Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  “After the autoist had driven round and round for awhile, it became high time that people should catch on to the fact that as he rides there are a thousand and ten thousand little ways you can cash in on him en route,” Agee wrote in Fortune. First and foremost in making money was selling gasoline. Pumps appeared anywhere one could put up a storage tank, such as hardware stores, general stores, and people’s homes. Curbside pumps became ubiquitous taking their “place on the sidewalk with the mailbox, the streetlamp, and the fire hydrant.”18 By 1920 15,000 gasoline stations dotted the country and by 1930, 124,000 stations blanketed our gas guzzling land.19 Station owners weren’t just dealing a commodity. In the words of one enthusiastic spokesman, “it is the juice of the fountain of eternal youth that you are selling. It is health. It is comfort. It is success.”20

  “The gas station . . . is undoubtedly the most widespread type of commercial building in America,” wrote Daniel Vieyra in Fill ’er Up: An Architectural History of America’s Gas Stations. What had begun merely as a way to distribute gas evolved into a full-scale sales and service center. Owners sold oil, lubricants, tires, batteries, and accessories. They added lifts and pits for oil changes and repairs. Some owners also had separate rooms for car washing. Most had restrooms and many offered food, drink, and tobacco. They had become the one-stop service station so familiar to the American roadside.

  As stations were transformed in the 1920s and 1930s, station design entered its golden age. Vieyra describes four recurring themes. Most elegant were what he calls the Respectful buildings, which grew out of the City Beautiful movement and fostered urban pride. Many resembled Greek temples with columns and pilasters. Others alluded to colonial designs, complete with cupolas and pedimented porticoes, whereas in the southwest, stations took on a more Spanish adobe appearance. All were supposed to inspire the motorist to stop in and consume.

  The second category was Functional buildings, catering to a motorist’s sense of efficiency. The classic was Texaco designer Walter Teague’s white box. Clad in enamel, with three parallel green stripes wrapping around the building, clearly labeled service bays, a glass-enclosed office, and in-door restrooms, the Teague box was streamlined, orderly, and incredibly successful. All you have to do is go to your corner gas station and you will see how Teague’s design morphed into the modern box.

  Domestic buildings, Vieyra’s third typology, satisfied those seeking a more familiar or rustic look. Who wouldn’t want to pull up to a small cottage, either Tudor- or otherwise English-inspired, and purchase gas? The fuel had to be high-quality; the clean, folksy salesman emerging from his pastoral home wouldn’t mislead anyone. Would he? That’s certainly what the gas companies hoped buyers would believe.

  Domestic, Functional, and Respectful buildings did share one common theme. Large companies designed them to promote a corporate image. They wanted travelers to know that when they saw a Texaco box in Tampa, Florida, or a Pure Oil cottage in Westerville, Ohio, they would get the same good service they got from their local Texaco box or Pure Oil cottage.

  Some station owners eschewed corporate branding and endeavored to attract motorists with whimsy. They built stations out of old planes and modeled them after lighthouses and windmills. They made them look like tank cars, Brobdingnagian oil cans, and colossal shells. While some places showcased local themes, such as the World’s Largest Redwood Tree Service Station in Ukiah, California, and a monumental Mammy with a giant, beehive skirt in Natchez, Mississippi, other locales turned to more exotic imagery. No pharaohs ever lived or died in Maine, but travelers in the 1920s and 1930s could buy gas from a series of pyramid-shaped stations. The same traveler could also go to Bardstown, Kentucky, and purchase fuel at a tepee, perhaps the first tepee ever built in that part of the world. Despite the cheesiness of the pyramids, one can argue that evoking Egyptians in Maine is better than reinforcing stereotypes in the south.

  Vieyra labels this architectural style Fantastic and delineates its golden age as 1920 to 1935. Bill Brown may or may not have known of these other fantastic structures when he came up with the plans for his petrified wood station, but his little building was emblematic of the times. Motorists didn’t know what to expect on the open road. They were adventurers, seeking new sights and new experiences. Buying gas at a petrified wood gas station was part of the adventure; it was what restive Americans wanted when they traveled.

  Brown further benefited from Lamar’s location, a little over 125 miles west of the hundredth meridian and less than thirty-five miles from the Kansas border. When travelers driving U.S. Route 50, often called America’s Main Street, happened upon the petrified wood station, they knew they had left the moist East behind and crossed into the arid West. Hell, the wood out here was so dry it had turned to stone.

  “I think they look like warriors crossing the plains,” said Carolyn Peyton.21 She was referring to the thirty-two-story-tall windmills arranged in parallel rows across open ranchland, twenty-five miles south of Lamar. One hundred and eight of the white towers, each with three 112-foot-long blades, have been erected on nearly twelve thousand acres of land, most of it owned by the Emick family. Peyton, who grew up in Lamar and arranged this little expedition, was standing with Greg and Val Emick, who have driven us out to look for petrified wood on their property.

  It is perfect country for windmills, windy, gently rolling, and treeless. Prickly pear cactus, yucca, and sunflowers are the tallest plants growing amid weathered grasses. Not much moves out here besides the turbines, cows, and grasshoppers, and at least one tarantula.

  “People occasionally try and steal the petrified wood. Recently someone tried to put these full rounds into his pickup,” said Emick.22 He was referring to three bathtub-sized petrified logs resting on the ground. “They crushed the back end of their truck, which is how we caught them,” he added.

  “Do you have time to see another log?” he asked. “It’s a bit of a drive.” Back in his V-10 pickup, he drove out a dirt road, through several gates, one of which I almost electrocuted myself on, crossed a dry, rocky wash, and finally abandoned the road to head cross country. He stopped at a mostly buried petrified tree, unseen until almost stepped on.

  Brown, black, and white, the log had eroded like an onion, revealing ring after annual ring of growth. Emick walked off its length and determined that it ran aboveground for forty-five to fifty feet. Hundreds of smaller pieces had trickled down the hillside below it, looking as if the tree had recently died and decayed into pieces. One chunk the size of a baseball had a creamy, translucent texture, warmed by the midday sun. It weighed about twice as much as a baseball and its fossilized bark felt like a dried orange peel, in contrast to the smooth, layered growth rings. The nearly perfect fossilization of the ancient tree made the connection between the living and the long dead especially palpable.

  Emick guessed that Bill Brown acquired his petrified wood from somewhere around this site. Frank Phillips purchased his twenty-four tons of petrified wood from property about a mile west of here and a 1931 booklet places the petrified forest on what became Emick land. That publication refers to one log that was a hundred feet long and six feet in diameter. Because the exact spot of Brown’s acquisition of his building materials will never be known, it presents a geologic conundrum.

  When did the trees live? That is the 50-million-year question. Did they grow 150 million years ago in a dinosaur-rich savannah or 120 million years ago in a hilly landscape of fast streams or 100 million years ago, as a sea began to invade North America? Part of the problem can be summed up by one geologist, who said about the area, “I haven’t seen enough petrified wood of that quality to build a bird house, much less a gas station.”

  The question is interesting because that 50-million-year period witnessed one of the great events of evolution. The appearance of angiosperms, or flowering plants, was as dramatic as that of trees 250 million years earlier. Encased seeds allowed flowering plants to spread across the globe, filling niches never attempted befor
e by their naked-seeded cousins, the gymnosperms. Angiosperms led to a burst of evolution, as pollinators and consumers evolved to feed on nectar, pollen, fruit, and seed. Flowers responded in kind, trying either to encourage or discourage visitors. We now reap this revolution in evolution: Almost every plant we consume is an angiosperm.

  Close-up of petrified wood, William Brown’s gas station, Lamar, Colorado.

  Angiosperms also filled the world with new aromas and new colors. Paleontologists suspect that some of the dinosaurs were colorful, because their modern descendants—birds—are, but greens and browns still dominated the palette 150 million years ago. With the evolution of flowers around 132 million years ago, the landscape brightened with hues rarely seen before on land.

  No matter when Brown’s trees once lived, water carried them some unknown distance, perhaps tens of miles but more likely much less. A few trees probably remained intact but the majority broke into smaller sections, as you would see along any modern river. After they settled, most likely on the inside of a bend where the river slowed or possibly in a logjam, fine-grained sediment quickly buried the downed timber. Groundwater rich in silica infiltrated the wood. The silica impregnated and replicated the tree’s structure. More sediments piled atop the tree-rich beds of sand, converting it to a sandstone.

  As with so many other aspects of the history and geology of the gas station, paleontologists cannot tell what species the trees originally were. The best guess is some type of conifer but nothing more specific than that. They could be an angiosperm such as a magnolia or cottonwood, but probably not; gymnosperms dominated the planet’s flora long after flowering plants appeared. No one has studied the petrified wood well enough, however, to say for sure.

  I like to think that Brown’s trees lived after angiosperms evolved. They grew in a grove near a fast-flowing river. Perhaps a herd of herbivorous dinosaurs grazed nearby, eating some of those newfangled plants with their colorful flowers. A few insects buzzed around, also periodically checking out the flowers. Wind blew gently through the trees. Geologists can be romantics, too.

  Although Frank Phillips couldn’t buy Bill Brown’s gas station and never had anyone build him a copy from the petrified wood he bought in July 1939, he did become the owner of a new petrified wood building. On November 28, 1939, Phillips turned sixty-six. His employees, who called him “Uncle Frank,” celebrated their boss’s big day with parties and a parade. Gifts arrived from around the country. They included a portrait, numerous items emblazoned with the Phillips corporate logo and the number 66, two very ugly lamps, and a small model of a gas station.

  Bill Quinn, the Lamar agent for Phillips Petroleum, station managers Gene and Blynne Smith, and tire distributor Red Mathews built the twenty-four-by-thirty-inch replica of the Lamar building. It had taken them several weeks to assemble. They first built a plywood mock-up and then headed south to the petrified forest to collect buckets of petrified wood chips. After putting together the model, they added a sign that read. The Only Petrified Wood Station in the World, two pumps, several cars, and a smartly dressed mechanic. According to Quinn, no other present “thrilled him [Phillips] more than the miniature petrified wood service station.”23

  Uncle Frank put his little gas station on display at his ranch,Woolaroc. It sat out for many years until Woolaroc opened as a public museum. The model didn’t survive long. The public liked it too much. Greasy little fingers picked at it, breaking off souvenirs and stealing them, says Woolaroc’s director, Ken Meek. He doesn’t know exactly when but thinks the model was thrown out sometime in the 1950s, after Frank Phillips died.

  Bill Brown’s petrified wood building remained a gas station until he died in 1957 and then it stood unused until 1962, when James Stagner converted it to an office for the Lamar Tire Service. Stagner still owns it but hasn’t used the building as an office for many years. He said that people still stop by and want to see it. Most are respectful and just take a few pictures and leave, but some want more. “A couple of kids once drove up and asked for a crowbar so they could pry off a piece. We told them to hold on so we could get two crowbars and we would pry off a piece of chrome from their car,” he said. “They left without any wood.”

  After talking with Stagner, taking photographs, and exploring the building, I got in my rental minivan and drove north. I stopped at a gas station about an hour later. It was a typical modern station found near highways across America. No one came out to help me. I paid for my gas with a credit card inserted at the pump and got back on the interstate. Bugs still covered my windshield.

  8

  THE TROUBLE WITH

  MICHELANGELO’S FAVORITE

  STONE—CARRARA MARBLE

  Clearly it is a miracle that a stone, formless in the beginning,

  could ever have been brought to the state of perfection which

  Nature habitually struggles to create in the flesh.

  —Vasari, Lives of the Artists

  Nothing the best of artists can conceive

  but lies, potential, in a block of stone,

  superfluous matter round it. The hand alone

  secures it that has intelligence for guide.

  —Michelangelo

  ONE MIGHT THINK that an architect named Stone would know better. One also might think that a company that depended upon geology for its fortunes would know better. They didn’t. Like so many others before and after them, Standard Oil Company of Indiana and its chairman, John Swearingen, and architect Edward Durell Stone had been seduced. Not by money or sex, the typical agents of temptation, but by stone. In particular, they had succumbed to the allure of Carrara marble. They made a big mistake.

  In an age when skyscrapers covered in glass and steel dominated architecture, Stone rejected the “hygienic austerity” of human-made materials. He favored the “classic purity of the all-white building” with its “accumulation of history,” and no stone better met this requirement than an “ageless material,” such as marble.1 Taking a less aesthetic approach, Bonnie Swearingen, John Swearingen’s wife, said, “We’re going to bring [the marble] all the way from Italy to Chicago.”2 Standard Oil’s new headquarters would be in her words a “mountain of marble,” piercing the Windy City skyline with the world’s tallest marble shaft.

  Stone and Standard gave in to marble for a simple reason. No material has as glorious a pedigree. For over five thousand years, humans have relied on the dignity, prestige, and beauty of marble. Whether in sculpture or architecture, East or West, public or private, sacred or profane, small-scale or monumental, marble bestows qualities found in no other stone. Use of marble signals that the artist or architect has achieved a certain status in life and can afford the stone of Michelangelo, of the Parthenon, of the Taj Mahal.

  Construction on Standard’s headquarters began April 6, 1970. Engineers describe the design as tube construction, with a central core for elevators, mechanical shafts, and emergency stairs, surrounded by a structure of steel and concrete. On the exterior hung a curtain wall of 44,000 marble panels, which served little purpose other than an aesthetic one. Each panel weighed between 275 and 350 pounds and ran on average 50 inches high by 42 inches wide by 11.4 inches thick. Four stainless steel anchors bolted to the building held each panel in place. The anchors looked like four hands with bent fingers wedged into four grooves on the panel’s top and bottom edges. Because the groove was wider, deeper, and longer than each anchor, the panels could move slightly. After hanging the panels, builders caulked the grooves around each slab, so that from the outside you could not see the anchors. Nor could water get behind the panels and weaken the anchor system.3

  Standard Oil’s employees moved into their 1,136-foot-tall, marble-encased headquarters in December 1972. The honeymoon between man and marble lasted only one year. On December 26, 1973, a 350-pound marble slab plummeted from the eighty-second story and walloped the Prudential Building across the street. A windstorm two months later dislodged another slab, which destroyed a car on the stre
et. Neither incident injured anyone.

  Responding to a new city ordinance, Standard, now known as Amoco, made its first detailed inspection of the slabs in 1979. Over two thousand panels had cracks and seven had bowed convexly one-half inch. Workers replaced the potbellied panels with new ones and repaired the cracks. Amoco also hired Texas A&M professor John Logan as principal geology consultant on the building. His specialty was studying how rock responds to temperature and pressure.

  “The panels were intimidating. Anything that failed could be catastrophic,” said Logan, now a geology professor at the University of Oregon.4 He immediately set up temperature probes around the building to monitor it twenty-four hours a day. Ever since Lord Rayleigh in 1933 had shown that marble weakened as it was heated, geologists had known that thermal cycling warped marble. Logan also removed several panels from the building, took them back to his lab in Texas, and baked the rocks at three different temperature cycles. In all the tests, panels suffered a rapid loss of strength, which then tapered to a gradual loss. He also observed that larger temperature differences in cycles led to more pronounced loss of strength.

  Coincident with Logan’s testing, employees continued to notice cracks and bowing appearing regularly in the panels. Inspectors in 1989 found almost 8,300 panels with cracks. On many, a slight tap with a hammer expanded the crack from a fine, vertical line to a crescent shape prone to failure. Worse, maximum panel curvature had increased to 11.8 inch. In agreement with Logan’s hypothesis that daily temperature changes weakened the panels, approximately 80 percent of those most warped panels occurred on the south and east sides of the building, the two areas that received the most direct sunlight. Tests further showed that an average panel had lost 40 percent of its original strength and that weaker ones had suffered a 75 percent decrease.