Once upon a time, Frances Griffin, the director of PR for Old Salem, embarked on a bus tour of other restored colonial villages in the eastern USA. When she returned, I asked her how it had gone. She sighed and said “Fam, when you have seen one pewter fork, you have seen them all.”
Few places on earth can offer anything unique. The Taj Mahal comes to mind. Mt. Kilimanjaro. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The “House of the Sun” in Maui. “The Shed”, which opened just a few weeks ago on the Highline in New York City. And so on. Among them is a little yellow scallop shell shaped service station on East Sprague Street in Winston-Salem. It is the only authentic building of its kind on earth.
In 1833 Marcus Samuel & Company was established in London, dealing in antiques and curios. As the Victorian culture developed, seashells became a huge fad for jewelry and decoration purposes, so Marcus began importing exotic shells from the East Indies. His sons established a two-way trade, exporting kerosene to the east in return for shells. In 1897, they incorporated the Shell Transport & Trading Company. In 1900, they added a pretty bad drawing of a mussel shell to their logo. That was replaced in 1904 by a not much better drawing of a scallop shell. But they kept working at it, and by 1930 had a pretty decent logo.
Meanwhile, Royal Dutch Petroleum, founded in 1890, was extracting crude oil from wells on the island of Sumatra. In 1907, as a defensive measure against the cut-throat tactics of the Standard Oil Company, they merged with the Shell Transport and Trading Company to form Royal Dutch Shell. The Dutch division had charge of extraction and shipping of crude. The British division did the refining and distribution. Antiques and curios became just a memory.
Shell gasoline arrived in the United States in 1915 when the company began building service stations in California. They adopted the colors red and yellow from the Spanish flag because so many Californians at that time had Spanish backgrounds.
On December 6, 1929, Fred Bonney and Walter Leonard ran an ad in the Winston-Salem Journal announcing the opening of their new Shell service station at the corner of Northwest Boulevard and Reynolda Road in the Twin City. Within months, Joe Glenn and Bert Bennett had supplanted them in the top spots at the Quality Oil Company. Since this was the first Shell distributorship in North Carolina, Glenn and Bennett were worried about name recognition. They soon came up with a brilliant idea, a service station shaped like a seashell. They designed it themselves and applied for a patent. The first seashell station opened at 91 Burke Street, where Burke, First and Fourth Street meet, on June 30, 1930. Within months, there would be a total of eight seashell stations, seven of them in Winston-Salem and one in Kernersville.
The process followed by the Frank L. Blum Construction Company was fairly simple. First the office area was boxed in, then a bent green wood and steel wire frame was constructed around the office in the shape of a scallop shell. Large canvas hoses were then attached to form the ridges. And finally, concrete was applied in the same manner as stucco, creating a striking eighteen foot high building that could not escape notice.
Eventually, the stations provided too little space for expanding services, so one by one fell into disuse. Most were replaced by larger buildings. But when the station at Sprague and Peachtree Street, built by Rad B. Burton in 1930, closed, it was leased in 1972 and later bought by James D. Watson who established a small engine repair shop in the building. That saved the only remaining scallop shell service station in the world.
Local historians soon took notice. On May 13, 1976, the Sprague Street station was added to the National Register of Historic Places. A bit later, Preservation North Carolina raised the funds to restore the station. Quality Oil Company paid for the restoration of the original Shell pumps.
For some years it was operated as the Piedmont Triad office of North Carolina Preservation. Today it is owned by James D. Watson and the Historic Preservation Foundation, Inc. It is the only building of its kind in the world, and it is located right in your own back yard.
A word about scallop shells (pectins)
Scallops, both oceanic and bay types, are found around the world, in many forms and colors. Their shells have always been highly collectible. And of course, many of us find them delectable eating. We eat the muscle that opens and closes the shell. Few of us have ever actually seen a scallop in the wild, so we are unaware that they have eyes. Far more eyes than we have, arrayed along the edges of the shell, ever on the watch for potential food to pass through their filtration system. They are one of only two species that have mirrors built into their eyes. The mirrors focus light so that they can better detect approaching food. When that happens, the shell opens and the food flows in.
North Carolina Collection 
What well researched history! Very interesting!
Very cool! I did not know any of this!