Sinclair, Wyoming: The Oil Company's Perfect Town

The town you are passing through was designed from scratch by a corporation. Every house, every street, every civic building, all of it purpose-built to house the workers of an oil refinery, laid out to a single architectural vision. It is one of the most intact company towns in the American West.

The story begins in the early nineteen twenties, when Frank Kistler, founder of the Producers and Refiners Corporation, known by the acronym PARCO, built a large refinery here in the high desert of Carbon County, Wyoming, to capitalize on the regional oil boom. To house the workers, he needed a town. He hired the Denver architectural firm of Fisher and Fisher, and they delivered something unusual: a company town built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, with consistent facades, red tile roofs, stucco exteriors, and a village plaza. The town was called Parco, after the company.

Parco set itself apart from the grim tradition of company towns. Rather than rows of identical wooden shacks, it offered real houses, a hotel, a clubhouse, a swimming pool, and community buildings, an attempt to make industrial servitude look like prosperity.

The Depression changed ownership. Sinclair Oil acquired the refinery during the nineteen thirties, and in nineteen forty-two, the town was renamed Sinclair. The name stuck. The refinery still operates today.

The Parco Historic District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-seven. Drive the residential streets and you can still read the original design: uniform setbacks, Spanish Revival details, the quiet geometry of a town that was never really allowed to grow organically. It was imagined whole, built fast, and then handed over to history.