Vintage 1960s Atlantic Refining Company Stock Certificate 🛢️ Purple, 100 Shares, $3 Cumulative Convertible Preference

What Was Atlantic Refining Preference Stock? 🛢️ The Atlantic Refining Company, $3.00 Cumulative Convertible Preference Stock, Purple, 100 Shares

Size: 12" x 8" ~ Issued and cancelled. They vary a little one to the next.

Vintage 1960s The Atlantic Refining Company Stock Certificate! Oil Americana! Purple. This is the 100-share certificate, engraved and printed by the American Bank Note Company with a deep purple border and 100 in the top corners, and up top sits the company's black engraved vignette: a seated woman holding a globe among oil derricks, refinery towers, storage tanks and a big laboratory flask, the whole oil business in one picture. THE ATLANTIC REFINING COMPANY runs across in bold capitals, and at the bottom is the company seal from Philadelphia, a building with a tower at its center.

🏷️ Every Word That Matters

• THE ATLANTIC REFINING COMPANY
• INCORPORATED IN 1870 UNDER THE LAWS OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA
• $3.00 CUMULATIVE CONVERTIBLE PREFERENCE STOCK (CONVERTIBLE INTO COMMON STOCK; SUBORDINATE AS TO DIVIDENDS AND ASSETS TO PREFERRED STOCK), PAR VALUE OF $1 EACH
• 100 SHARES
• THIS CERTIFICATE IS TRANSFERABLE IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK OR IN LOS ANGELES, CAL.
• REGISTERED: MORGAN GUARANTY TRUST COMPANY OF NEW YORK, REGISTRAR
• COUNTERSIGNED: THE CHASE MANHATTAN BANK (NATIONAL ASSOCIATION), TRANSFER AGENT
• AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY, the printer
• On the back: the KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS and the NOTICE OF ELECTION TO CONVERT, the form a holder filled in to swap these shares for common stock

These are real issued certificates, signed, punch-cancelled and stamped on the back as the shares changed hands through the brokers and transfer agents.

🤝 The Stock That Built ARCO

This $3.00 preference stock came out of the merger that made ARCO. On January 3, 1966, the Richfield Oil Corporation of Los Angeles was merged into The Atlantic Refining Company, and Richfield's biggest holders, Sinclair and Cities Service among them, came out of the deal holding this $3.00 Cumulative Convertible Preference Stock. That's why a Philadelphia company made it transferable in Los Angeles. Four months later, on May 3, 1966, the company adopted its new name, Atlantic Richfield Company. There's a courtroom story behind it, too: the United States had sued Richfield, Cities Service and Sinclair on antitrust grounds in October 1962, and when the suit was dismissed after the merger, Sinclair and Cities Service had to get rid of their preference stock within seven years. Then on March 4, 1969, Sinclair itself was merged into Atlantic Richfield.

⛽ Atlantic, from Standard Oil to ARCO

Originally founded in 1866 as the Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company, the firm was a pioneer in the burgeoning oil industry, and it was incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1870, just as the certificate says. By 1874 John D. Rockefeller had acquired the company and folded it into his Standard Oil empire, giving him a major foothold on the East Coast, and by 1886 Atlantic controlled Delaware, southern New Jersey and the southeastern tip of Pennsylvania. When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up in 1911, Atlantic was one of the eleven companies given the right to the Standard name, and it turned it down, because its own name sold better. After ARCO sold its northeastern business in 1985, the Atlantic name went to Sunoco in 1988, and the last known Atlantic station, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, became a Sunoco in 1996.

🏦 The Banks on the Bottom

The two New York banks that signed these carry some history of their own. Morgan Guaranty Trust Company was born in 1959, when J.P. Morgan & Co., founded by J. P. Morgan in 1871, merged with the Guaranty Trust Company of New York. The Chase Manhattan Bank came from the 1955 merger of the Chase National Bank, named for Treasury Secretary and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, and the Bank of the Manhattan Company. And that one has a legend. After the yellow fever epidemic of 1798, Aaron Burr set up the Manhattan Company in 1799, supposedly to bring clean water to New York from the Bronx River, but really as a front to start a bank to rival Alexander Hamilton's Bank of New York. Both banks are part of JPMorgan Chase today.

📜 Paper Shares

Paper share certificates go back a long way. The oldest known one was issued by the Dutch East India Company's chamber at Enkhuizen in 1606, and the paper era is closing fast: the Walt Disney Company stopped issuing paper stock certificates on October 16, 2013. Once they're gone, they're gone.

🖼️ Display

Envision adorning your wall with a vintage historic collectible as a decorative piece in any home room! The purple and black look great in a frame, and it makes a great gift for anybody in oil and gas, banking, or anybody who remembers an ARCO or Atlantic station.