Episode 5
The Oil Boom in Plantation Country
The Company Town
Pan American Record 1 No. 6, (July 1917): 13.
Pan Am’s
Company Newspaper
Scroll through corporate propaganda from over a century ago, for free on Google Books:
See what an Oil Boom Company Town from 1916 looked like.
Music by Delta Moan: Blood & Dust
Or watch this slideshow of photos!
“‘Mex Pet’ Refinery at Destrehan, Louisiana”
The St. Charles Herald
May 7, 1921
Hahnville, Louisiana’s newspaper reported company town baseball games to local communities.
The adjacent company towns we discuss in Episode 5, Destrehan and Norco, played each other frequently.
Shell Norco
Documentary
Brief video put together by Shell Norco Museum Committee and the Shell Norco Video Studio, 1997.
Irene Hebert
“A Century on Apple Street”
Oral history of Irene Hebert, century-long resident of St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. St. Charles Museum & Historical Association, 2016.
“Apple Street” was the geographic border between white and Black families in St. Charles Parish during Jim Crow.
For Oil Workers’ Labor History:
Ray Davidson, Challenging the Giants: A History of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union. Colorado: The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union. 1988. Google Books
Tyler Priest, “Cat Crackers and Picket Lines: Organized Labor in US Gulf Coast Oil Refining,” January 2018. Read on Research Gate
For more about “Welfare Capitalism”:
Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism 1880-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1976. Google Books
Destrehan Plantation Museum’s coffee table book:
Eugene Cizek, Richard Sexton, John Lawrence. Destrehan: The Man, The House, The Legacy. River Road Historical Society, 2008. Buy from 64 Parishes