Sub-subseries 9: History

History includes corporate growth stories created for marketing purposes, drafts of corporate histories, state-by-state histories about natural gas, and overviews of the history of natural gas. This section also includes clippings, correspondence, images, maps, and notes.

Luke Scheer, who worked for Panhandle Energy from the 1930s to perhaps the late 1960s, collected or generated the great bulk of the material in this section. For many years, he worked out of the Panhandle Energy Pipe Line office in Detroit. Scheer was in the thick of Panhandle’s battle for the Midwest markets. He researched material for a book about the natural gas industry and compiled notes and correspondence from librarians and historians throughout the United States.

In the late 1950s and in the 1960s, Scheer, along with other Panhandle officials, decided that an official history about the company needed to be written by a reputable scholar. They hired Dr. Robert Eckles from Purdue University to write that corporate history. Eckles’ notes, interviews and transcripts are also included in this section. Drafts of that work are included in this section, but Eckles final work was never published.

The task of writing a corporate history fell to Christopher J. Castaneda and Clarance M. Smith. Their notes, tapes, transcriptions and research are included in this section. Their research resulted in the book Gas Pipelines and the Emergence of America’s Regulatory State: A History of Panhandle Eastern Corporation, 1928-1993.