Winship, Walter Edwin

Submitted by Mike Miller

Walter Edwin Winship, an electrical engineer b profession, has for a number of years been identified with the petroleum industry, and has developed one of the outstanding independent marketing services of petroleum and petroleum products. Mr. Winship has been a resident of New Orleans for a number of years.

He was born in Providence, Rhode Island. June 16. 1872, son of John Bruce and Carra Bryant (Mills) Winship. His parents also were natives of Providence and his father was a lumber merchant. Both parents were Presbyterians. The father was a Mason and republican.

Walter Edwin Winship, only surviving child of his parents, was liberally educated, taking his college course in Leland Stanford university in California, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1895 and Master of Arts in 1896. After a period of residence abroad in the University at Berlin, he received the Doctor or Philosophy degree in 1899. Meanwhile he had been an instructor in mathematics in 1895-96, at Leland Stanford, and in 1899-1900 was instructor in electrical engineering at the same university. Mr. Winship, was a pioneer in the storage battery industry, and from 1902 to 1913 was associated with the Gould Coupter and Gould Storage Battery Companies of New York. In 1913 he became general manager for the General Lead Batteries Company of Newark, New Jersey, being with that company eighteen months.

In 1915 Mr. Winship turned his attention to the petroleum industry as southern sales manager for the Mexican Petroleum Corporation, the duties of which position brought him to New Orleans. He resigned in 1920 to become an independent marketer of petroleum and is president of the Winship Fuel Oil Service, Inc. He buys petroleum production and refinery products from all the leading fields of the southwest, including Mexico, Arkansas and Louisiana, and has his own facilities such as barges, tank cars, motor cars for the shipping and distribution of the product. His business headquarters are in the Whitney Central Building at New Orleans.

Mr. Winship married August 11. 1908, Miss Magdeleine Agnes Slagter, of Titusville, Pennsylvania, daughter of one of the noted pioneers in the oil industry in western Pennsylvania. Mr. Winship is a member of the Sigma Chi college fraternity, several New 0rleans Carnival Associations, the American Electro-Chemical Society, and is a republican and Presbyterian. He belongs to the Pickwick and Boston, Louisiana, Southern Yacht and New Orleans Country Clubs at New Orleans, and the Engineers and Chemists Clubs of New York.

A History of Louisiana, (vol. 2), p. 379, by Henry E. Chambers. Published by The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago and New York, 1925.