Shell Oil buffs build replica station Oxford couple use memorabilia for re-creation

OXFORD – Jim and Chris Lamb have so much Shell gasoline memorabilia, people have mistaken their place for a gas station and asked to use the restroom.

As part of their hobby collecting old Shell items, the Lambs have set up a re-creation of a vintage Shell station next to their mobile home parts business, Parts & Pieces, on Route 26.

You can forgive passers-by for thinking it’s the real thing.

In a collection that spans decades, there’s a renovated 1926 Tokheim hand-crank gas pump and a restored 1939 gas pump. There’s an oil can rack, a “mechanic on duty” sign and a yellow trash can.

There are Shell signs, matchbooks and key chains, and old oil filters and cans of Shell antifreeze, brake fluid and lighter fluid. On top of his head, Jim Lamb wears a Shell gas attendant hat from the 1920s and ’30s era.

“Once you turn into a nut on this kind of stuff, you can’t stop,” he said.

Lamb got the bug about eight years ago when a man who bought his grandfather’s old truck brought by the key chain with a Shell fob on it with Conrad W. Black on the back.

His grandfather had owned a Shell station in West Paris from the 1950s into the ’70s, and Jim Lamb had worked there as a kid.

Since then, Jim Lamb has been finding Shell-brand items on eBay, in Uncle Henry’s and in farmers’ fields.