A portrait of Parco? Paint the men confident. Color the women industrious. Splash white on the blizzard of '49 and blood-red onthe fire of 1927.

No pastels will bring to life the intense activity of a people building their town; back-breaking, sun-up to sun-down work on the refinery, homes and roads...babies born in tents...building a school-house...watching wrestling bouths through clouds of cigar smoke...cheering wildly the refinery baseball team...planting laws...pouring sidewalks...dancing til 2 am every Saturday night. The people were vibrantly alive.

A magic was at work in new Parco, a zest for life that infected everyone in and near the infant town Denver Post and local reporters called Parco "the newest," "the most modern", "the finest", "the friendliest". Energetic, pulsing life poured through Parco from the moment of ground-breaking in 1922.

Greenville

General Grenville M Dodge, Union Pacific's chief engineer, and his consturciton crew worked their way into Wyoming (then Dakota Territory) in 1867. They hammered their way across the miles of brush-covered prairie, leaving newly-born railheads like Cheyenne, Bosler, Carbon, Benton and Rawlins.

The railroad had to ahve a water supply for their Rawlins station, so a booster pump station was erected six miles east of Rawlins. It carried North Platte river water pumped from Ft. Fred Steele. In honor of the engineer, the station was named Grenville.

As the railroad pushed across the state into Utah, trains smoked down the new track with passengers and supplies. Often Indians attacked the trains with rifles in an effort to stop the invasion of the "Iron Horse". Over 100 years later the Indians had moved away and several towns had vanished but the pump station at Grenville was still operating.

 

 

Frank Kistler, who had hit gusher-producing oil wells in the Lost Soldier field north of Rawlins, built the town and refinery. He could not sell the oil as fast as it was produced, so he built a refinery to refine the excess crude oil. Currently the Sinclair Refinery is one of the West's longest-running industrial plants. It is one of the most modern refineries in the Rocky Mountain region, producing 60,000 barrels of petroleum products per day.

Kistler was determined that the town he constructed in 1924-1925 called Parco would be modern and attractive, so he hired two prominent Denver architects, William E. and Arthur Fisher. Kistler, with the help of the Fisher brothers, settled on the Spanish Colonial design for the town buildings and many of the stucco houses.

The town name Parco came from the first letters of the corporation name, Producers and Refiners Corporation. The fountain, in the plaza in front of the Parco Hotel, was a memorial gift to Kistler. The eight carved figures in the fountain are "Bear-Cats", the name of the gasoline that was being marketed by the company.

The company owned and maintained the entire town and refinery until the fall of 1967. Then the Sinclair Refining Company, who had purchased the refinery in 1934, gave the business buildings to the town. The company sold the houses to those who were renting them. A sense of community continues in Sinclair, and this is reflected in the many refinery personnel who have chosen to retire in the town.