How Dudley Dudley, Seacoast women stopped $600M oil refinery in Durham almost 50 years ago

In the fall of 1973, landowners along Durham Point Road were receiving visits from people offering to buy options on their properties.

At the time, Dudley Dudley was Durham's newly elected member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, the first Democrat to win the seat since 1918. A colleague from the legislature called her one day to tell her there were whispers in the State House that an oil refinery could be coming to Durham.

Local suspicions turned out to be correct: A $600 million oil refinery, the largest in the country proposed by arguably the world’s richest man, was in the works for the Strafford County town that is home to the University of New Hampshire. Dudley, with the help of two other women and an army of motivated citizens, led the legislative effort to shut down plans for the gigantic refinery.

Dudley, now 85 years old, recalled her memories of that time in a speech Thursday, May 5 in Portsmouth. Held at the South Church, the event was a synopsis of “Small Town, Big Oil,” a book written by David Moore, a senior fellow at UNH's Carsey School of Public Policy.

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Next year will mark 50 years since the grassroots effort to prevent the approval and potential development of the refinery began taking shape.

“I intuitively knew that if it turned out to be an oil refinery, I wanted no part of it for Durham or for the Seacoast,” Dudley said, recounting her reaction to the call from a fellow legislator speculating about the refinery.

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Olympic Oil Refinery was proposed by the wealthy Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who married former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy after she was widowed. In his corner pushing for the refinery were New Hampshire Gov. Meldrim Thomson and William Loeb, the Manchester Union Leader publisher whose publication exerted a wide influence.

The proposed refinery, according to Dudley, would have refined 400,000 barrels of oil per day and provided storage for 30 million barrels. It would have been built in Durham, with its terminal located at the Isles of Shoals and the oil pipeline running through Great Bay, Newington, Portsmouth and Rye.

“For me, it was an easy question,” Dudley said. “I knew what my position was from the very beginning. It was that Durham was no place for an oil refinery.”

Teaming up with Nancy Sandberg, leader of the citizens group Save Our Shores, and Phyllis Bennett, publisher and co-founder of Publick Occurrences, Dudley got to work. The freshman legislator, after being canceled on several times, landed a meeting with Thomson during which she showed him a petition of 4,000 signees opposing the refinery.

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Moore said the petition was so long it stretched from where Town and Campus is in modern-day Durham along Main Street to the post office.

The author added Onassis had scheduled a trip to Durham in December 1973, when he would meet with Thomson after arriving in a helicopter. When residents caught wind of his visit, they set up signs on the ground for him to read.

All of the signs were in clear opposition to his plan, some reading “Not Here” and “Go Home, Ari,” Moore said. “As it turns out, the helicopter turned around because Onassis had been put off by all the signs.”

According to University of New Hampshire records, however, Olympic’s end goal was gaining traction, as a real estate agent helped the business to successfully option over 1,000 acres of land from 11 property owners. The agent told landowners different stories: that he wanted the property for recreational purposes, that they’d use it for hunting or they wanted to build their home there.

Dudley recalled advice a friend from Concord, who was a lawyer, gave her about how to get work done as a state representative. “‘If you ever want to get anything done in the New Hampshire legislature, just use these two words: home rule,’” she recalled her friend telling her. “I tucked that piece of advice away.”

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The freshman legislator sponsored House Bill 18, which reiterated that, with projects such as oil refineries, municipalities had the final say, known as the “home rule” bill.

In March 1974, the movement against Onassis’ oil refinery proposal scored a major victory when Durham voters overwhelmingly voted against zoning amendments that Olympic needed for approval. The final vote showed 1,254 residents voting against amendments compared to a mere 144 in favor.

The following day, Dudley’s “home rule” bill came to a vote in the House of Representatives, which was packed with media from around the world. Before that, House Bill 34, which would have established an energy siting body that could override zoning in municipalities, was shot down.

When Dudley’s bill was voted on, she said legislators from Berlin, Salem and Nashua, who were moved by the resistance against the refinery from Durham voters the day prior, joined Seacoast legislators in approving House Bill 18.

The bill passed and became law, effectively shutting down Onassis’ plans and saving the natural beauty of the Seacoast.

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“The House never specifically voted against the oil refinery and the town of Durham never addressed the question of the zoning ordinance variance because Olympic never asked for the variance,” Dudley said.

The following evening, while at dinner in Concord with friends from the legislature, Dudley spied familiar faces at a nearby table: all of Olympic’s consultants.

Dudley, who later became the first woman elected to serve on New Hampshire’s Executive Council, watched as the lead consultant stood up and marched toward her table. She worried that the consultants were huddling up to discuss possible paths to proposing refineries in different communities across the Seacoast, though that didn’t prove to be the case.

“Their leader came up to us and shook (the hands of) each one of the people at my table and said they had come to tell us they knew the right side had won,” Dudley said. ‘And I believed them.”

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: How Dudley Dudley, Seacoast women stopped $600M oil refinery