Stories in Stone (24 page)

Small orders trickled in, but for the next three decades the industry remained stagnant and depressed.
²¹
The OPEC oil crisis, however, was a turning point.
People began to realize the importance of energy efficiency, that glass
leaked like a sieve, and that stone required less energy to produce and once on a building was more efficient.
The industry
has been mostly steady since then.

The quarries of Indiana continue to extract stone, and the mills of Indiana continue to cut and carve Salem Limestone in all
shapes and sizes.
The men of the Belt are leaner and more technology driven than in the heyday of limestone in the early 1900s,
but they still produce a classic building material.
Their product isn’t flashy.
It’s not colorful or sensuous.
“The Salem
Limestone doesn’t deny it’s a stone.
You don’t put up a building with limestone to express anything but permanence,” says
sculptor Dale Enochs.
²²
“The Salem isn’t a screaming, sexy material.
It has humility.
I liken it to Indiana.
It’s part of us.” It is also part Of
America.

7

P
OP
R
OCKS
, P
ILFERED
F
OSSILS
,
AND
P
HILLIPS
P
ETROLEUM—
C
OLORADO
P
ETRIFIED
W
OOD

Here is a building worthy of study .
.
.
worthy of a visit or many visits to
see and observe these marvelous trees .
.
.
they stand to remind you
of the ancient ages long ago, and to serve you with the modern fluid
which is the vital touch of our ultra modern motor-age.

—Joseph Walter Field,
Lamar Daily News

T
WO CARLOADS OF rocks arrived by train in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in July 1939.
From a distance they looked like nondescript
stone, but up close one could detect something special.
They weren’t just rocks, they were dozens of pieces of petrified wood,
so well preserved that one could count tree rings and see the fossilized bark, insect borings, and ancient knots.
Most of
the fossil logs were tan to white but some had been stained red to orange.
The petrified wood stumps averaged three to four
feet in length and thirty to forty inches in diameter.

Frank Phillips, Bartlesville’s most famous citizen and founder of Phillips Petroleum, had purchased the petrified wood.
It
had come from a dry wash that cut across a windswept grassland about twenty-five miles south of Lamar, Colorado.
The wash
was a good place to find petrified wood because intermittent stream flows eroded the rocky walls of the sandstone drainage
and exposed the harder, more erosion-resistant fossilized logs.
In addition, the open, rolling terrain around the wash meant
that trucks could easily reach the heavy pieces of petrified wood.
This was critical because the longer pieces weighed over
a ton.

Few, if any, people in the small town of Lamar knew that Phillips had commissioned the delivery to Bartlesville.
The supposed
buyer of the fossils was a man named B.
R.
Teverbaugh, who was working with Ted Lyon, Phillips Petroleum’s division manager
in Wichita, Kansas.
Teverbaugh, in turn, had hired A.
H.
Matthews of Lamar to locate the petrified wood.
On June 13, 1939,
Teverbaugh, in a letter marked PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL, wrote to Phil Phillips, nephew of Frank Phillips, “The writer handled
this through a friend we have in Lamar, Colorado, so that it will not be known who was desiring the petrified wood.”

Teverbaugh further noted in his letter that he and Lyon had tracked down the land’s tenant, but that the Federal Land Bank
of Wichita, Kansas, now owned the mortgage.
To increase the likelihood of getting the wood at a low price, Teverbaugh and
Lyon told the bank that they were the ones who wanted the fossils.

Teverbaugh also traveled down to the property Matthews had found to take a look for himself.
He thought that there weren’t
many good specimens but that they could get twenty to twenty-five tons of wood, which they offered to buy from the bank for
thirty-five to fifty cents per ton.
Anything higher and the two poor men wouldn’t be “in the position to take” the wood, wrote
Teverbaugh.

Better examples of petrified wood had been found in the area, Teverbaugh reported, but someone else was already using the
material.
That someone else was Bill Brown, who had recently built a small gas station in Lamar out of petrified wood.

Brown’s station was the driving force for Phillips’s pursuit of the petrified wood.
He had found out about the building because
Brown had leased it to Phillips Petroleum.
Phillips then tried—again on the sly—to buy the building and move it to Bartlesville,
but Brown found out the buyer’s identity and jacked up the price, and Phillips, who was notoriously cheap, refused to buy.
Instead, he decided to purchase his own petrified wood and ship it to Oklahoma, where he would build his own gas station.

Teverbaugh struck a deal for 48,045 pounds of petrified wood, paying $24.20, twice his initial offer.
In early July he had
the wood shipped by train to Bartlesville, more than 375 miles from the Lamar source.
Phillips’s parsimony surfaced again
and the petrified wood sat unused at his country estate, known as Woolaroc, for decades until workers made it part of a sculpture
in an outdoor pond.
In contrast, Bill Brown’s petrified wood building remained a landmark for years, and although it hasn’t
been a gas station for decades, it continues to attract and inspire visitors.

Brown’s gas station stands at the north end of the main business street in Lamar, a community of eighty-three hundred in Colorado’s
southeast corner.
The town is quiet and well kept and is more reminiscent of Kansas—flat, rural, and surrounded by treeless
plains—than Colorado.
Located along the historic Santa Fe Trail, Lamar has long been more a passing-through point than a destination.

Finding the station can be challenging, particularly when the building’s present owner, who sells tires and used cars, parks
three massive SUVs in front of it.
It’s a good thing he doesn’t sell RVs, as even a medium-sized one would completely hide
Brown’s fifteen-by-thirty-five-foot structure.
The best time to see it is early in the morning when the low angle of the sun
makes the building with its crenellated roofline seem enchanting, as if it had been erected for a fantasy movie.
No wonder
Frank Phillips wanted to take it home with him.

Made from several hundred pieces of petrified wood, the station looks as if it had recently emerged from the earth.
The dominant
color is tan to dark brown, although black, milky white, and rusty red pieces also dot the structure.
On one piece on the
side of the building, the end of a five-inch-wide, blackened branch protrudes out from a trunk.
Another log forms a Y where
it has split into two branches, and below the front window is another stump, its rings a dark carnelian against a rusty tan
background.

Brown used his biggest logs of petrified wood in front.
Two three-foot-diameter pieces flank what had originally been the
bay where cars entered for lubrication and washing.
The larger of the two weighed over thirty-two hundred pounds, according
to a newspaper story written when the station opened.
Brown also took advantage of two big logs to inscribe them with his
name.
Other mammoth trunks stand on either side of the front window and at the ends of the building.
Brown incorporated one
crooked fossil log as a waterspout.
Along the top he placed many pointed pieces, giving the station the look of a turreted
castle.
Most of the blocks on the north side are about the size of lunch boxes; Brown used bigger logs on the south end.
Nearly
every piece of exterior petrified wood is in an upright position, like a standing tree.
The average piece is at least a foot
across and two feet tall.

The few pieces of wood that aren’t upright are the ones used inside the building, on what one early writer called the “oldest
‘hardwood’ floor in the world.” Unfortunately, a dingy gray carpet scattered with fallen slabs of ceiling tile covers all
of the stone floor except for where the front door opens.
The interior doesn’t look anything like it did during the early
years of the gas station.
The present owner chopped off the back twenty feet of the building, which was not made of petrified
wood, and now uses what is left for storage.
Two pianos, a baby carriage, broken chairs, a computer monitor, and cardboard
boxes have replaced the snacks, tires, lubricants, bathrooms, and service bay of old.

Brown chose his best piece of petrified wood for the lintel above the front door.
In the middle is the base of a two-inch-wide
branch that looks as if it had recently been snapped off so it wouldn’t thump you when you entered the door.
To the right
are a series of holes that must have been made by insects when the tree was still alive.
Around the holes the stone is a pale
tan to reddish color that I associate with recently downed wood where the bark has been peeled away.
Below this barky region,
the stone is gray and weathered looking.
You have to reach up and touch the petrified log to make sure it’s not real wood.

Walking around the building, you can see another notable feature.
Between the petrified logs on its north side, the mortar
is green and raised as if someone did a poor job of caulking the seams.
Judging from the consistent style used throughout
the building, it seems the entire structure must have had green mortar, but it has almost completely faded on the south and
east sides.
Coloring the mortar green was not Brown’s idea, although a newspaper article written at the time implies that
it was.
A young man building the gas station for Brown thought the colored mortar would give the appearance of vines climbing
the stone trees.

We know about this young man only because of the fame he achieved after leaving Lamar.
His name was Bill Mitchell and he later
went on to invent Cool Whip,Tang, and Jell-O.
He also developed, by accident, one of the great candies of my youth, Pop Rocks.
I still remember the rumors kids passed along of how other kids had eaten Pop Rocks, drunk a soda pop, and exploded.
Mitchell’s
daughter said that her father spoke with fondness of the summer he worked on the station.
“I think he thought it was a special
time,” she said.

Mitchell’s story of working on Brown’s building compounds one of the confusing aspects of the gas station’s history.
In a
letter Mitchell sent to the Lamar newspaper in 1978, he wrote that he worked on the building in the summer of 1930 or 1931.
Other articles, pamphlets, and Web sites state that it was built in 1932.
The assessor’s records show the gas station was
constructed in 1933, as does one of Brown’s stone-incised inscriptions.
No notice of the building, however, appeared in the
Lamar news-paper until an article dated September 20, 1935, heralded its imminent completion.

“There are so many features involved in this unusual filling station that it takes a few minutes to properly sense its unique
position.
An all wood building approved in the fire zone, because it cannot burn!
An all wood building with scarcely a piece
of wood in it .
.
.
THE ONLY PETRIFIED WOOD FILLING STATION IN THE WORLD!” wrote Joseph Walter Field on the front page of
the
Lamar Daily News
.
“Can you imagine the thrill of realizing a lifelong ambition, a dream of years, materializing before your eyes?
Well, this
is the way Brown feels as he sees this unique building nearing completion.”

After finishing the station and signing his lease with Phillips Petroleum, Brown leased the station to others, who ran it.
Two of those lessees were brothers Gene and Blynne Smith.
“Service was much more formal then.
Gene always carried a tire gauge
and chamois in his pocket,” said Dorothy Smith,Gene’s widow.
¹
“When someone pulled up, he’d rush out, check the air in the tires, the oil, and water in the radiator.
He also washed the
windows.”

No matter when the station was built, it was big news in Lamar.
The town, like the rest of the country, was in the middle
of the Great Depression.
Lamar would soon achieve some notoriety because of photographs of titanic storms of black dust raging
across the county and out toward Kansas and Oklahoma, but its main claim to fame prior to the gas station was the infamous
Fleagle Gang robbery of May 1928, which left four men dead following the holdup of Lamar’s First National Bank.
After a yearlong,
nationwide manhunt, the police and FBI captured one of the gang members, using evidence from a fingerprint he left on a getaway
car.
The Fleagle Gang case is the first where the FBI used fingerprints to convict a criminal.
All four members of the gang
eventually died on the gallows.