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Thursday, August 30, 2012

Phillips 66, Iowa State Fair, Maid Rites and the Gibson Memorial Library


I now live in the city I was born in (Corning didn't have a hospital way back then). When I was young, Creston really did seem like a city. It was so big and had so many stores in which to shop - compared to Corning. Going to Creston was a big deal. One of the things I remember my Dad telling me about Creston when I was just a kid was that it was the home of Phillips 66 Gas Stations.


For some reason, it fascinated me that a company as big as Phillips 66 got its start in a town I considered part of my known world. He said Frank Phillips and his brother, Lee Eldas (L.E. Phillips), started the company. I thought they still lived in Creston and operated the little Phillips 66 Station on the Corner of South Cherry Street and Highway 34. Later I learned that the company was located in Bartlesville, Oklahoma where all the oil wells were.
Frank's story is one of those "rags to riches" tales. He was born in Nebraska but the family moved to a farm in Taylor County, Iowa after losing out to grasshoppers in Nebraska. He began hiring out to neighboring farmers at age 10. While in the town of Creston at age 14, he decided he wanted to be a barber and apprenticed himself to one of the town's barbers. Ten years later, he owned that barber shop and two others, one of which was in the basement of the Iowa State Savings Bank. John Gibson was president of the bank. He considered Frank an up and coming entrepreneur. Gibson's daughter, Jane, and Frank were married in 1897. In 1903, the two Phillips brothers and John Gibson made a trip to Indian Territory (Osage Co. Oklahoma) where the oil boom was just beginning. Not only did they own oil wells, they owned two banks in the town. Frank and Jane were to make Bartlesville their home for the remainder of their lives.   


Back to when I was a youngster - the only family vacations we ever had were a day or two at the Iowa State Fair. We would leave early in the morning, spend the day at the Fair and then drive home in to do chores in the dark. Once in a great while, on the way home, Dad would stop at the Maid Rite in Creston which I remember as being next door to the Phillips 66 Station. In my mind, the cafe looked something like the one pictured above which was located in Macomb, Illinois. Either that, or like one of those silver 50's Diners. I haven't been able to locate a picture of the Creston one. Eating out was a big deal for us and those loose meat sandwiches tasted so good - especially with a Coca Cola and some french fries.
I often mention one of my new favourite Creston locations: The Matilda J. Gibson Memorial Library, pictured here on a 1950's postcard. I used to wonder who Ms. Gibson was. I assumed she might have been a maiden lady who left her money to be used to build a library. In reality, it was her daughter, Jane, and son-in-law, Frank Phillips who gave the money for the library to be named in her memory. It seems the good people of Creston had tried twice to get a Carnegie Library for their town and failed both times. That was when the Phillips' stepped in and gave $25,000 to purchase the lot and have the library and club room built. It formally opened in April of 1931.


Which is the same year the cottage style gas station was built. I thought the building might have been unique to Creston, but I find several more examples of them around the Midwest. In 1994, after serving as the office for a monument sales company, the building was donated to the city and moved about a mile west to the west edge of Creston at Parkway & Highway 34 to become the Union County Visitors Center - the Frank Phillips Visitors Center.


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