Huge airships, not cars, once pulled up to this unique ‘gas station’ in Fort Worth

Now this was a gas station.

On Blue Mound Road east of Meacham Field are buildings that once housed the world’s first helium plant.

Fort Worth’s helium plant had its origin in an experimental station that the U.S. government built here during World War I to extract helium from natural gas piped in from the Petrolia gas field in Clay County.

For the sake of national security, the station was called a “chemical plant.” Workers stored the extracted helium in cylinders and shipped them to New Orleans to be sent to the war front in France. But the armistice was signed before any Fort Worth-produced helium was shipped overseas.

However, the Navy continued to operate the station, and on Jan. 19, 1919, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram announced that the federal government would construct the world’s first helium plant adjacent to the “chemical plant.”

The helium plant was the military’s only source of the gas at a time when dirigibles had great strategic importance to the military. Helium, with 92 percent of the lifting power of hydrogen, is a safer gas, less flammable than hydrogen, which was used by Germany’s zeppelins.

In 1924, workers added a 160-foot mooring mast to the helium plant so dirigibles could refuel. Helium was piped up the mast to a moored airship. Dirigibles drew large crowds as the behemoths sailed in to tie up at the mooring mast to refill their gas bags (made from laminated sheets of cow intestine supplied by packing plants such as Fort Worth’s).

The first airship to “fill ’er up” at this gas station was the 682-foot-long USS Shenandoah, the world’s first helium-filled dirigible. On Oct. 8, 1924, a crowd estimated at 20,000 turned out to crane its collective neck as the Shenandoah cast its elliptical shadow over Fort Worth and moored overnight at the helium plant. The dirigible left the next morning for the Pacific Coast as it made the first flight of a rigid airship across North America.

Four years later, on Oct. 8, 1928, the USS Los Angeles sailed into town to moor overnight at the plant and to stock up on helium (100,0000 cubic feet), gasoline (4,500 gallons) and food (2,500 pounds).

As the Los Angeles neared Fort Worth from the south, members of the crew dropped a note over the house at 1021 North Anglin St. in Cleburne. That house was the home of Hannah Rosendahl, mother of Los Angeles commander Charles Emery Rosendahl.

Rosendahl was not commanding the Los Angeles on that trip. He was in Germany observing the trials of Germany’s new Graf Zeppelin dirigible and would return to the United States aboard the Graf Zeppelin on its first Atlantic crossing. (In 1937 Rosendahl would be in command of New Jersey’s Lakehurst Naval Air Station when the Hindenburg burned there.)

In 1928, dirigibles were still big news: The mooring of the Los Angeles in Fort Worth drew a crowd estimated at 22,000.

But by 1929 the Petrolia gas field was depleted, and the world’s first helium plant closed.

Employees were transferred to a new helium plant at Amarillo.

Mike Nichols blogs about Fort Worth history at www.hometownbyhandlebar.com.

This story was originally published December 27, 2019 at 5:00 AM.