculture, which most people think of when they think of the West.  It can be a bit irritating to some stockmen, and I've heard them comment on it.  Ranching was part of the local economy here starting in the 1880s and it still is.  Wool production for the county was, at one time, simply enormous.  Beef production was so significant that the county had a packing house at least as early as the 1930s, located in Evansville, and it continued to have one until the 1970s.  My family owned it during the 1940s, up until my grandfather Lou Holscher died in his late 40s, at which time the family had to sell it.  

Be that as it may, the county has always heavily identified with oil, rather than livestock, in terms of its identity.  The newspaper used to claim, on its front page, that Casper was "The oil capitol of the world".  Casper's nickname is "The Oil City" (although leaning on the cartoon there are also many businesses that use "Ghost Town" as a reference.  The new internet news source for the town is called The Oil City News.  The local hockey team and the teams for the town of Midwest are called "The Oilers".  On maps featuring drawing references for the town or the county, as tourist maps and the like will do, the county always has something that reflects oil production.  

And at one time it was indeed refined production that was a major industry here, as opposed to crude production and exploration, which remains significant.

The refinery was joined over time by two others, those being the Sinclair Refinery and the Texaco Refinery. Those refineries were built next to each other, in what is actually Evansville Wyoming, east (and downwind) of where my family had its packing house, and east and downwind of any of the local municipalities.  The Standard Refinery was west, and upwind, of Casper itself.  It's being upwind contributed to the very common petroleum smell that the city had when I was a kid.  Smelling "the refinery" was pretty common.  "That's the smell of money", people use to say.

And I suppose it was. The refinery was a major employer from the point at which it was built up in to the 1980s.  It was such a factor in the town's economy that one addition to the city was known as The Standard Oil Addition, either because the titles went back to Standard Oil or the company participated in getting the subdivision rolling so that its workers would have a place to live.  My parents house, built in the 1950s, bordered the Standard Oil Addition.  And it was a fair distance from the refinery.

But not so far that if you gained any height you could see it.  But that would be true of any refiner in Casper from any height.  But the Standard refiner was a big one.

It never seemed impressive to me as a kid growing up that the town was basically surrounded by refineries.  That was normal.  Now, you wouldn't think that normal.  But we did.  And anyone my parents age knew people who worked at the refineries.  I did, but they were people my parents age.

And that was because nobody my age worked there. Which must say something about how the refineries were going.  Not one person I knew in school ever worked at any of the refineries.  The only people I knew who I didn't know by way of my parents were older soldiers I knew in the National Guard. A few of them worked at the refineries.  It's odd to think of, given as they were such major features in the town's economy.

Oil collapsed as part of the economy here in the early 1980s.  Standard's refinery already didn't look like something they were keeping up.  In my memory, I thought the refinery must have closed around 1983 or so, and was surprised in these photos to see that it kept on until 1991.  That means an institution that I could see from the window of some of my classes in high school died almost without my noticing it.  I must have been pretty distracted when I first came back from law school and started working, or its death was predicated, known and inevitable by that point. That's more likely it.

Or maybe I was influenced by the large number of people around here who were somewhat mad at Standard Oil.  Not much notice was given when things started going bad, and we felt that there should have been. By the time the refinery closed it was a run down eyesore and while that didn't equate with people being mad at the oil industry, it did lead to a certain "well good riddance to you then" feeling about Standard Oil.  And of course, I'd just been through a lot of college, and being an outdoorsman and a geology student I may have picked up a bit of that anti industry feeling that's common amongst young outdoorsmen and young geology students (who ironically have only the industry to look to for employment).  Perhaps, but I don't really think so.  Maybe it just seemed inevitable, the way that the decline of coal feels right now.  An inevitability, being that, can be lamented or endured.

I can recall the effort to clean it up, as well as the legal battle (which we were not part of) that developed after British Petroleum, then the owner, closed it.  I've always felt a bit odd about the post refinery legal battle as it well know that when we were growing up you knew that smelling the oil, and seeing the grit that would end up automobiles, meant you were breathing stuff that was bad. But you accepted it.  A person could simply look at the grounds of a refinery that had been producing petroleum for 80 years and know that a lot of stuff was under that ground.  But that is probably neither here nor there.

Now, it's a golf course.  That came about in part by way of the settlement of the legal woes left by the long presence of the refinery.  It took a long time to establish, and for quite a while I could watch the heavy equipment reshaping the old grounds from our front conference room window, followed by watching the dust rise off the shaped grounds in the wind. But the grass did take, in spite of what skeptics thought (and I was skeptical that it would) and it looks very nice now. The walking paths within it are nice, and it's a nice park, really, next to the North Platte River.  Probably oddly, the visage would now be more familiar to the departed spirits of Frontier cavalrymen now, who were stationed at nearby Ft. Caspar, than at any time since 1913.

So, from major industry, employing more here locally than anything else in its heyday, to a golf course that costs a lot for its operators to run.  

And from an economic anchor of the town to a non entity, in that fashion, in a town that has only one surviving refinery.

A real change.  You would have thought that I would have paid more attention to it.