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A Company That Started With Just a Hole in the Arizona Desert
Date: April 15, 1992
Location: Princeton
Title: A Company That Started With Just a Hole in the Arizona Desert
Author: Diana G. Lasseter
Subject: The Barringer Crater Company”s founder lost money on his venture, but won scientific fame
Amidst the scientific tomes and nickel-iron meteorite specimens on J. Paul Barringer”s desk sits a letter postmarked Kazakhstan, Russia. Its sender, scientist Emil Isokh, writes at length about the subject of his recent studies: Zhamanshin, a meteor crater near Novosibirsk in western Siberia. While Isokh”s words reflect enthusiasm for his new theory on the crater”s formation, they also reveal his frustration. Scientists are laughing at his hypothesis.
J. Paul Barringer understands Isokh”s situation better than most. His father, Daniel Moreau Barringer, met with similar skepticism nearly 90 years ago, when he suggested the origins of a meteor crater in Arizona. That hole in the ground lost D. Moreau lots of money, but gained him scientific fame.
Of all the businessmen in Central New Jersey J. Paul Barringer is one of the most fascinating. He is chairman of The Barringer Crater Company and Cass County Iron, both of which are headquartered in his office at 20 Nassau Street. One firm operates in Flagstaff, Ariz. and the other in northeast Texas.
Cass County Iron was started in 1974 to lease oil drilling rights on the 10,000 acres of land the company owns in Cass County, Tex. Although it is still publicly-held, the depressed oil industry in Texas has rendered the firm virtually inactive. The Barringer Crater Company, however, is still going strong. With one employee, 32 stockholders- all of whom are descendants of D. Moreau – and ten board members, this firm”s colorful history brings to Princeton a tale of one man”s business ventures in the old West.
The firm was started by D. Moreau Barringer as the Standard Iron Company in 1903. His children changed the name in 1953 to Barringer Crater. Today it is headed by the last of the eight Barringer children, 90-year-old J. Paul, who took the helm in 1975. The eldest brother, Brandon, had remained chairman up until he died at age 93 last February. The Barringer Crater Company exists to preserve a mile long and 570-foot deep hole on the surface of the Northern Arizona Plateau known as the Barringer Crater.
Although it is thousands of miles from the Arizona desert, Princeton is an appropriate spot for the family business because it is where the Barringer Crater legacy began. As a member of the Princeton University class of 1879, and a classmate to Woodrow Wilson, D. Moreau pursued a law career after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Driven by the financial potential of mining and a fascination with science, D. Moreau left his Philadelphia law practice to go West. “Father got bored to death with trusts and wills,” explains J. Paul. “So he spent what money was left from the family”s plantation in North Carolina to shoot big game out West. That is when he decided to become a geologist.” The elder Barringer attended the Colorado School of Mines, which launched him into the world of scientific enterprise.
Around 1895, D. Moreau and his mining partners discovered the Commonwealth, a rich silver mine near Pearce, Ariz. From this mine and two others he made his million, which allowed him to raise two daughters and send six sons to Princeton, invest in Mexican iron deposits and study hundreds of other mines in search of another Commonwealth. Most importantly, though, the lucrative mine enabled D. Moreau to invest his time and money in the exploration of a hole in the Northern Arizona Plateau.
D. Moreau learned of the Arizona crater, then known as Coon Butte, in October 1902. Fascinated by the presence of meteorites around the hole, D. Moreau suspected that the crater had been made by a meteor hitting the earth, a theory that at the time had been disproved by a leading geologist. He also saw mining potential of nickel-iron meteorites, rocks which were then worth $110 per ton. Says J. Paul: “My father said if you multiply 100 million tons by $110 you”ll have a hell of a horse race.” After learning that the crater was owned by the U.S. government, D. Moreau applied for a mining patent. He was granted a title to two square miles that included the crater.
The Pearce mine had gained the elder Barringer notoriety in Arizona, so he did not dare put the title in his own name for fear someone would jump his claim. Consequently, he formed the Standard Iron Company in 1903, placing the claim in the new firm”s name.
Between 1903 and the time of his death in 1929, D. Moreau and his business partners spent more than $600,000 exploring the crater, including close to $200,000 of the elder Barringer”s personal funds. The crater, though, proved not to be the goldmine D. Moreau had hoped. “He absolutely lost the commercial venture,” explains J. Paul. “He was practically broke when he died.”
The crater enterprise, however, made D. Moreau famous in the science world. In 1905 he published a paper on the crater”s origin. Based on the meteoritic material found around the crater and brought up by the shafts, as well as other evidence, D. Moreau wrote, “We can now prove that this crater is due to the collision with the earth of an extra-terrestrial body.” Although it took 20 years, science ultimately accepted his theory, and more than 120 impact craters have been identified since. Coon Butte is now well known in scientific circles as the Barringer Meteorite Crater.
After J. Paul and his brothers- who had inherited all but a few of the Standard Iron shares-returned from World War II, they were approached by Burton Tremaine Jr., a cattle breeder from Connecticut, who wanted to develop the land around the crater as a tourist attraction. The Barringer brothers leased Tremaine a portion of the Arizona property, where he launched Meteor Crater Enterprises, a firm that invested more than $1 million during the 1950s to construct a museum, gift shop and observation decks on the crater”s north rim.
Today, the primary purpose of the Barringer Crater Company and Crater Enterprises is to preserve the crater as a memorial to D. Moreau”s pioneering scientific work. Says J. Paul: “Our primary mission has been to maintain the crater in our father”s memory. We also hope that the crater is considered a monument to private enterprise, which, although not a financial success, contributed to scientific knowledge.” The company”s net income from the tourist operations in 1991 was about $150,000. Some $50,000 in profits will go to education, supporting young scientists and the study of meteoritics. Every year, the Barringer Medal is given to an outstanding individual in the field.
J. Paul has spent the past fifteen years studying the science that his father found so intriguing. Although he will soon be turning active management of Barringer Crater over to his son-in-law and other younger executives, he admits that not many men have had such absorbing work between the ages of 75 and 90. Says he: “Young scientists like Emil Isokh continue to learn from my father”s scientific work, and his fight for acceptance. We should all understand the importance of meteoritics. After the human race gets done making a fool of itself, the good Lord may just send us an asteroid and start over.”
