10/25/2026
Thankful for P66 still to this day.
In 1927 Phillips Petroleum built a plant in the Texas Panhandle to catch the gas that oil wells had been throwing away, and the propane it bottled is the reason a farmhouse forty miles from the nearest gas main could cook supper on a stove. ⛽
The Panhandle field was sitting on an ocean of natural gas nobody had figured out how to sell. Out in Hutchinson County the lighter liquids riding in that gas, propane and butane, were being burned off or vented as waste. Phillips put up a plant to pull them out, compress them and sell them in steel bottles, and within a couple of decades the company was the largest supplier of liquefied petroleum gas in the United States. That is a quiet thing to be famous for until you remember how much of rural America had no gas line at all. Bottled gas out of the Texas plains is what put a working stove and a heater in those houses. 🔥
The men who ran the plant needed somewhere to live, so the company built them a town and called it Phillips. Identical white frame houses in neat rows, a school, a ballfield, a company store. Around four thousand people at its peak, every one of them living on ground the company owned. And that turned out to matter, because decades later the company decided the houses sat too close to the works, bought the town from the people living in it, and took it down. The school district outlasted the town. 🏈
The gas that nobody wanted heated half the country, and the town that handled it is a mowed field.
