Turns out my issue was with OpenLayers silently failing when attempting to transform the vector features to the proper projection as a result of proj4js not being properly referenced.
I was able to find the proper originating projection from spatialreference.org and get the projection code to base the transforms on.
I also discovered that spatialreference.org has no official record of EPSG:900913 (which I expected) or EPSG:3875 (which I did not expect). I needed to use EPSG:3785 which I thought was deprecated.