History
USOR was organized in 1952 as a privately held corporation, then named Pacific Oil & Refining Co. The president of the company at that time was Dr. Ernest Lyder. The company was formed for purposes of building an oil refinery in the Pacific Northwest. In 1954, the refinery's present site in Tacoma was purchased, and in 1955 its name was changed to U.S. Oil & Refining Co.
Construction of the initial facility, a 5,000 barrels per day (790 m3/d) (stream) refinery, began during the summer of 1955. Construction was completed in mid-1957. By the end of that year, the refinery was in full operation. Chico Marx entertained at the ground-breaking ceremony on July 22, 1955, for the new $10 million plant. Tacoma Mayor Harold Tollefson and senators Warren G. Magnuson and Henry M. Jackson also attended the ceremony. The site had been a favorite spot for fishing, swimming, and duck hunting in earlier years. The west end of the site had once been the city landfill, which at one time contained (unmodified, unstripped) Japanese Zeros brought over from after World War II. The east end of the site was once wetlands.
A second crude unit, capable of processing heavy crude oil, used in the manufacture of paving grade asphalt, became operational in 1959. USOR was sold to Astra Oil Trading in 2006. Astra is a subsidiary of Transcor.
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“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)