The Petroleum Tower is part of the Central Business District Historic District in Shreveport Louisiana. The building is an excellent example of high rise curtain wall construction and was designed by a famous Dallas architect, Wyatt C. Hedrick.

1. Petroleum Tower Historic Significance
The Petroleum Tower is a high-rise commercial office building built in 1957. It is located
in the heart of Shreveport Louisiana’s Commercial Historic District at the North corner of
the intersection of Texas Street and Edwards Street. The building, designed by Wyatt C.
Hedrick and Stanley Architects of Fort Worth, Texas, is an excellent classic example of
high-rise curtain wall architecture during this timeframe. Wyatt C. Hedrick was a famous
American Architect and designed buildings throughout the United States from around
1920 to the mid 1970s. At one time his firm was considered the third largest architectural
company in the country. A number of his buildings are on historic preservation registries.
Attached is information about Hedrick from several sources obtained through an internet
search.
The Petroleum Tower contributes the toute ensemble of the historic district and provides
a layer of history of Shreveport’s Central Business District development. Its primary
importance is in reinforcing the visual wall of buildings along the main street in the
district, Texas Street. This wall of buildings that mark various timeframes of development
is an important characteristic of Shreveport’s Commercial Historic District.
Construction of the 16-story building is a concrete structural frame clad from the third
floor to the mechanical penthouse with an aluminum curtain wall system including
transparent glass and a 2-color pattern of opaque glass spandrel panels. The building is
caped with a 2-story height solid aluminum panel system enclosing the mechanical
penthouse. The facade above the second floor is perimeter framed with a distinctive
aluminum “picture frame” detail on both the Texas Street, Edwards Street and alley
elevations. The ground floor and second floor structural elements are clad in granite and
establish a visual base for the curtain wall system that conceptually floats above the
ground plain. A precast stone aggregate panel horizontally bands the building above at
the second floor spandrel and visually creates a clearstory for the base design element
of the facade. This element appears intended for signage. The ground floor entry to the
upper floors is located on Edwards Street and ground floor tenant spaces have entries
on both Texas and Edwards Streets.
The building has a narrow footprint at 60’ wide along Texas Street and 150’ deep along
Edwards Street to the alley. The structural bays are a grid of approximately 20 feet by 25
feet. The interior of the building is of no architectural or historical significance and was a
building of tenants composed of local small businesses. Tenants changed during the
years of occupancy of the building and space was reconfigured periodically. Interior
construction includes drywall construction and suspended ceilings. Some areas include
plaster partitions and ceilings. Asbestos containing materials were used in plaster
ceilings and many other locations. The building was closed to tenants in the 1980s due
partly to the costs of asbestos removal. The building core including stairs, elevators and
toilets is also of no architectural historic significance and a deterrent to the renovation
and use of the building.
The importance of this building is its contribution to the historic fabric of the Shreveport
Historic Commercial District within the Central Business District.

2. Additional Buildings and information on Wyatt C Hedrick Architect
• Fidelity Union Towers, 1509 Pacific Ave., Dallas, Texas – 21 and 31 story towers
built in 1952 and 1960 sometimes referred to as the Mosaic Building and the
Mayflower Building
• Fort Worth Club Building, 1926, 175’, 16 floors
• Historic Electric Building, 1929, 229’. 19 floors
• Petroleum Buildiing, 1927, 228’, 14 floors
• Will Rogers Tower, 1936, 208’
HEDRICK, WYATT CEPHAS (1888-1964). Wyatt Cephas Hedrick, architect and
engineer, was born in Chatham, Virginia, on December 17, 1888, the son of Washington
Henry and Emma Cephas (Williams) Hedrick. He received a bachelor of arts degree
from Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, in 1909 and an engineering degree from
Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, in 1910. He worked as an engineer
for Lane Brothers in Alta Vista, Virginia, from 1910 to 1913, when he was hired by the
Stone and Webster Engineering Corporation of Boston as a construction engineer for
the company's Dallas office. He headed his own construction company in Fort Worth
from 1914 to 1921, when he became a partner in the architectural firm Sanguinet and
Staats,qv which had offices in Fort Worth and Houston.
In 1925 Hedrick opened his own architectural practice with offices in Fort Worth, Dallas,
and Houston. The next year, after Sanguinet and Staats retired, he also bought the
remaining interest in their practice. From the 1920s through the 1950s he had an active
nationwide practice, and at one time his was considered the third-largest architectural
firm in the United States. Hedrick produced buildings in a wide range of historical and
modern styles. Among his best-known works are the Shamrock Hotel in Houston (1949),
the Sterick Building in Memphis, Tennessee (1930), and the Medical Arts Building in Fort
Worth (1926). Hedrick also produced a large body of Moderne buildings in Fort Worth,
including the Worth Theater (with Alfred C. Finn, 1927), the Lone Star Gas Company
Building (1929), the Hollywood Theater (with Finn, 1930), the Texas and Pacific
Terminal and Warehouse (1931), Will Rogers Memorial Center (1936), and City Hall
(1938) (the last two in association with Elmer G. Withers). He also designed scores of
schools and facilities for various universities, including Texas Tech University in
Lubbock, Texas Christian University and Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth, and the
University of North Texas in Denton.
Hedrick married Pauline Stripling on June 17, 1918; the couple had one daughter. After
his first wife's death, he married Mildred Sterling, on December 17, 1925; with her he
had two daughters. Hedrick was a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers,
the American Institute of Architects, the Texas Society of Architects, the Scottish Rite
and the Shrine, the Elks Club, the Dallas Athletic Club, the Houston Club, the Petroleum
Club, and the Dallas, Houston, and Rivercrest Country clubs. He died in Houston of a
heart attack on May 5, 1964, and was buried in Fort Worth.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Judith Singer Cohen, Cowtown Moderne: Art Deco Architecture of Fort
Worth, Texas (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1988). Houston Post, May
6, 1964. Jamie L. Lofgren, Early Texas Skyscraper: A History of the Skyscraper Style
(M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1987). Sanguinet and Staats-Hedrick
Collection, Architecture and Planning Library, University of Texas at Austin. Who's Who
in America, 1960-61.

3. Christopher Long
Wyatt C. Hedrick: Distinguished Architect, quot;Man of Distinctionquot;
By Frances Hallam Hurt, from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, August 27, 1950; used
with permission.
If you might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb, then it's just possible that you might as
well be called a Man of Distinction as a distinguished man.
Anyway, whatever his “druthers,” as they say in Wyatt C. Hedrick's adopted Texas, that's
what happened to him. An architectural and engineering giant with almost $700,000,000
worth of projects behind him, Hedrick nonetheless remained a fairly nebulous figure until
his photograph appeared, polished and poised, in magazines all over the nation as
officially a Man of Distinction, Order of Lord Calvert, in that company's series of ads. The
folks back home finally pushed their hats back on their heads and whistled. There
seemed to be something to the rumors about that Hedrick boy, after all. So, at 62,
Hedrick is in the curious position of owing his sudden national prominence to a whisky
advertisement instead of to the great structures which have given the real lustre to his
name.
Hedrick's involuted road to popular recognition brought into the spotlight not only a
remarkable architect, but an architect with a remarkable story.
Wyatt C. Hedrick, born fourth in a family of nine to the Wash C. Hedricks of the
practically invisible community of Museville in Pittsylvania County in 1888, walked to his
two-room country school, worked his way through college and learned engineering the
hard way, by carrying a chain and running an instrument. Some 30 years later this same
man designed an $80,000,000 naval base in Trinidad among his many multimillion dollar
jobs for the government. On the glamour side, he designed the fabled $20,000,000
Shamrock Hotel in Houston for Glenn McCarthy, a Texas reputedly of such
Texanishness that you'd no sooner expect him to let a Virginian design his baby than
Grandma Moses.
Although Hedrick's main preoccupation seems to be with the mighty — such as the
$50,000,000 plants for the Aluminum Company of America, hospitals, civic buildings,
universities and schools — rather than with the mundane, he also designs residences.
He finds the ranch-style house, so beloved in Texas, to his personal liking in a country
where the kind of house you live in can make a big difference in how comfortable you
are. He, no doubt, has few complaints himself, on the score of comfort, even in Texas,
as his principal ranch home, “Anacacho,” looks like that of a Spanish grandee before the
Republic. This is a far cry from the white farmhouse where he grew up, looking out over
hills greener than the Shamrock lobby.
From the beginning, Hedrick seems to have been different from his brothers, but not too
different. He played football and baseball, hunted and fished and worked on the farm,

4. but his oldest sister, Mrs. W. E. Bolling of Lynchburg, remembers him most clearly as
bent over his books by the big open fire in their mother's bedroom. Another sister, Mrs.
Clark Hodges, of Museville, remembers what her father always said of him when they
returned from road- repairing trips. The elder Hedrick, in addition to being a tobacco
farmer, was foreman in charge of highway repairs. In those days, when he and the crew
took off, they camped on the road until the work was done. Wyatt generally got in on
these expeditions, often as cook. His father's standing comment was that Wyatt held the
frying pan in one hand and a book in the other.
One of Hedrick's Museville schoolmates, Harry Wood Smith, of Danville, who is also
singularly connected by way of being a double brother-in-law (one of his sisters married
Irving Hedrick, of Museville and the other Dick Hedrick, of Lanette, Ala.), remembers that
Wyatt always said he was going to be President. Smith takes a sharp interest in this
matter, as Wyatt promised to make him Vice-President.
After graduating from Chatham High School, Hedrick entered Roanoke College. He
worked his way through three years there then took a BA degree at Washington and Lee
University in 1910, all without having drawn up his personal prints for a career as
architect and engineer.
It seems to have been a combination of the Texas girls he met at Randolph-Macon in
Lynchburg, plus his first post-graduate job (Lane Brothers Construction Company, at
Marcus Hook, Pa.), which finally shaped his career.
As nearly as Mrs. Bolling recalls, the young man went West in 1913 to see some of the
girls he knew and has been back only on visits since.
He got a job with Stone & Webster Engineering Corporation in Fort Worth as an
engineer, which represented a lot of self-education for a boy with a BA degree. He had
had no architectural experience until 1922, when he went with the firm of Sanguinet &
Staats, forming a partnership of Sanguinet, Staats & Hedrick, of Fort Worth. The big
break for him seems to have come after the first world war, when he laid out Love Field
at Dallas. When an architect from Fort Worth gets a big job in Dallas, that's news.
From that original surveyor's chain he carried, Hedrick has developed offices in Fort
Worth, Houston and Dallas, manned by 150 employees. His official home is the
aforesaid quot;Anacachoquot; at Spofford, some 300 miles from any of the offices. He has
several other ranch homes, all equally remote. He commutes to his offices by plane.
Two of his brothers, Luther Hedrick, of Wichita Falls, who made his in oil, and Russell
Hedrick, resident architect and engineer at Texas Tech in Lubbock, are also pretty well
Texanized. Another brother and sister, Claude Hedrick, of Alexandria, and Mrs. John
Bennett, of Danville, complete the family roll call.
Notes:
• The above 1955 portrait of Wyatt C. Hedrick is provided by Ames Fender, Fort
Worth, Texas (architect and grandson of Wyatt C. Hedrick);
• If you know of an existing copy of the above-mentioned Lord Calvert “Man of
Distinction” advertisement featuring Wyatt C. Hedrick, published in the 1950 era,
please advise us by e-mail.

5. Wyatt C. Hedrick
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Will Rogers Tower, Fort Worth, 1936
Wyatt Cephus Hedrick (1888, Pittsylvania County, Virginia - 1964) was an American
architect, engineer, and developer most active in Texas and the American south.
Starting in practice in Fort Worth in 1922, opening his own practice in 1925, Hedrick was
responsible for many of the tallest buildings in the city and several buildings now on the
National Register of Historic Places. In 1925 he married Mildred Sterling, and in 1931 his
father-in-law, Ross S. Sterling, became governor of Texas.
Hedrick worked mainly in a stripped-Classical style. With his extensive university and
government work, at one time his firm was the third-largest in the United States.
Commissions include:
Eudora Welty House, Jackson, Mississippi, 1925
Medical Arts Building (razed), Fort Worth,Texas, 1926
Historic Electric Building, Fort Worth, Texas, 1929
Sterick Building, Memphis, Tennessee, 1930
Commerce Building, Fort Worth, Texas, 1930
Texas and Pacific Terminal and Warehouse, Fort Worth, Texas, 1931
United States Post Office, Fort Worth, Texas, 1933
Will Rogers Memorial Center, Fort Worth, Texas, 1936 (with Elmer G. Withers)
Fort Worth City Hall, now the Public Safety and Courts Building, 1938 (with Elmer
G. Withers)
The legendary Shamrock Hotel (razed), Houston, Texas, 1946-1949

6. Wyatt C. Hedrick & Co.
# Building [from now to past] Complex Floors Year
1. First Energy Building Akron Centre 19 1976
2. 55 Marietta Street 21 1958
3. 1400 Hermann 17 1957
4. Kroger Building 25 1954
Memorial Hermann Hospital
5. Memorial Hermann Hospital.. 9 1949
Jones Pavilion
Edwin Hornberger Conference
6. 5 1949
Center
7. Hermann Professional Building Memorial Hermann Hospital.. 15 1948
8. Brazoria County Courthouse 5 1940
9. Will Rogers Pioneer Tower 1936
Texas & Pacific Railway
10. 12 1931
Terminal
11. Frances Towers 11 1931
12. Texas & Pacific Warehouse 8 1931
13. Sterick Building 29 1930
14. Commerce Building Commerce/Oil and Gas 19 1930
15. Aviation Building 16 1930
16. Electric Building 15 1930
17. Marshall Hotel 8 1930
18. Baker Hotel 14 1929
19. Petroleum Building 12 1929
20. Lone Star Gas Building 7 1929
21. Sanger Building 5 1929
22. YWCA Building 6 1928
23. Medical Arts Building 19 1927
24. Worth Hotel 18 1927
25. Petroleum Building XTO Energy 14 1927
26. The Arlington Hotel 12 1924
27. Lamar Life Building 10 1924
28. The Neil P. at Burnett Park 11 1921
29. Criminal Justice Building 7 1918
30. Baker Building XTO Energy 10 1910
31. Houston Place Lofts 9 1906
32. Sterling Hotel 40