Burt E. Hull Interview - Burt E. Hull Interview [part 3 of 6]

TOPIC: Beaumont, Sour Lake, Humble Pipeline work NAME: Burt E. Hull INTERVIEWER: W. A. Owens PLACE: Dallas, Texas TAPE NO. 129 DATE: 8/24/53 RESTRICTIONS: None

Owens - Well, what was your next activity then?

Hull - Well, after these odd jobs in Louisiana and Texas, south Louisiana, south Texas the---.

In the fall of 1905 the Texas Company decided for two reasons to build a pipeline from the vicinity of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to tie on to its present system at Humble, Texas.

And I was sent up to Indian Territory in the fall of 1905, 1906, I beg your pardon, 1906.

To get that started, the survey started and location.

And the construction was in the following year.

They, the company, branched out quite a bit in 1906, I mean decided in 1906 to branch out.

They built a refinery at Dallas here right across. And one in Tulsa as soon as the Dallas was finished.

And abroad, why they acquired a Continental Oil Company in Belgium and started an export department.

And a lot of distribution terminals on the Atlantic seaboard.

O.- So it was getting to be a large company by that time?

H.- By the fall of 1906, it had become an integrated company, yes.

O.- Yes. Did you help in building any of the refineries?

H.- Yes.

O.- Which ones?

H.- All of them.

O.- All of them. You worked in all the---

H.- All up to time I went to Foreign Service down at Mexico.

O.- Yes sir. All right, but I'd like for us to get the story of that pipeline down from Tulsa.

What kind of problems did you have surveying for it?

H.- Well, as I mentioned before, there wasn't any kind of roads in those days.

We had no automobiles and we had no trucks.

Everything was by horse drawn vehicles, and so we didn't need highways.

And the country was sparsely populated so you couldn't depend on finding boarding houses or restaurants in the small towns through the country.

And on a survey you pretty near had to have a camp.

Well, we had camps, I mean what we call a mobile camp, what we can pick up and move.

We had camps for our survey crews.

And so we just moved those right along as we progressed.

O.- Yes. What kind of maps did you have for that work?

H.- Well, they were rather crude too.

There weren't any two adjoining maps with the same-- just kind of maps of different scale.

Some, they usually scaled in so many varies per inch depending on the size of the county in the scale of the map usually.

So to have anything that's like a pipeline or railway or highway, why, you didn't have any maps to lay it out on.

You had to make your maps, fit them together somehow.

O.- Did you have to do all the map work yourself, or did you have competent engineers to assist you?

H.- Well, of course I had a lot of assistants, anybody we could hire.

But there weren't any companies to whom you could go contract for maps or anything like that as you can today.

O.- Yes. Well, what about problems of right of way?

H.- Well, that wasn't a great deal of trouble.

Usually you, we'd first have to locate the line where we wanted to lay it across a man's land.

And then we could show him on the ground where we wanted to go.

And we could measure on the ground how far it was and we'd just pay him for the privilege of laying our pipelines there and maintaining it.

And taking it up later on when we didn't want to use it anymore.

O.- What kind of prices did (Both talking)..excuse me.

H.- Well, prices ran from 10 to 25 cents a rod for that privilege.

As a matter of fact the first original line from Humble to near Tulsa, Indian Territory, I mentioned, [ran] across this very tract of land we're sitting on here.

And right over there you can see where the line was taken up.

Well, it wasn't abandoned until about two or three years ago.

And there's still signs of where that line lay across this land.

O.- You didn't know then that you'd be settling here?

H.- No, of course.

O.- What did you do? Did you have condemnation procedures for....

H.- Yes. O.-.....people up there?

H.- You have in all states except Pennsylvania.

At that time I believe all states had a condemnation law, except three or four or five states.

In other words, if you can't reach an agreement with the property owner, you can go to court in the court, some county court or something and he appoints an appraisal committee to say what the privilege is worth of laying line.

And then whatever the finding of that court is, is binding on the owner of the property.

O.- Yes, sir.

H.- But in the 47 years that I was with the Texas Company, I don't remember a single condemnation suit being tried.

It'd get right up to the point and then the l and owner would say,"All right, you can go ahead."

I don't know why they-I guess the land owner figured that he'd be better off by taking the company's offer than he would by having to abide by whatever the finding of an appraisal committee would.

Might be-see, the appraisal would be made on the basis of his ad valoren tax rendition anyway.

O.- Yes. That could be fairly low.

H.- Yes, it'd usually be low.

So they--well, in all cases I can remember of, we had one or two suits where the land was owned by somebody was either of unsound mind or in the pen or something like that.

No legal representative appointed to look after their interests.

But because of a difference in opinion of the compensation between the company and the landowner, I never did know of a case of a condemnation case to be tried.

O.- Yes, sir.

H.- They always reached a settlement before they come, went to trial.

O.- What did you do in cases where you couldn't find the owner of the land?

H.- Well, that's handled the same way as the condemnation cases.

O.- Yes, sir.

H.- There's a few of those cases where title's in dispute or you can't find the owner.

And all you do then is put up bond with the court and go right ahead.

O.- Well, in the Big Thicket there was a great deal of question of ownership, wasn't there?

H.- No, not a great deal that I can recall.

However, in those cases we just put a bond up, make a bond in the court and got right ahead, don't delay at all.

O.- Yes. Were you ever ordered off land by the owner?

H.- Oh, yes. Lots of times.

O.- Could you tell us some of those stories?

H.- Yes. Well, we had to have a peace bond.

We had to go to the local courts and get a peace bond, against a owner to--really it's an injunction to adjoin [sic?] him from running us off, running the surveyors off the land or anything else.

But they are rare, not many cases.

Nobody was ever hurt, yet.

O.- Were you ever shot at?

H.- No, threatened but not shot at, actually shot at.

O.- Well, you were telling me some of the details of the pipeline.

How long did it take you to lay the pipeline from Tulsa to Humble?

H.- I say six months.

O.- About six months?

H.- Yes.

O.- And----

H.- Usually you can lay it just as fast as you can get the pipe.

O.- How was the pipe brought up?

H.- How was it brought up?

O.- How was it brought to where you were laying it? By railroad.

H.- Well, it was brought to the nearest rail, from the pipe manufacturing plant to the nearest rail head.

O.- Yes, sir.

H.- For instance, our line, original line from Indian Territory down to Humble was fairly close to what is now the Trinity and Brazos, what was then the Trinity and, newly constructed Trinity and Brazos Valley Railroad.

So we just picked out the nearest railroad switches or stations along the line and shipped our pipe to those stations.

And from there, why, we load it on wagons and hauled it out with mules or horses out to the right of way.

Some places the right of way was right alongside the railroad right of way.

Not far though, cause the railroads have to go to a grade.

They have to be as near level as possible.

They can't spend too much money on grading.

But it don't make any difference with a pipeline how far you go or how far you come down.

You can go the straightest line is the best, between the two points is, for pipeline.

O.- Yes, sir. Did you use any oxen in hauling the pipe?

H.- Well, in heavily timbered country some places, that's all.

On prairie land, why, horses and mules can, they can travel so much more rapidly than oxen, you can't afford to string with the oxen.

Except where you have a lot of mud and maybe corduroy road and conditions.

O.- Would the Texas Company furnish the teams or did you do that by contract?

H.- Well, in the early days the Texas Company would pay so much an hour for a team and driver, or a number of teams and drivers.

Later, why, the contractors came in and agreed to, would offer to string pipe for so much a mile.

And later, not only the Texas Company but all companies adopted a practice of accepting bids from usually local contractors on stringing from rail head to the nearest point on the right of way in units of so much a mile, or so much a foot.

And that's the practice today.

The contractor who lays your pipe he can't afford to have a whole lot of trucks laid up doing nothing a lot of the time.

So he lets the so-called pipe stringers bid, make him propositions.

Let's say that general contractor A gets his award to contract from building a 100 miles pipeline for you.

He immediately looks for some pipe stringing contractors, Red Willet, for instance, and the Dunn brothers over here, Vandiver, and Cox and others.

And says, "Now, here. I've got a 100 miles of pipe of a certain weight and a certain size to lay.

That pipe is going to come to these railroad stations along these railroads.

If you want to bid on it, why, make me a proposition on any or all of it, why, I'll open bids on a certain date."

Well, these fellows will bid on that so much a foot for laying the pipe down there on the ground right where this contractor wants it.

And that is much more economical for him.

They'll go on then and bid on another fellow's line over there where that truck is, see.

So they can use their trucks in two places.

This fellow then don't have a lot of equipment tied up waiting for the next job he'll

be awarded. And it's more profitable for him to give these fellows the stringing and he can make it himself with his own trucks.

O.- Did you run the same sorts of crews down from Tulsa that you had over to Humble as a digging crew and a pipe laying crew?

H.- Well, no.. Maybe some of the pipe laying crew were the same men...

O.- Yes.

H.- ....but certainly the ditching was done by local.. we try to hire the man himself, the man that owns the land.

Now he may have some boys out on a vacation or something that'll want to go to work.

They don't have to have any skills to dig a ditch.

O.- So you could use local labor around the...

H.- Well, we'd rather.

O.- Yes. Do you recall about how much you were paying for that labor in those days?

H.- Oh, about 15 or 20 cents an hour.

O.- You'd get all the ditched dug you wanted at that rate?

H.- Yes.

O.- Do you remember what you were paying....

H. - My recollection was for unskilled labor like digging ditches about 15 cents an hour.

O.- Do you remember what you were paying your skilled labor at that time?

H.- Well, about 25 and 30 cents an hour.

O.- Well, you were telling me a story about the cook...

H.- That's fifty years ago, you know.

O.- Yes, fifty years ago.

You were talking about your cook and cook wagon.

I'd like for you to tell that story again.

H.- You mean losing one?

O.- Yes, losing one.

H.- Well, we had a deal with a farmer and rancher down there at Waxahachie that had two wagons and two teams.

And that was on this line from Indian Territory to Port Arthur.

So we hired him to move and set up, hired him as camp boss and his teams.

And he had somebody helping him because he had two teams.

He would move the camp for us whenever we wanted it moved and find the camp sites for us, and arranged for camp sites.

What he would do, the surveying crew would all go out on the job, surveying the line.

That day he knew that he ought to move ahead because they would be working ahead of him.

So he stayed behind and he and his helper would take down the camp and everything movable and pick it all up and load it on the wagons.

And he'd drive on ahead and maybe by noon hour they'd find a new camp site and get it all set up.

Then he'd bring a little lunch back to the crew.

And he would tell the crew where the camp was moved to.

And that night when the crew knocked off from work, why, they would have a general idea where to find the camp.

Well, one day somewhere this side of Coalgate, between Sherman, Texas, and Coalgate, Oklahoma, Bill Fondrell didn't show up.

There wasn any wagon roads or any highways or anything.

Nobody, no use hunting.

He'd moved the camp, all right, but where.

He didn't tell anybody where the camp was.

So they began to hunt him.

And got into our tent and we finally gave up and decided we couldn't find him.

Well, from that day we couldn't find Bill or anybody had seen him or heard of him or the camp.

Everybody's wearing apparel and everything they owned was in that camp.

And we depended on staying at these sparsely located, let's call them pioneer farm houses, that we could.

Maybe we'd sleep in a barn or somewhere else.

Well, we just depended on the people who owned the land or tenants to take care of us until we could find Bill.

You know, we came across the Red River and from Sherman down to Dallas, it's all, nearly all lands, well more than half cleared.

It's not all timbered like it is up in Oklahoma.

So we made it into Dallas here without hearing a word from Bill Fondrell.

I guess it was a week.

And from Dallas we just kept going south.

We went down through Waxahachie, Corsicana, and clear on to Humble, never did see Bill anymore.

It was while we was somewhere between Corsicana and Humble that Bill showed up in Dallas.

And we just told them, "All right, pay him off and let him go.

Because if he's going to get lost, why he's no good to us."

So we went from Dallas, let's say from Sherman, went from Red River to Humble without any camp.

And we don't need any camp today.

There's plenty of restaurants and little hotels and so on nearby.

And it's silly to rent a, lease a camp, a mobile camp anymore.

O.- You were telling another story about the time you spent the night when the man wasn't at home.

H.- Oh, that was down near Conroe, on the same project.

It was Sunday.

We were working on Sunday.

And along about four or five o'clock in the afternoon we began to look for a place to spend the night.

And we come across a little farm house, but

there wasn't anybody home.

So we come back there anyhow.

And we were all hot and sweaty so we took some wash tubs down from the wall.

And proceeded to have our baths out in the well in the yard.

And we drove the cows in to milk them and caught three of four chickens and got some eggs.

And killed two or three chickens and had a big feast there.

Well, about ten or eleven o'clock the owner came home with his family.

And some of the boys was still bathing and the bathtubs in the yard, or the washtubs rather.

Turned out the owner was a nigger, or tenant.

Anyway it was his house, and his cows and his chickens and his eggs, and his water well.

Anyhow he was, he was pretty-he was fighting mad.

He was awfully mad.

The next morning he was in a better humor and I straightened it out with him.

I paid him for the milk we had taken out of his cows.

And the eggs and chickens and so on.

And anyway I straightened out in cash settlement with him.

Why, he was all right.

We struck a bargain and made an end of it.

And I hired him on the spot to help trim, get limbs out of the way as we were in heavy timbered country there on down, on ahead.

And he, he agreed only to work for a few days but he worked till we got into Humble.

And he liked it.

From that time on he was one of our employees.

O.-The only Negro you....

H.- The only nigger we had.

But the point was that we just helped ourselves to everything he had when we wanted to spend the night.

There wasn't nobody at home.

O.- Well, usually they were very hospitable, I take it?

H.- Well, usually they were, if you find them at home.

We had no trouble making--if it were at all possible for them to make room for us, they would do it.

Sometimes they'd tell us right off, "We haven't got a place for a cot in the house.

If you want to use my barn out there, go out there and sleep in the hay if you want to.

Won't charge you nothing for that."

O.- Did they ever sic the dog on you?

H.- Yes, sometimes they would.

I don't mean when we were spending the night or anything else like that, but they'd look up and see a bunch across the corn field out there.

Maybe wouldn't have the opportunity to go and tell them we were going to survey a line across.

And they'd sic a dog on us and run us off, try to.

O.- You were telling another story about the Burleson family.

I'd like for you....

H.- Well, that happened down here in Leon County, one hot day.

I usually tried to stay about anywhere from a half to a mile ahead of the survey crew and scout around and find out who owned the land we were crossing.

That was the only place, didn't have any abstract company to--no place to go get information.

So I'd go along ahead of them and I'd guess about where they were coming through.

And if I could find anybody, try to get what information I could on who owned the land, where they lived and so on.

And one day about noon I was out ahead of the gang and I come on to a fellow's place.

I can't remember what name I used, but I said, "Your name is Blank," let's say Jones.

"Your name is Mr. Jones, isn't it?"

I don't like to go up to a man and say, "What's your name, mister?"

So I pretended I knew who, lived there, but I didn't.

He says, "No, my name's not Jones. My name is Burleson."

"Well," I says, "well, that's a familiar, that sound familiar to me.

The name Burleson is all, is one of, I hear that very frequently.

In fact, my grandmother was, she was named Burleson.

Her name was Mary Burleson.

"He says, "Yes," says, "she was my sister.

My name's Edwin (?)Burleson."

So it just goes to show you how you can go across the state of Texas and find members of your own family you didn't know lived there.

O.- Yes.

H.- Well, Edwin Burleson, he's got a son here in Dallas now.

He's first, a vice-president in the First National Bank.

O.- This was a six inch line you said, I believe?

H.- It was eight inch from Indian Territory down to Humble.

O.- Oh yes, eight inch there and six inch on the other.

H.- Well, we laid there afterwards another six inch and another eight inch and a ten inch.

They had four or five lines from Humble on to Port Arthur.

O.- Yes.

H.- That's all been replaced with a sixteen inch now, I believe, one sixteen inch line.

O.- Well, what was your next job after that pipeline job was over?

H.- Well, that was finished in the early fall of 1907.

I went back to Port Arthur as a--let me see-- I was in, acting chief engineer of the company.

And they decided to expand Port Arthur considerably.

And they bought these export terminals, as I've

mentioned, over in Belgium and were building some distribution terminals along the Atlantic seaboard.

So that was all, they decided to put that all as a responsibility of the refining department.

So they decided that they'd expanded the pipelines about all they needed to right away so I was transferred as chief engineer to, chief engineer of the refining department.

And let me see, I moved, well, they moved the general offices from Beaumont to Houston in the spring of 1908, April, I believe it was.

So I went down to Port Arthur as chief engineer of the refining department in maybe it was April, 1908.

And I stayed down there at Port Arthur's headquarters until about, eight and twelve leaves four, about fourteen years as chief engineer of the refining department.

Then I went to Mexico, no..... l went to Casper, Wyoming.

O.- All right. Before we take up that story, I'd like to go back and ask you a few more things about the Sour Lake, Batson, Beaumont area.

I'd like first for you to tell me about the incident with Mr. Broussard and his rice farm.

H.- Well, I don't remember what year that was.

Maybe have been, seems to me that was in 19--, well, it was after we built our line to Indian Territory.

Maybe, let's say in 1911 or 1910 or eleven or thereabout.

Incidentally, I was at Port Arthur, and most of it is hearsay.

They had had a little leak in one of the six inch lines across a piece of land on which Broussard was farming as a rice farmer, east of Sour Lake, and spilled a little oil.

And when he floods it with water, why the oil went out and covered maybe 10 acres of his rice crop.

And he just raised all

kinds of hell. He made them pay him.

Pay Old Man Broussard made the Texas Company, Texas Pipeline Company pay him for the value he would have gotten for the best of his rice had he raised a crop on all of it.

They paid him off to get rid of him.

It didn't amount to too much.

Well, that was, let's say the fall of 1910.

The following year he planted a crop there.

And of course they fixed the pipe and there wasn't any more oil leak.

But the next year he didn't raise any rice except for that very spot that the company had paid him for a crop the year before.

All the balance of his, that had no oil, had never had any oil on it, wouldn't bear for some reason.[end of tape]