Phillips 66 Station, McLean

Phillips Petroleum built its gas stations to look like cottages, so they would sit easily among houses. The one at 218 West First Street in McLean, put up in 1929, has the Tudor Revival lines of the type, with shutters and a brick chimney on the outside, and the yellow and black shield sign out front. It pumped gas for five decades, closed in 1977, and has been restored. The National Park Service calls it Phillips' first station in Texas. A state marker at Turkey, in Hall County, makes the same claim for a station there that opened in July 1928, so the record is not settled.

McLean began in 1901 as a railroad switch and well, and rancher Alfred Rowe laid out the town the next year. When Route 66 came through in 1927 the town was shipping cattle and oil by rail, and the road moved its business onto the highway. At the road's peak McLean had twenty-two auto businesses, and three quarters of them were filling stations.

When Interstate 40 crossed the Panhandle, McLean's merchants fought the bypass, and the town was the last on the Texas road to lose its traffic. Businesses closed and the population fell to about 800. Because so little was built afterwards, the stations, the Cactus Inn and the Avalon Theater still stand in the blocks around First Street and Main, listed on the National Register as a district in 2004.