Success Story
Bold
Enterprise Challenges Industry Giants
Five months after the founding of Sinclair Oil
& Refining Corporation, Harry F. Sinclair
announced that he would build a new 8-inch pipe
line from the Cushing Field in Oklahoma to East
Chicago, with modern
refineries at Kansas City
and the Chicago ship channel. That he meant to
battle the industry giants on
 their own ground
excited the entire mid-continent. That the land
acquired in East Chicago was within sight of
Standard Oil's Whiting, Indiana plant had
defiant implications obvious to the trade.
Exactly a month later, one thousand workers
began to push the pipeline northward from
Drumright, Oklahoma.
"We make
everything," said an advertisement,
"that can be made from petroleum." The
sales book priced eighteen products: gasoline; a
tractor distillate named Hi-podistal; kerosene;
natural gas; bunker fuel for
ships; tar,
pitch,
roof coating, turpentine, paint, leather
preservative, medicinal mineral oil, and a half
dozen oils and greases.
Sinclair now
expanded its sales, heretofore confined to
paltry outlets in Kansas. Before 1916 ended, the
Sinco trademark adorned service stations from
Oklahoma north to Iowa, from Denver east to
Albany, N.Y. There was little rural business,
since only 880,000 miles of U.S. road were even graveled,
and nowhere was there a continuous 50-mile
stretch of pavement.
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