Magnolia Station Lofts

The 3.5-acre (1.4 ha) site Magnolia Station Lofts occupies was originally at the north edge of Dallas’ city limits and the site of Magnolia Petroleum Company’s first sales and distribution center in 1911. The site is important to Dallas history for its close association with the growth of the oil industry in Texas and the United States in the early 20th Century. The industry was a major contributor to the growth of Dallas and the state.

A Galveston banker, John Sealy purchased the Texas oil production, refining and transportation assets of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company after an anti-trust suit forced that nationwide enterprise to sell its assets in Texas. The purchase was made at public auction in Austin in November 1909. Sealy operated the business under his own name until April 1911 when he and fellow investors organized the Magnolia Petroleum Company. One of the new company’s first acts was to purchase the property on Lyte Street at Dallas’ northern city limits for $8,000. The land was adjacent the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad tracks, on an escarpment free from the occasional flooding of the Trinity River (which had inundated downtown Dallas in three years before). A month after the purchase a building permit for $10,067 was filed at City Hall for the first of a collection of structures now known as Magnolia Station. The complex of seven buildings contained a pump house to draw refined petroleum products from railroad tank cars, 11,000 steel petroleum tanks surrounded by a concrete retaining wall, a shed under which products were blended, a barrel-repair structure, warehouse, machine shop, delivery truck garages, and an office building. All but the tanks themselves have been restored and remain on site.

In 1925 the Company merged with Standard Oil of New York (SOCONY), which in turn adopted a new trademark: Mobiloil. In 1955, the name Socony was dropped in favor of Mobil. The company’s offices had previously moved to downtown Dallas when its new signature building with Pegasus, a red neon revolving flying red horse that could be seen for miles around was completed in 1922. The distribution center moved to Singleton Boulevard in West Dallas in 1949. The site was subsequently occupied by the Neuhoff Packing Company for meat processing, and then the Kaymac Paper Company as a storage and distribution facility.

In 1993 the site was purchased and restored to its present state as a loft apartment complex by the Lyte Development Company of Dallas. Its rustic undulating landscape with century-old historic buildings functions as a unique seventy unit loft apartment development.

References

• Gause, Jo Allen. New Uses for Obsolete Buildings, Washington, D.C.:
• ULI - the Urban Land Institute, 1066. Pages: 44, 148, 156
• UL:I Catalogue Number: N03
• International Standard Book Number: 0-876420-802-5
• Library of Congress Number: 96-61393.

External links

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