Business & Economy Page A6
From the Spindletop gusher of 1901 sprang Exxon Mobil’s tale of success
Humble Oil & Refining, the Texas precursor to Exxon, was chartered some 100 years ago.
What do you get when you add Jefferson Davis’ grandnephew, an uneducated farm hand, an orphan and a Princeton graduate?
The answer is the Humble Oil & Refining Company — the Texas precursor to the ExxonMobil of today.
The roots of Humble Oil stem back to the 1901 Spindletop gusher that kicked off the Texas oil rush. By the 1940s, it became the largest domestic oil producer, a spot it held through the 1960s. The Humble name wasn’t extinguished until the launch of the Exxon brand in 1972.
“It’s a story of really able and driven people finding this region as a way to play out their ambitions,” said Joe Pratt, an oil historian and professor at the University of Houston. “I don’t think you can exaggerate how important Humble was throughout 50 years of the global oil industry.”
The Spindletop discovery attracted most of Humble’s original nine founders and board members to the Houston area — many weren’t from Texas — and several of them found their way to the newly discovered Humble oil field just northeast of the city beginning in 1905.
But Ross S. Sterling didn’t invest in Texas oil wells until 1909 in Humble. He was busy opening a series of small feed stores and banks in oil towns, according to the 1959 “History of Humble Oil & Refining Company” by Henrietta Larson and Kenneth Wiggins Porter.
Sterling, a largely uneducated farm hand from Anahuac, founded the first Humble Oil Company in 1911, although the Humble Oil & Refining Co. that came to dominate US production wasn’t chartered until six years later on June 21, 1917. The brash Sterling, who became president of the company, would be elected Texas governor in 1930.
Some of Sterling’s early Humble partners included his brother, Frank, Ohio driller Charles Goddard and Tennessee orphan Walter Fondren, who came to be known as the best Gulf Coast driller after moving to Texas at age 17 “with nothing but a pair of overalls and 30 cents.” The other founding Humble team was the famed Blaffer & Farish partnership of William Stamps Farish and Robert Lee Blaffer, a New Orleans railroad worker first sent to Spindletop by his employer.
Farish came from Mississippi with a law school education and the pedigree of being the grandnephew of the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. Farish would go on to serve as president of Humble, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, another predecessor to Exxon Mobil, and the American Petroleum Institute.
Blaffer and Farish first met in 1902 near Beaumont and created their formal partnership in 1904. They moved to Houston a year later to focus on the burgeoning Humble oil field.
The bridge between the Sterling group and Blaffer & Farish was Harry C. Wiess, the youngest of the founders. A Beaumont native and one of the first secondgeneration oilmen in Texas, the Princeton-educated Wiess took over his father’s interests in the Paraffine Oil Company, which merged into Humble in 1917. Wiess teamed with Sterling to explore Oklahoma, partnering with Blaffer & Farish in the Goose Creek oil field, now part of Baytown.
The other two original Humble directors — Lobel Carlton and Jesse H. Jones, a wealthy lumberman, developer and banker — were much less involved. Carlton was a lawyer for several of the founders, while Jones was brought in to help with financing. Jones, who sold his Humble interests in 1918, would become the owner and publisher of the Houston Chronicle.
Most of the Humble founders proved successful in the oil fields, but they were at first dwarfed by the biggest oil companies in the state like the Texas Company (Texaco), Sun Oil (Sunoco) and Gulf Oil.
Starting in 1915, the Texas Company pushed legislation to let oil companies become integrated so one corporation could produce, transport and refine the oil into fuel. Independent producers like Farish, Sterling and Wiess formed the Gulf Coast Oil Producers Association to fight the legislation and to find better deals to sell their oil.
They subsequently formed or bought separate refining and pipeline companies. Farish led the push for them to pool all of their resources into one company that could feed the nation’s rapidly growing oil and gasoline demand.
Once a compromise version of the Texas Company’s bill became law in 1917, the consolidated Humble Oil & Refining Company was created.
Humble then built the Baytown refinery — the expanded version of which is the nation’s second-largest refinery today.
Despite early successes, Humble’s growth was still restricted by a need for more capital to finance exploration.
John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil never made a major dent in Texas early on because of the state’s strict antitrust laws — not to mention Standard was considered a monopolistic Yankee empire. But courts in 1911 broke Standard into several parts. The Standard name remained strongest within the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, or Jersey Standard.
Farish became friendly with the Standard CEO Walter Teagle while serving on the Petroleum Committee of the Council of National Defense during World War I. Over lunch one day, Farish and Teagle talked about a partnership, an idea Farish reluctantly broached to Sterling. “I don’t give a continental damn if you get it from the czar of Russia or the emperor of Germany, just so we have the money,” Sterling replied, according to the Humble Oil history book.
In 1919, they agreed to sell 50 percent of Humble to Standard for $17 million in a deal that left Humble leadership with a remarkable level of independence for decades to come. When challenged with the notion that Standard was taking Humble over, Sterling responded, “Take us over, hell! We’re going to take over the Standard.”
Humble opened its downtown Houston headquarters in 1921. Six years later, it discovered the Sugarland oil field, the first major U.S. find using seismography. The big Friendswood oil field discovery came in 1937.
The Humble brand became ubiquitous in Texas and much of the country, although Standard pushed its Esso or Enco brands in some regions. As Jersey Standard grew globally the company merged all of its U.S. operations into Humble in 1959.
For years, though, the company struggled with which of its brand names to use, deciding to create a single U.S. brand, Exxon, in 1972. The oil giant maintained its headquarters in New York until 1989, when Exxon moved to Irving to save money. Exxon merged with Mobil in 1999. The Humble brand was long gone by then.
“It’s a company that became truly global,” Pratt said, “and they needed a global name.”