Creosote Stories invites us to explore the legacy and future of the creosote plume in Northeast Houston. A byproduct of burning coal, creosote is a wood preservative predominantly used to treat railway ties and has been manufactured in the United States since the early 1900s. The Northeast quadrant just inside of Houston’s 610 loop is the site of three former creosote treatment companies. Two of the three treatment areas are currently listed as US EPA Superfund sites. The third is the Union Pacific Englewood Yards in Fifth Ward - a highly contested arena where lawsuits and cancer studies are ongoing and also the focus of the exhibit.
Peeling back the historical layers of the creosote industry in the American South takes us to the expansion of commercial logging and the closing of the frontier, the pseudo-science of race and the messy inventions of chemists, and the African-American labor that pressure-treated railroad ties and utility poles. All of this was marketed as a safe, cost effective way to conserve valuable forests.
Creosote Stories features artwork and research by Willow Naomi Curry, Ginger Jeudy, Danny Russo, and Ukombo Fellows Chelsy Aledia, Nia Buckley and Kennedy Henderson. Oral histories contributed by Fifth Ward and Kashmere Garden residents Sandra Edwards, Walter Mallett, Dolores McGruder, Vivian McKelvey, and Joetta Stevenson are featured throughout the spaces.
Houston Climate Justice Museum contributors: Aaron Ambroso, Willow Naomi Curry, Sarah Davidson, Tiffany Jin, Noura Jabir, and Skyler Smith.
With special thanks to the Rice University Center for Environmental Studies, Joseph Campana, and Weston Twardowski for helping to make this exhibit at the Solar Studios possible.
The fictional character of Laura Polk was a Creole woman born in Louisiana in 1911. Early in her life, she had a child born out-of-wedlock with the son of her family’s black maid. She moved to Texas where she settled down with a German-American man with whom she would have two children. Laura supported her children by crocheting the linens of wealthy whites in a nearby neighborhood. Moving into an area of town recently vacated by whites, Laura was able to send her children to a school originally built for whites. Laura was a practicing artist and painter, and she was also an avid reader of poetry, yet she struggled to receive recognition for her work. Laura likened the landscapes of her neighborhood to the pastoral scenes found in many American landscape paintings. Laura became a central figure in her neighborhood, and her house became a meeting place for many. She was known as a generous host, and even boarded people after her husband died. Both Laura’s son and eventually his wife and Laura’s granddaughter lived in her house. Laura traveled widely in the South and is also known to have made a trip to Europe. The photos in this room are of her family, people she met on her travels, and people who she looked up to. Laura’s granddaughter is an aspiring writer and activist; you can find her correspondence on the desk in the back of the room. Both Laura and her granddaughter became aware of industrial contamination in their neighborhood in recent years, and became actively involved in tracking the creosote plume and cancer deaths in the neighborhood.
Top: Danny Russo, Morning Glory, acrylic on canvas, 2020
Bottom: Ginger Jeudy and the work of Earth Clinic
So one of the big things that the term anthroposcene leaves out is the particular ways that humans have altered life on earth, right? We're not all equally responsible for environmental destruction. In fact what the term anthropocene papers over is a lot of the important ways in which systems of plantation creation, of capitalism, of slavery and colonialism have created particular effects of environmental destruction that are responsible for the kinds of ecological change that we see today. What planthroposcene is trying to talk about is a future where humans and plants get together to create more livable worlds. It is about recognizing the plants as elemental, world shapers and rearranges. In this section of the exhibit, the work of local artists and gardeners Ginger Jeudy and Danny Russo have been highlighted help us think about remediation remediate not just of the soil, but also the people that have been damaged by generations of contamination.
As part of the research into creosote's impact in Northeast Houston, we traced the legacy of two of the area's wood treatment operations: Koppers South Cavalcade Superfund site and Union Pacific Railroad's Houston Wood Preserving Works site.
In 1885, fewer than 1% of all railway ties in the US were treated because it was cost-prohibitive to manufacture creosote or other wood preservatives in the states. After the 1901 invention by Heinrich Koppers in Germany of a more efficient coke oven to capture creosote, the US Steel company contracts Koppers to build multiple coke plants in Illinois and other states. During WWI, Andrew Mellon is able to acquire 100% of the American Koppers Company and the company quickly emerges as a major domestic producer of creosote oil. By 1958, Koppers is the largest supplier of wood-treated products in the world.
The same year that the historically Black neighborhood of Kashmere Gardens was annexed by the city of Houston (1940) - Koppers Company, Inc. acquired a wood treatment plant in the area. Though Koppers had originally produced “coke,” a type of fuel made from heating coal or oil in the absence of air, they expanded into a larger suite of railroad-related operations—including railroad tie treatment and the creosote production it required - with Mellon’s backing. This Kashmere Gardens wood-treatment facility operated under control of the Koppers Comany from 1940 to 1961. During this period, as a result of the company’s diversification, Koppers’ stock price doubled. A decade later, they were able to open a second facility in Texas.
The Houston site was brought to the attention of the EPA in 1984 by the Texas Department of Water Resources. In 1986, it was placed on the EPA’s National Priorities List, making it a superfund site. Since then, the EPA has taken steps towards cleanup and monitors progress with Five-Year-Reviews.
In 2021 alone, the Mellon Foundation awarded over 500 million dollars in grants to support the arts and humanities. There have been 11 EPA designated superfund sites attributed to Koppers Co. At the time of the exhibit (Fall 2022), based on the estimated costs by the EPA for the 9 active Koppers sites still undergoing remediation, the cost of remediation for these creosote sites was $161.4 million dollars.