Phillips 66 Restored Station (McLean)

Phillips Petroleum was founded in 1917 by Frank Phillips in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and entered the retail gasoline market in 1927 with the launch of the "Phillips 66" brand. The name combined the company's name with the highway it most closely identified with — U.S. Route 66, which passed through Phillips's Oklahoma heartland and connected Chicago to Los Angeles. The 66 brand was launched aggressively, with hundreds of new stations built across the Midwest and Southwest in just a few years. The McLean station was the first Phillips 66 station in Texas, opened in 1929 as part of that initial expansion push.

The cottage-style architecture was created by Phillips's in-house designers to give the new stations a domestic, residential feel. Each station featured a steeply pitched gable roof in red, white walls with green-and-orange trim matching the corporate color scheme, multi-pane windows reminiscent of cottage casements, and a small attached canopy covering two gravity-feed pumps. The proportions of the building were deliberately small — most cottage-style stations are barely larger than a one-car garage — which kept construction costs low and made the buildings easy to replicate from town to town along Route 66.

The McLean station's restoration preserves all of these original elements. The red-and-white-and-green color scheme is the original Phillips 66 corporate palette, restored from period photographs. The original 1929 Phillips 66 shield mounted on the gable is a faithful reproduction (the original sign did not survive). The two pumps under the canopy are period-correct gravity-feed designs typical of the late 1920s, sourced as period reproductions during the restoration. The cumulative effect is a startlingly authentic glimpse of what a Route 66 gas station actually looked like in the first decade of the highway's operation.

By the 1980s the original station had been abandoned for over a decade and was in serious disrepair — the roof was partially collapsed, the pumps had been removed, the original signage was long gone, and the building was at risk of demolition. A coalition formed in the late 1980s to save the building, led by McLean residents working with the Texas Historical Commission and a small grant from ConocoPhillips (then still Phillips Petroleum). The restoration took several years and was completed in the mid-1990s.

The restoration approach was unusually careful by Route 66 standards. Rather than rebuilding the station to look generally vintage, the restoration team worked from original Phillips Petroleum architectural drawings, period photographs of the McLean station and similar cottage-style stations across the country, and historical color samples to match the original 1929-1935 appearance as closely as possible. Reproductions of the original signage, pumps, and small details (door hardware, window glazing patterns, gutters and downspouts) were sourced or fabricated to match.

The site is now under the care of a small preservation trust funded by donations and occasional restoration grants. Routine maintenance (repainting, roof repairs, sign refurbishment, landscape upkeep) happens on a multi-year cycle. The station was added to the National Register of Historic Places as part of McLean's broader Route 66 historic district listing, and it serves as one of the key remaining examples of Phillips 66 cottage-style architecture on the National Road today.

The station sits on a small lot at 218 West First Street in McLean, with a gravel parking pull-off directly in front. The site is free to visit, available 24 hours a day, and requires no reservation or check-in. There's no staff on site and no interpretive signage beyond a small Texas Historical Commission marker explaining the building's significance. Plan 15-30 minutes for photographs and a careful walk around the exterior.

For photography, the building faces south, which means morning and late-afternoon light produce the best results — the low sun raking across the cottage-style facade picks out the architectural detail and the period color scheme nicely. Midday overhead light tends to flatten the building. After dark the station is not lit (no period-style nighttime illumination has been installed), so night photography requires bringing your own light source or relying on streetlight ambient.

The station pairs naturally with a Devil's Rope Museum visit — the two sites are about a five-minute walk apart and together form the core of McLean's preserved Route 66 streetscape. A typical itinerary: museum at 10am (90 minutes), walk to the Phillips 66 station for exterior photographs and time on the original alignment (20-30 minutes), then continue to the Red River Steakhouse on the same historic alignment for lunch. The full McLean half-day, including the Cactus Inn neon sign and the Avalon Theater facade, runs about 4-5 hours.