Organizations
Collection for organization entities.
Pages
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- Index Oil Shale Company (Colorado)
- A company established in 1921 by Harry Lewis Brown, who had sold his Wrigley’s chewing gum factory in New Jersey in order to fund the venture, reportedly starting with an initial capital investment of $100,000. The company’s first mine was based above the Roan Creek Valley, half a mile from the eventual placement of the Roan Creek Community Hall. The company mined the oil shale from Mount Blaine (also known as Mount Index). A tramway brought the shale down from the mine to a retort on the hill below, which was located in a 2-3 acre mining camp. Over time, the camp grew to include 12-15 buildings, including housing for Harry Brown and his wife, a bunkhouse, a cookhouse, and the retort. The tramway utilized gravity to move the full buckets downhill and the empty buckets uphill. The retort, what Brown’s daughter Penelope (Brown) Eberhart called a “giant tank,” was invented by Brown and had been brought in by railroad to De Beque. The company developed several consumer products from the byproducts of the refinement process, including a product called Index Soil Vitalizer, a fertilizer made of shale residue. The company also produced a medicinal salve that was marketed to the Western Slope through the C. D. Smith Drug Company. Both of these products were found by the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration to be carcinogenic and were taken off of the market, though Armand de Beque claimed that later testing showed that they were perfectly safe. Harry refinanced the Index Plant in 1926 after an oil shortage was predicted, but lost his financing during the Great Depression. During that time, Harry opened a laboratory in conjunction with C. D. Smith and left his daughter Penelope and her husband William Joseph Eberhart as caretakers of the Index Plant, which they struggled to maintain. To afford food, they sold off bits of the property, starting with rolls of cable, then tin buildings, until eventually all that was left was the house. The couple abandoned the property in October 1942.
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- International Motor Sports Association
- IMSA, the International Motor Sports Association, has a long history as the premier sanctioning body for sports car competition in North America.
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- Intrawest Resort Holdings, Inc.
- Owned the Steamboat Ski Area from 200 to 2018. Now the Alterra Mountain Company.