Humble Oil & Refining Company

The Humble Oil Company was chartered in February 1911, and when it was incorporated as Humble Oil and Refining on June 21, 1917, it took in the Paraffine Oil Company, Blaffer and Farish, Schulz Oil, Ardmore Oil and Globe Refining. That year it had 217 wells and about 9,000 barrels a day. Standard Oil of New Jersey, a target of Texas antitrust enforcers, found it easier to do business in the state through its affiliate. Humble was the largest domestic crude producer in World War II, and the Baytown Ordnance Works made nearly half the toluene for explosives.

What the plaque says

Humble Oil & Refining Company Ross S. Sterling entered the oil business in 1909, when he invested in the Humble oil file north of Houston. Two years later he formed the Humble Oil Company with five partners: Walter W. Fondren, Charles B. Goddard, William Stamps Farlish, Robert Lee Blaffer, and Harry Carothers Wiess. Sterling's brother, Frank, became a company director in 1914. In 1917 the company obtained a state charter under the name Humble Oil & Refining Company. In order to finance the building of a refinery, fifty percent of the company stock was sold to Standard Oil of New Jersey. The first oil was pumped into a still at the new refinery on May 11, 1920. As the company expanded and employed more people, a town grew up around the refinery. The company provided low-interest home loans to its employees. By the 1930s research was being conducted at the Baytown refinery, resulting in the production of vital products for the U. S. war effort during World War II. The post-war years saw additional expansion at the refinery, and the company was merged with Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1959. The Humble name was used until 1972, when Standard Oil Company (NJ) became known as Exxon Corporation. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 5.1 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Space Center Houston — 15 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• Emancipation Park — 22 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• Homesite (Point Pleasant) of William Scott — 2.1 mi
• Bayland Orphans Home — 2.9 mi
• Hannah Este Burnet — 2.9 mi
• Ashbel Smith, M. D. — 3.9 mi