Howard Cottonseed Oil Company

The Howard mill rose with an industry that turned a nuisance into a fortune. For most of the nineteenth century, cottonseed piled up at gins and rotted. In the 1870s Europeans blended the oil into olive oil until Italian growers won a tariff; oleomargarine and compound lard took up the slack. Mill owners' syndicates formed the American Cotton Oil Trust about 1884, and by fall 1886 it controlled 88 percent of the nation's crushing capacity. Texas led the country with 102 mills in 1899, and in 1909 most Texas mill hands worked seventy-two hours a week or more.

What the plaque says

Howard Cottonseed Oil Company The Howard Oil Company was one of the earliest cottonseed oil companies in Houston, built in 1880 following the construction of the adjacent junction of the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway and the Houston & Texas Central Railway. In 1882, a station was built at the intersection of the new railroads and named Chaney Junction, honoring Thomas R. Chaney, Secretary and General Manager of the Howard Oil Company. The community that sprang up around Chaney Junction was called Chaneyville. Largely populated by freed slaves and their descendants who labored for both the cottonseed mills and the railroad facilities that stood within walking distance of their homes, Chaneyville became one of the centers for Houston's African American population. An enormous fire destroyed much of the company complex in 1886. By summer 1887, the mill was well on its way to being rebuilt. Within five years of the fire, the plant, by then owned by the National Cotton Oil Company, was the largest cotton oil mill in Texas. In 1892, it produced 12,000 tons of cottonseed meal, 2,000 bales of lint and over 1.25 million gallons of cottonseed oil that was shipped around the globe for use in products from margarine to soap. Another fire destroyed the entire complex on January 6, 1912. The plant owner by that date was the Industrial Cotton Oil Company, who had acquired National Cotton Oil's operations throughout Texas a decade earlier. Industrial rebuilt the cottonseed plant yet again, and it remained in operation until the early 1920s when the property gave way to other uses. The giant seed house is the only part of the cotton oil mill facility that remains. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.2 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Rothko Chapel — 2.3 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 2.4 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.5 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Houston Cemetery Company — steps away
• Caspar Braun — 0.3 mi
• Eugene Thomas Heiner — 0.3 mi
• Damascus Missionary Baptist Church — 0.3 mi