Carbon Black on the Texas Panhandle

I've been doing picture research and returned the other day to the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Office of War Information (OWI) digital archives, the wonderful treasure trove for the Great Depression and home front during World War II. (An earlier post about the collection's color slides can be found here.) This is one of those shots, the color muted but deep, and striking.
    Photographer John Vachon took it in 1942, of a worker in a carbon black plant on the Texas panhandle. These factories "make carbon," Vachon explained, "which is powdery black stuff in big bags worth 3 cents a pound, used in making tires, paints, & numerous other places." He described to his wife what it was like to approach:

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The panhandle is the seat of the carbon black industry, and on any given day in any given spot you can look all around you and in 6 or 7 corners 40 miles away, no fooling, you see little black places above the horizon.  These are the C.B. plants.  Then as you get nearer, naturally, the little black place gets bigger and bigger.  From 5 or 10 miles it's a huge black cloud out there ahead of you.  Then you drive right up to it and it's just exactly like driving from a sunny day into the middle of night.

Natural gas was the raw material for carbon black and these factories were quite extensive. The one Vachon visited had about 300 smaller buildings, called "hot houses," where each house contained several hundred jets burning natural gas. The gas was deliberately burned without sufficient oxygen, which produced the black powdery residue, then collected into bags. Even visiting the plant, Vachon got "dirtier, that is blacker, than I have ever been in my life. Really black all over. Right through the clothes it goes. I washed carefully my face and hands, but I'm leaving the rest for a while, it's really kind of beautiful. It gets very shiny when you rub it."

Obviously, the work went on decades before clean air and workplace safety regs were in place!