Dow Freeport, Texas

Dow, currently the nation's largest chemical company, is headquartered in Michigan, but half the company's manufacturing assets are at six sites in Texas. Of these, Freeport, on the coast forty miles south of Houston, is the first and largest. Also called Dow Texas Operations, Dow Freeport consists of four primary complexes in town, Plant A, Plant B, Oyster Creek, and Salt Dome, connected to one another by road, rail, and pipelines, totalling over 7,000 acres and 1,900 buildings. On these sites are 65 production plants, producing 44 percent of the company's products sold in the USA, and around 20% of products sold globally. Dow first came to Freeport by opening a plant to extract magnesium from seawater, in 1940, a site now known as Plant A, located at the mouth of the Brazos River. A second plant was established during the war, a little further inland and away from U-boats, to increase magnesium production, called Plant B. The residential village of Lake Jackson was built to house 5,000 plant workers during wartime. The Oyster Creek plant was built in 1969.