Little Rock CentralHigh School

National Park ServiceU.S. Department of the Interior

Little Rock Central High SchoolNational Historic Site

The Magnolia/MobilService Station

“What Is SignificantAbout the Gas Station?”

Visitors to the site often are curious about the restored gas station and how it relates tothe stories of Central High School. The Magnolia/Mobil service station located at thecorner of Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive and Park Street was built in the 1920s, about thesame time that Little Rock Central High School was built. Throughout the years, thebuilding has served as a gas station, a hangout for students, a temporary “office” forreporters during the desegregation crisis, storage for a wholesale florist business, aNational Historic Site visitor center, and in the near future as an education center.

The restored Magnolia/Mobil service station, 2007. Photo by Ben Wagner.

The History of the GasStation

This service station was built for the MagnoliaPetroleum Company of Texas in the 1920s. Calledthe “Southwest” model, this station in Little Rockwas identical to many others throughout Texas andArkansas.

The Magnolia Petroleum Company was one ofmany regional oil companies owned by MagnoliaOil Corporation. Founded as Vacuum Oil Companyof Rochester, New York by Matthew Ewing andHirman Everest in 1866 the company became asubsidiary of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard OilCorporation of Ohio in 1979, and later a part of theStandard Oil Trust. In response to a 1911 SupremeCourt decree against monopolies, the Standard OilGroup was broken into thirt y -four companies.One of the successor companies, Standard OilCompany of New York (SOCONY), acquired fullinterest in the Magnolia Petroleum Company ofTexas and some other regional oil companies beforemerging with the Vacuum Oil Company (anothermember of the Standard Oil Group) in 1931.

As Socony - Vacuum the company led the way inpioneering lubricants and new energy sources. Thename changed to Socony Mobil Oil Company in1955, Mobil Oil Corporation in 1966, and MobilCorporation in 1976.

In the late 1950s, the station featured both Mobiland Magnolia signs to capitalize on regional andnational brand identification. The station was inoperation into the 1980s, when it closed and thebuilding was acquired by the wholesale florist thatwas once located across the street. The companyused it for storage until 1996, when Central HighMuseum, Inc., a nonprofit organization, purchasedthe property to use as a visitor center. The MobilFoundation assisted in restoring the exterior of thestation to its 1957 appearance. Mobil’s corporatearchives supplied the architects with the originalspecifications for the vintage signage, the paintscheme, and the gas pumps. The visitor centeropened in September 1997 for the 40th anniversaryof the desegregation events at the school.

In November 1998, President Clinton signedlegislation designating Little Rock Central HighSchool National Historic Site as a unit of theNational Park Service. Central High Museum, Inc.donated the property to the park service and thestation served as the interim visitor center untilSeptember 2007, when the new, permanent centeropened for the 50th Anniversary.

The gas station before renovations began in 1996.

Did you know that in 1957. . .Did you know that in 1957. . .Did you know that in 1957. . .Did you know that in 1957. . .Did you know that in 1957. . .

...the price of a gallon of regular Mobil gasoline was 22.5cents?

...a bottle of Dr. Pepper cost 10 cents?

During the 1957-58School Year

E X P E R I E N C E Y O U R A M E R I C A

The service station was one of the few businesses inthe immediate neighborhood and had a paytelephone on site. During the early days of thedesegregation crisis, when reporters from all overthe state, nation, and world converged on LittleRock, many phoned in their reports from thestation. The press included a number of local andinternational reporters from magazines andnewspapers such as The New York Times, Life, Look,Arkansas Gazette, Arkansas Democrat, ArkansasState Press, Der Spiegel (a German Periodical),Chicago Defender, and Baltimore Afro-American.

In the 1950s, television was entering mainstreamAmerica as a medium for news, and the events inLittle Rock were among the first major news eventsto be televised. Reporters representing the majornetworks featured live footage of the events asArkansas National Guard troops, on orders of thegovernor, kept nine African American teenagers outof the school.

The service station today is being converted intoLittle Rock Central High School National HistoricSite’s educational center. While keeping its historicappearance on the outside, inside the station will berenovated into classroom space, becoming a placewhere teachers and students can come to learnabout the past and also the future of social justiceand civil rights.

Little Rock Police Chief Gene Smith (right) talks to onlookers outside theMobil station in September 1957. Central High Historical Collections/UALRArchives and Special Collections.

The Station’s Future

“...the world media took a moralstand on Little Rock and theywere horrified...there was so muchmedia coverage, even though weknew [the people in the crowd]were crazy we also knew thatthey would have to be reallycrazy to kill one of us in public.”

Minnijean Brown Trickey

Workers install a new heating and air conditionag system on theMobil station as the first phase of its renovation as the park’s

education center, October 2007.