The C & H Refinery

The C & H Refinery (HM2993)

Location: Lusk, WY 82225 Niobrara County
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Country: United States of America
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N 42° 45.237', W 104° 27.459'

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Inscription
By the standards of the petroleum industry, the C & H Refinery is tiny, but placed in the light of history, that small enterprise illustrates the enormous transformation of the oil business. In the late nineteenth century, a multitude of small oil refineries with limited capital and simple technology sprang up near oil fields across the nation. Those refineries distilled the crude and separated its various components into different storage tanks when they turned into steam at their sequential boiling points. That process, however, like small refineries themselves, was replaced in the early 1910s and 1920s when the refining business was controlled by a small number of companies and when refineries adopted a sophisticated technology that caused a molecular change in the petroleum. Both changes meant that almost all of the older, smaller, refineries vanished from the landscape.

But not all of them. In 1933, two Ohio Oil Company employees, Roy Chamberlain and James Robin, opened their own refinery in Lusk. The C & H Refinery acquired obsolete, but functional, equipment from a refinery in Casper that had been closed earlier and, with two stills manufactured in the late nineteenth century, began to refine petroleum, separating the crude into water, naphtha, kerosene, and diesel. The antique machinery and small output were manually



controlled and monitored, the work force modest, and the refinery capable of producing only 190 barrels a day. But it survived, continuing to operate and sell home heating oil to the Lusk community until 1978 when it closed.
When the stills were cleaned and fired up again in 2000 by its new owner to demonstrate that the refinery could still operate, a technology and a small business energy many believed to be buried deep in the past came suddenly back to life.
Details
HM NumberHM2993
Tags
Placed ByWyoming State Historic Preservation Office
Marker ConditionNo reports yet
Date Added Wednesday, July 11th, 2018 at 10:01am PDT -07:00
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Locationbig map
UTM (WGS84 Datum)13T E 544382 N 4733634
Decimal Degrees42.75395000, -104.45765000
Degrees and Decimal MinutesN 42° 45.237', W 104° 27.459'
Degrees, Minutes and Seconds42° 45' 14.22" N, 104° 27' 27.54" W
Driving DirectionsGoogle Maps
Area Code(s)307
Which side of the road?Marker is on the right when traveling East
Closest Postal AddressAt or near 4040 US-18, Lusk WY 82225, US
Alternative Maps Google Maps, MapQuest, Bing Maps, Yahoo Maps, MSR Maps, OpenCycleMap, MyTopo Maps, OpenStreetMap

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