Baker Castor Oil Company

The Baker Castor Oil Company, later owned by CasChem and Vertellus, manufactured castor oil and other food oil products.

The company’s castor oil roots trace back to 1857, when H.J. Baker added castor oil to its product line, producing oil that became a household medicine chest staple across America — a venture that later led the company into fertilizer production as well, using pomace, a byproduct of the castor oil process. That foundation eventually grew into the Baker Castor Oil Company’s dedicated processing plant in Bayonne, New Jersey, which became the company’s primary crushing and manufacturing facility for castor oil and related derivatives.

The Bayonne plant’s importance grew substantially in the mid-20th century, particularly as castor oil derivatives became valuable to national defense. In the mid-1930s, the company launched a program to develop domestic castor production to supply its processing operations, offering growing contracts that spurred limited cultivation in California’s Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys. Domestic production was further encouraged during both World Wars due to castor oil’s strategic value, since its derivatives are key ingredients in hydraulic fluids, greases, and lubricants used in military equipment; during the Korean War, a government-sponsored procurement program pushed domestic castor acreage above 20,000 hectares by 1951, concentrated in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Arizona. By the late 1960s, Texas alone was growing more than 30,000 acres of castor beans, with the seed shipped east to the company’s crushing facility in Bayonne, New Jersey, for processing. The Bayonne operation later passed through corporate ownership changes, eventually becoming part of CasChem and then Vertellus Specialties, which continued to hold trademarks tied to the original Baker Castor Oil product lines, including castor oil and its oxidized and polymerized derivatives.