Category: Stories in Stone Blog

Pop Rocks, Phillips Petroleum, and Petrified Wood – Chapter 7

Typical modern gas station architecture centers on a simple design principal—uniformity. A Shell station in Seattle looks like one in Savannah. Switch a Texaco station from Tuscaloosa with one from Tallahassee and no one would know the difference. But gas stations used to be unique, none more so than a small, one bay building in Lamar, Colorado a small town in southeastern Colorado. Built in the 1930s by William “Bill” Brown, the station was made entirely of petrified wood that Brown stole from private land.

Brown obtained his unusual building material from wooded hills 20 miles south of Lamar. (Curiously, one person who helped build the station was Bill Mitchell, who later achieved fame for inventing the infamous candy, Pop Rocks.) First described in 1895, some of the petrified logs are up to 30 feet long. Surprisingly, few modern geologists have studied the petrified wood mostly because Brown was not alone in pilfering the fossils. Many people simply drove out ranch roads and loaded their trucks with what they found. A geologist who has worked in the area reports that there isn’t enough “petrified wood of that quality to build a bird house, much less a gas station.”

Brown’s petrified wood began life 125 million years ago on a relatively flat, semi-arid landscape that tilted down to a coastal plain to the east. North America was located a bit south of its present location but a sea had begun to move in from the north, which by 85 million years ago had split the continent into two massive islands. Large streams flowed out of nearby hills, crisscrossed flood plains, and removed most plants and animals that could have fossilized except for trees, some of which are now found in the gas station.

Photo courtesy of Dorothy Smith • Circa 1936

Only three month’s after the Brown’s station opened, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! mentioned it in a column. The caption read “The Petrified Wood House, Built Entirely of Wood Turned to Stone.” Brown had a sign made with this caption and placed it on the front of the station.

Brown’s gas station also interested Frank Phillips, the founder of Phillips Petroleum, the type of gas that Brown sold. Phillips tried to buy the gas station, which he hoped to ship to his Oklahoma estate. When Brown found out that it was Phillips who wanted to buy the building, he immediately jacked up the price. Phillips, who was known to be a cheapskate, refused to buy it. Instead, his agents surreptitiously bought 48,025 pounds of petrified wood at $1/ton and shipped the petrified wood to Oklahoma, but Phillips never built a copy of Brown’s filling station.

Photo courtesy of Carolyn Peyton • Undated

Six months after his purchase, however, Phillips did become owner of a new petrified wood building. On December 2, 1939, when Phillips turned 66 at a huge bash in Oklahoma, three Lamar residents associated with Brown’s station gave Phillips a model of the station. After Phillips’ birthday, the little gas station was placed on display at his estate and was thrown out sometime in the 1950s, although no one knows exactly when.

Red Mathews and the model station he and others made for Frank Phillips- 1939

Brown owned the station until he died in Lamar on November 2, 1957. The little building has not been a gas station for several decades but the weathered sign is still above the single bay door and the present owner says that people still stop by to take a photo of “The World’s Oldest Building.”

Starbucks and Slate

Coffee and slate: two great things that go together. Yesterday, the Seattle Times reported that Starbucks is putting a new look into some of its stores. Primarily, the corporation is planning to use more recycled and reused building materials. What struck me most about the article is that the new menu boards at the remodeled stores in Seattle use chalkboards from Garfield High School. Those chalkboards, which I (along with previous Garfield attendees Quincy Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Bruce Lee) may have used when I attended Garfield in the 1980s, are made of slate.

Starbucks’ remodeled store in Seattle (from the Seattle Times)

Blackboard slate came primarily from Lehigh and Northampton counties in Pennsylvania. The metamorphosed stone began as a sediment deposited in an ocean, when rivers carried clay, silt, and sand off North America and out into a deep marine basin. The 450-million-year old sediments first formed into shale, followed tens of millions of year later by metamorphosis to slate, under thousands of feet of rock. At present, up to 7,000 feet of slate beds make up the valleys and ridges around Pen Argyl, 60 miles north of Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania slate (from Penn Big Bed Slate Co. Inc. web site)

Smooth, durable, and uniform, slate took chalk easily and legibly, didn’t absorb water, and stayed straight and true. By 1905, the majority of blackboard makers in the United States sold boards of slate. Six years later, the Cyclopedia of Education reported on blackboards that “It is doubtless no exaggeration to say that [slate]…should be used for all brick, stone, or concrete buildings.”

Blackboards are a wonderful teaching tool. They don’t break or warp. They can be cleaned indefinitely, either with an eraser or with your hand. They produce a pleasing click-clack sound when written on properly. Often taking up an entire side of a room, they provide a huge space for jotting down anything from music to drawings to numbers. They also seem eternal and permanent. Just think of the photographs of Einstein, or any number of mathematicians and physicists, writing out elaborate equations on a blackboard and you will recognize the role they have played in education and communication.

Or consider how our use of blackboards has seeded our language. We wipe the slate clean or start over with a clean slate. We chalk up something to experience. We refer to a tabula rasa, literally a scraped tablet, but more often defined as a clean slate. We vote for one of a slate of candidates. We are slated to do something and those who had a debt were formerly said to be on the slate. No other stone has contributed a comparable literary etymology.

I am happy to see the reuse of the slate from Garfield by Starbucks. I am lucky to have my own slab of that slate as well. The only downside is that Garfield now has those ugly, petroleum based whiteboards instead of the wonderful blackboards of my youth. Perhaps the school district can be inspired by Starbucks and reuse slate. It is certainly more environmentally hip than whiteboard.