Cedar Grove was an oil boom town

The Caddo Parish Civil Rights Heritage Trail project is expanding its scope with a new series designed to help historic villages, towns, neighborhoods, and/or cities in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, investigate three different versions of their communities: the past, the present, and the future. Team members include Dr. Gary Joiner, Mik Barnes, Jaclyn Tripp, Dr. Laura Meiki, Dr. Jolivette Anderson-Douong, Dr. Amy Rosner, Dr. Rolonda Teal, and Brenton Metzler.

The team is now focusing on the history of the Cedar Grove neighborhood.

In the first article in the series on Cedar Grove, Dr. Gary Joiner (Professor of History at LSU Shreveport) showed us how a social movement in 1911 Shreveport drastically changed Cedar Grove.

In the second article of the series, we learned how Shreveport became a hub for automobile production in the early days of the horseless carriage.

The third article of the series examined how manufacturing changed in Cedar Grove after automobile production ended.

For the fourth article in our series on Cedar Grove, Dr. Gary Joiner takes readers back to 1905-1910, when Cedar Grove sprung up in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, as a small oil boom town.

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SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – The Cedar Grove neighborhood in modern-day Shreveport was once a little oil boom town that sprang up overnight.

Boom towns like Oil City and Trees City (from the previous timber boom) sprang up quickly in North Caddo Parish. Cedar Grove is one of those oil boom towns.

Cedar Grove might have remained a pastoral setting during the early 1900s, and Caddo Parish may also have seen slow, steady economic growth if oil and gas deposits had not been discovered twenty miles north of Shreveport near Caddo Lake in 1905.

Oil from Cedar Grove was transported through pipelines beginning in  1910. Former timber railroads now serviced oil companies. Refineries sprang up to process the oil and gas into useable products. 

Pipelines and railroads revolutionized the oil and gas business—access to transportation allowed oil fields to be separated from processing centers. Two early refining centers in Shreveport were located in Anderson Island and Cedar Grove.

Several wealthy Shreveporters, some owners of early Cedar Grove industries, purchased most of the remaining Pickens land in 1910. Among them were former Louisiana governor Newton Crain Blanchard, real estate developer J.B. Atkins, Lee Emmett Thomas, Wesley E. Wheless, and John D. Wilkinson.

Shreveport had friendly relations with Cedar Grove. The city extended street car service to its near neighbor, separated by five miles of mostly undeveloped land. While workers in Cedar Grove refineries and factories mostly lived there, owners and managers typically lived in Shreveport.

Cedar Grove had many growth opportunities. The topography of the northwestern portion was flat, negating the need to move mountains of soil. The railroad tracks (now part of the main trunk line of the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railroad) bisected the town east and West.

Early oil companies eyed the town as a favorable location for refineries and associated factories. With an influx of industrial companies in Cedar Grove, lumber mills were needed to build the factories and homes.

Cedar Grove became a nexus of the industry. Pipelines brought gas to run the local factories. Refined oil and petroleum products were loaded on railroad tank cars destined for larger markets. Among the early petroleum-related refineries were the D’Artois Refining Company, which produced a variety of oils and grease products, Western Carbon, McNutt Carbon, Rogers Refining, and Louisiana Fuel and Gas. Several of these were merged into the more significant Crystal Oil and Refining Company.

“The establishing of another refinery in the Shreveport, La., district is noted as follows by the Shreveport News: ‘Ground will be broken at once, it was announced yesterday, for the $150,000 plant of the Marine Oil and Refining company at Cedar Grove, the site to cover 10 acres. The plant will be installed at a cost of $150,000 and the D’Artois process for the running of lubricating oils without a wax plant will be used. This, according tot he announcement, will cut the price of making high grade lubricants in half. Low grade Caddo oil will be used,” we read in Vol. XXII–No. 1 of the Apr., 1917, pp. 24 of The Petroleum Gazette from Titusville, Pennsylvania.

In Shreveport Chronicles: Profiles From Louisiana’s Port City, by Eric J. Brock, published by The History Press in Charleston, South Carolina in 2009, we learn that George D’Artois, the founder of the D’Artois Refining Company, was the grandfather of George D’Artois, the commissioner of public safety during Shreveport’s civil rights movement.

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Sources:

Shreveport Chronicles: Profiles From Louisiana’s Port City, by Eric J. Brock, published by The History Press in Charleston, South Carolina, 2009

The Petroleum Gazette, Titusville, Pennsylvania, Vol. XXII–No. 1, Apr., 1917, pp. 24

The (Shreveport) Times, Oct. 20, 1915, pp. 8

The (Shreveport) Times, July 30, 1910, pp. 9

The (Shreveport) Times, Jan. 28, 1907, pp. 3

The Shreveport Journal, June 25, 1909, pp. 6

Eric J. Brock, “Cedar Grove Was First a Town On Its Own,” Presence of the Past, Shreveport Journal, February 21, 1998.

Louisiana Oil and Gas Museum, Oil City, Louisiana. https://aoghs.org/energy-education-resources/louisiana-oil-and-gas-museum/

Eric J. Brock, “Currently A Standing Symbol of Urban Decay, Cedar Grove Was Once a Booming Industrial Town,” Presence of the Past, Shreveport Journal, March 19, 1994.

Brueggerhoff’s  Shreveport City Directory 1917, R.L. Polk & Co., Dallas, Texas; Brock, “Currently A Standing Symbol.”

Brock, “Currently A Standing Symbol.”