Business innovates—and government creates the conditions that make innovation possible. Here in Pennsylvania, most residents heat their homes with natural gas. Why? Because, in the early days of World War II, U.S. taxpayers built a 1,400-mile pipeline from East Texas to Phoenixville, where it branched out to oil refineries in Delaware County and New York. Intended to protect the nation’s oil supply from German submarines, the so-called Big Inch line was later sold and converted for natural gas transmission by private investors who saw it as a tool to market what had been a waste product.
In Chester County, oil pipelines had been regarded with suspicion since the 1870s, when Standard Oil bribed the Pennsylvania legislature to preserve its monopoly. The first crude, wooden pipelines were laid in 1863 in the western Pennsylvania oil fields. Their initial purpose was to help small, independent oil drillers break the monopoly of the Teamsters, who charged extortionate rates to move barrels by wagon to the nearest railroad. As the oil industry outgrew its chaotic early days, it consolidated into the hands of a few well-capitalized entrepreneurs. One was Cleveland refiner John D. Rockefeller, who founded Standard in 1870 and spent the next decade acquiring its competitors.
By 1879, Standard controlled 90% of the country’s refining capacity, along with the pipelines through which Pennsylvania crude was gathered. Rockefeller controlled so much oil that he could dictate prices to the small independent producers that used his pipelines. Incorporating as Tidewater Pipeline, Pennsylvania producers banded together to lay a 110-mile pipeline from Coryville to Williamsport. The oil was carried east to market on the Reading Railroad.
When Tidewater later began to extend its pipeline east toward Philadelphia, Standard retaliated with public relations tactics. First, they tried to frighten farmers with the supposed dangers of oil pipelines to agriculture. More important, the Pennsylvania Railroad—Standard’s ally—refused to let Tidewater cross its tracks. Near Downingtown, the oil men came across a farm that featured a culvert under the railroad tracks so cattle could wander freely from one field to the next. They bought the farm on the spot and ran their pipe through the culvert. And so, Tidewater reached the Delaware River.
Standard was only temporarily defeated. Within a couple of years, it won partial control of Tidewater and re-established its monopoly. That lasted until 1911, when anti-trust litigation broke Standard up into 11 separate entities. Oil transmission was handled piecemeal until 1942.
In January of that year, a German submarine sank the first U.S. tanker ships, only a month after Pearl Harbor. Over the following five months, subs sank 233 more tankers. At the time, the United States was an oil exporter, and most of its oil came out of the ground in Texas. But without large, long-distance pipelines, 90% reached East Coast refineries by tankers, which loaded on the Gulf Coast and sailed around Florida.
The United States lost a full quarter of its oil tankers to German U-boats in 1942. Deliveries to the East Coast fell by 90 percent. Officials calculated that 7,000 railroad tank cars—cars that didn’t exist— would be needed to replace the oil going into the ocean each day.
The resulting shortage was a particular problem for Britain and the Soviet Union, which relied on U.S. oil to supply their war machines. Rationing was imposed on the Northeastern states in May.
Harold Ickes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, had foreseen this possibility. He’d wanted to build a pipeline in 1940, but oil producers resisted federal involvement in their industry. Ickes’ proposal was rejected early in 1941, for the official reason that it would use too much steel. When war came, the plan was resurrected.
There would actually be two pipelines: the Big Inch for oil, and the Little Inch for oil products like kerosene. Both would dwarf anything in existence. Most U.S. pipelines were eight inches in diameter or smaller. The Big Inch would be 24 inches in diameter, the Little Inch 20. Thousands of miles of American countryside had to be surveyed and cleared. Tunnels were bored underneath the Mississippi and 200 other rivers, streams and lakes. Trucks delivered 40-foot sections of pipe to 15,000 workers, who completed up to nine miles of the Big Inch line a day.
Trucks delivered 40-foot sections of pipe to 15,000 workers, who completed up to nine miles of the Big Inch line a day.
Washington funded an independent corporation, War Emergency Pipelines, which, in turn, contracted with 13 major oil companies to get the line built. Federal officials began contacting local landowners in December 1942. Some undoubtedly remembered the terrible things that Standard Oil had whispered about pipelines more than half a century earlier. But there was a war on, so no one really listened. A condemnation petition filed Dec. 31, 1942, in U.S. District Court for right-of-way between Honeybrook and Collegeville was granted two days later.
The Chester County section was finished by March 1943 on a straight line that ran through Schuylkill, Charlestown, East and West Vincent, Upper Uwchlan, Wallace and Honeybrook townships. Ickes came to town in July 1943 for the dedication. Standing on a flag-draped platform before a thousand spectators near Eagle, he watched as welders sealed the last joint. The Big Inch, he noted, would deliver 300,000 barrels of oil daily to Eastern refineries, but no one knew how much would be necessary to win the war. And the United States had to supply its allies, too.
Historians do credit U.S. oil for its role in Allied victory. Between 1941 and 1945, the Axis powers produced 276 million barrels of oil. Texas alone produced 500 million. Hitler’s December 1944 offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, failed when his forces ran out of gasoline.
Unfortunately, the war also left Texas nearly dry—at least compared to rich new oil deposits just then being discovered in the Persian Gulf. But the state was rich in natural gas, and the oil pipeline provided a perfect means to sell it. It cost $95 million to build, and it was sold for $143 million.
Taken from the archives of Mark E. Dixon’s Retrospect column, a fixture in Main Line Today for 16 years.
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