Small Town, Big Oil ─ How Three Women in New Hampshire Took on the Governor and Aristotle Onassis...and Won

In the fall of 1973, the Greek oil shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, husband of President John F. Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and arguably the richest man in the world, proposed to build an oil refinery on the narrow New Hampshire coast, in the town of Durham, home to the University of New Hampshire. At the time, it would cost $600 million to build ($3.2 billion in today’s currency) and would pump 400,000 barrels of oil a day, making it the largest oil refinery in the world. The project was vigorously supported by the governor, Meldrim Thomson, and by William Loeb, the notorious publisher of the only statewide newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader.

But three women vehemently opposed the project– Nancy Sandberg, the town leader who founded and headed Save Our Shores; Dudley Dudley, the freshman state rep who took the fight to the state legislature; and Phyllis Bennett, the publisher of a local newspaper that alerted the public to the secret acquisition of land. The Soul of a Small Town is the story how the residents of Durham, led by these three women – who were demeaned by the Union Leader as “little ladies” vainly “beating their small breasts” – out-organized, out-witted, and out-maneuvered the governor, the publisher of the statewide newspaper, and the Onassis men to hand the powerful Greek billionaire the most humiliating defeat of his business career, and spare the New Hampshire seacoast from becoming an industrial wasteland.