“This monument design is a documentation of absence of a time past and a lost way of life, the absence of those who inhabited the buildings and built the industrial and social structures that we now inhabit. The monument is a memorial to that which has passed away and is lost. It is a funerary monument.”
– Inscription, Black Gold and Blue Collars, master’s thesis exhibition by Laura Lee Burchfield Scott.
The inspiration began with her grandfather. Back from serving in Germany during World War I, he made his way to the refineries of Southeast Texas. He made a good life and passed the tradition on to his children.
The lifestyle and culture born of the petrochemical industry are as much a part of this region as Cajuns and crawfish. As gumbo native to the soil or served in a bowl. A hard life but a good life for generations, including Port Neches native Laura Lee Burchfield Scott‚ ’97, ’04.
Today, this daughter and granddaughter of refinery workers is carrying out a one-woman campaign to build a monument to those workers and the legacy their toils represented. The result is Black Gold and Blue Collars, Scott‚’s Lamar graduate thesis and proposal for a public monument.
“It’s about connecting the past and the future,” said Scott, a wisp of a woman with an immense artistic talent and, now, a monumental dream.
Her grandfather, Charles Freeman, was born in 1889 and grew up in Lufkin. Returning from the war, he came to Port Neches to work on the docks of the Texas Oil and Refining Co. There, he lived in dormitories near the office buildings that became the focus of the monument.
“That was really my first interest in those buildings,” Scott said. “We used to drive past those buildings, and Mom would say,“Oh, that’s where Paw lived.’ There was always a special connection for me with my grandfather.
“I realized a lot of other people felt that connection and that it might mean something to them too. That is why I thought they were worth saving. They were important landmarks.”
Soon after the discovery of oil at Spindletop, petrochemical industry pioneers established Texas Oil and Refining on the Neches River at Grigsby’s Bluff – which soon grew to become the city of Port Neches while the company became Texaco.
Scott believes the monument – celebrating the centennial of the petrochemical industry in Port Neches – would find a perfect home on the banks of the Neches in Port Neches Park.
She has taken pieces of buildings that are now history, existing only in memory, and recreated aspects – “facades, corners, doors and windows to make this monument.”
“I was first motivated when they started tearing these buildings down,” she said. “It was almost like going back for weekly visits to an aged parent in a nursing home. I knew that any day there were going to be gone, but I never knew when. So I went back and visited often. When my sister happened to see that one building was completely gone, I grabbed a camera and started taking pictures.
“One corner was all that was left. When I looked up at that corner and the way the braces supporting it were framed against the sky, I thought, ‘This is the monument. This is what I want to focus on.’ I knew that ruined corner would represent the past and what we had lost.”
Scott made her first model with little pieces of paper, progressing from 5-inch to 15-inch to 45-inch models, the last created for the thesis exhibition and constructed by her friend Sam Daleo. She raised the corner skyward. “It will be 60 feet tall,” she said.
“I used the facades of the two buildings that were already torn down to create two sides of the monument. Those facades represent the past, and the blank facades represent the future because it’s a blank slate. We don’t know what will be written there.”
The destruction shares space with an uplifting symbol: “A phoenix rising out of rubble or ashes or ruins,” Scott says. “I intended this to be a representation of the past, the present and the future. People walking past and interacting with that space will share in the experience.”
Refinery life is fraught with difficulties: workplace illness and injury and the effects of strikes and shift work on family life. Scott’s father, Dale Ray Burchfield, a lab technician at the former Ameripol Synpol rubber plant, died of lung cancer and a
brain tumor caused by asbestosis. The ruins in her monument symbolize the downside of refinery life.
“It’s hard for a family, with a dad sleeping during the day and everybody having to be quiet and all of our schedules revolving around shift work,” Scott said. “Yet, at the same time, refinery work gave us a lifestyle we couldn’t have had otherwise. Our schools are some of the best in the state because of the refinery support. I wanted to represent the whole picture.”
Her father followed his brother, J.D. Burchfield, to Port Neches where he, too, got a refinery job. “By the time I turned 3, we moved into a brand-new house in Port Neches,” Scott said. “It was such a nice place, and I still remember how proud my family was of it.”
Her artistic inclinations began in childhood. “Mom says I used to doodle on my school papers and hand them in with all these little pictures around the borders. When I talked on the phone, I had to have a scratch pad – and I still do – to doodle and draw. If I ran out of paper, I’d draw on the woodwork. My mother talks to this day about having to refinish that woodwork.”
Scott took private art lessons and studied art when she was a senior in high school. She also took journalism and edited the yearbook.
After graduation, she enrolled in summer school at Lamar. She got married and finished three years toward a degree before having her first child. She aspired to a career as an elementary school teacher. “I was interested in art,” she said, “but felt like art was kind of selfish, and I wanted to do something that was more of a service to others.”
Her husband’s career as a minister took her away from home for more than 20 years and caused a long pause in her educational aspirations. Her world revolved around volunteer work and Bible classes. Then the couple divorced, and she found herself with two daughters to support. “I had never had a job in all my adult life,” she said.
“It was a real struggle.”
Back in Southeast Texas, she returned to Lamar, needing a year or two to complete her degree. “To realize I could go back to school and receive financial help was a blessing,” she said.
Scott had another life-changing experience: a semester as a work-study student in the Dishman Art Gallery. “When I saw what went on there and in the art department, I knew I had done the wrong thing years ago by not studying art. I thought, ‘Well, here I am. I’m 40. I have financial support. When am I going to have this chance again?’ Lamar gave me the chance to do what I’ve always loved. I changed my major, and it took me another four years to get through.”
Earning her bachelor’s degree in studio art in 1997, Scott taught for a year at Kountze High School. With a scholarship and support from Jerry Newman, she returned to pursue a master’s degree. She finished the course work, but her thesis was far from complete. She returned to the classroom full time and now teaches art at Beaumont Central High School.
An undergraduate assignment led Scott to the drawings that inspired the monument. “Painting and drawing are really my specialties,” she said.
The city of Port Neches has expressed interest in the monument. A committee is reviewing proposals from firms hoping to develop the city’s park and riverfront, gathering ideas from residents, city officials and others, said City Manager Randy Kimler. After the firm is selected in late May, he said, it will accept projects to include in the park’s master plan.
Scott collected trappings from the refinery – window sills, tools, lampshades, tables, metal works, all included in exhibits last December at Lamar and this March at the Effie and Wilton Hebert Public Library in Port Neches.
Lynne Lokensgard was her supervising professor, “encouraging me and putting up with all kinds difficulties,” she said. Meredith “Butch” Jack also lent support: “He told me it was a project that needed to be built.”
While Scott was completing her own Lamar degrees, she watched proudly as her daughter, Emily, graduated in 1999 with a degree in social work and her younger daughter, Leah, began work toward a business degree. Emily and Scott’s granddaughter, Caitlyn, live in New Jersey, where Emily is a social worker.
Scott’s mother, Johnnye Burchfield, still lives in Port Neches, in the same house Scott moved into when she was 3. “She’s kept it a beautiful place, and I don’t think she’ll ever, ever move from there.”
What does she think about her daughter’s project? “She told me if I didn’t finish this, her life would never be the same again. She’s really proud of it, and now she wants to see it built.
“I hope it can be built. There are a lot of ways the riverfront can be developed, but this is peculiarly and particularly about Port Neches. It really applies to our place in the world.”
Scott knew her labor of love wouldn’t be easy. In fact, Newman first advised her against it. “He was right,” she said. “It’s been bigger than I am. But when he came to my reception, he said he thought it was a really good project. I told him: ‘It was more than I should have tried to do. But I had a passion for it.”
