A City that Grows: 1950 to 1960

As the decade began, the LeTourneau plant was the largest industrial employer in Longview.

Building on defense contracts that started during the war, R.G. LeTourneau was in his heyday of creating enormous rubber-tired machines for a variety of purposes, with an electric drive motor built into each wheel. Longview citizens were amazed by huge excavation scrapers, front-end loaders, bulldozers, wheeled machines that molded all the walls of entire concrete houses, overland trains, forest-clearing machines, landing craft retrievers, log stackers, and eventually the world's first jack-up offshore drilling platforms built for future president George Bush.

To demonstrate the house-molding machines, Mr. LeTourneau built a substantial concrete neighborhood south of the plant in the late 1940s as employee housing. In 1952, he erected an enormous aluminum dome at the factory to test its practicality as a sort of portable metal tent. The dome was requested by LeTourneau's friend Billy Graham for use in an evangelism crusade in England, but it was not allowed by authorities there. Later, the company built several similar domes as permanent plant space.

The star in the crown of Carl Estes as chief promoter and site broker for Longview's industrial development was the Texas Eastman petrochemical plant, which was begun in 1950. Desiring a location near sources of light hydrocarbon feedstock, the company was induced to become established in the southwest corner of Harrison County near Longview. Estes's part of the bargain included site preparation and construction of roads and a lake for cooling water. He prevailed upon R. G. LeTourneau to provide the necessary clearing and excavation with LeTourneau's developmental machines and factory employees. As the nucleus of a work force to build and operate the plant, Eastman relocated a substantial cadre of capable young managers and engineers to Longview from the Eastman plant in Kingsport, Tennessee. Longview would not be the same without them and their strong, positive influence. Until his retirement in 1973, Texas Eastman President David C. Hull bootstrapped what was intended as a minor butyraldehyde plant into what became the largest petrochemical complex in inland Texas.

While assembling the Texas Eastman site, Carl Estes also established an industrial park of his own between the Eastman plant and State Highway 149, immediately north of his ranch home. That park became partially occupied by plants producing Trailmobile trailers, Resistol hats, and Marlow pumps. Greater success was achieved by two similar industrial parks developed by the nonprofit Longview Industrial Districts, beginning in 1956: a 250-acre and an 86-acre site on U.S. Highway 80 several miles east and west of the city, respectively.

Construction in Longview during the 1950s rivaled or exceeded that of the 1930s. In December, 1951, the First Baptist Church dedicated a new sanctuary facing the classical 1914 building, which remained across the street. In 1956, a new ten-story building-expandable to 17 stories-reclaimed for First National Bank (later Bank One) the status of the tallest building in town. The Petroleum Building was erected the same year. So was the Jaycee Exhibit Building at the Gregg County Fairgrounds, which was the largest meeting facility in the city until Maude Cobb Convention Center was built in the 1980s. Longview National Bank followed in 1957 with an enclosure of its 1930s building and addition of an adjacent structure to the north. Longview public school construction was also booming in the 1950s: the junior-high-school (later Henry L. Foster Middle School) gymnasium, the high-school (later T.G. Field) auditorium, Forest Park Junior High (later Middle School), and six new elementary schools.

In 1954, Ewing Adams presided over the formation of the Longview YMCA and construction of its building on South High Street in the new Ware Addition. Other major residential subdivisions of the 1950s include Forest Park and Brookwood.