Occupying an eleven acre industrial facility at 5th Avenue & 25th Street East, the Standard Ultramarine & Color Company (SUCO) site was once one of Huntington’s largest and most profitable industrial manufacturing plants.
The company was started by founder Omar T. Frick in 1909 and was originally based in Tiffin, Ohio but in 1912 Mr. Frick and his partner, the French engineer Henri Dourif, moved the company to Huntington. Standard Ultramarine on Fifth Avenue then grew from a half-acre into a twenty-acre factory site that employed over five hundred people manufacturing aniline dyes, various paint colors and printing pigments.
After O.T. Frick passed away in 1949, Henri Dourif served as president of Standard Ultramarine manufacturing until his retirement in 1964. Over the following years, the Standard Ultramarine plant changed hands several times. SUCO was sold to Chemetron Corp. in 1964 which merged with Holland Color & Chemical to form Holland-SUCO Color Company, a name that was used until 1969, when it became the Pigments Division of Chemetron. In 1979, Chemetron sold the plant to BASF Wyandotte, a German multinational dye company, who then sold it to Flint Group Pigments.
Flint shut it down in 2017, laying off the final 50 employees,while citing a reduced worldwide demand for “alkali blue” printing ink. The property was purchased by the Huntington Municipal Development Authority in 2018 and re-sold to Marshall University in 2019 for a planned baseball stadium according to published reports. But the map cards of the Cabell County Assessor’s database show that “Everett Hanna Properties” bought three of the SUCO/ BASF parcels from a “BPS Printing Systems LLC” in November 2019, before selling them to a “Huntington WV 0422 LLC” in November 2022, the current owner.
The 11.26 acre property is assessed at roughly $250,000 for the land and $750,000 for the structures, indicating an estimated market value in the 1.6 million dollar range.
Rumor was it was going to be a grow facility for the dispensary’s. And the RV’s that were there for the last year or so, they just vanished, then a large theft occured, of what who knows, the place is a dump.