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

What Was Atlantic Refining Preference Stock? 🛢️ The Atlantic Refining Company, $3.00 Cumulative Convertible Preference Stock, Brown

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! Brown. This one is engraved and printed by the American Bank Note Company with a rich brown border, and up top sits the company's black engraved vignette: a seated woman holding a globe among oil derricks, a refinery and a big laboratory flask, the whole oil business in one picture. THE ATLANTIC REFINING COMPANY runs across in bold capitals, with the company's seal from Philadelphia at the bottom.

🏷️ 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 $1 EACH
• CERTIFICATE FOR LESS THAN 100 SHARES
• THIS CERTIFICATE IS TRANSFERABLE IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK OR IN LOS ANGELES, CAL.
• REGISTERED: BANK OF AMERICA NATIONAL TRUST AND SAVINGS ASSOCIATION (LOS ANGELES), REGISTRAR
• COUNTERSIGNED: SECURITY FIRST NATIONAL BANK (LOS ANGELES), TRANSFER AGENT
• AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY, the printer
• On the back: 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 moved through the transfer agents.

🤝 The Stock That Made ARCO

Here's what makes this brown one special, and it's hiding in plain sight on the face: a Philadelphia oil company with its registrar and transfer agent both in Los Angeles. That's because this $3.00 preference stock was issued in the merger that built 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. Four months later, on May 3, 1966, the company adopted its new name, Atlantic Richfield Company.

There's a legal story in it too. Back in October 1962 the United States had filed an antitrust suit against Richfield, Cities Service and Sinclair over the Richfield stock the two oil companies had acquired. When Richfield merged into Atlantic, the suit was dismissed, but under the settlement Sinclair and Cities Service each had to get rid of the $3.00 preference stock they received in the merger within seven years. Then on March 4, 1969, Sinclair Oil itself was merged into Atlantic Richfield. So the stock on this certificate sits right in the middle of the deals that turned an old Philadelphia refiner into a coast-to-coast oil giant.

⛽ 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, the whole Philadelphia region. 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 was formed it bought Sinclair to go nationwide, sold off its northeastern business in 1985, and the Atlantic name went to Sunoco in 1988. The last known Atlantic station, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, became a Sunoco in 1996.

🌴 Richfield of Los Angeles

The other half of the family was the Richfield Oil Corporation, founded in 1911 in California. Its headquarters was the famous 12-story black and gold Art Deco Richfield Tower in Los Angeles, built in 1929 and torn down in 1968. Richfield went into receivership in the Depression in 1931, and in that period Cities Service picked up a majority of its stock. In 1957 it made a pioneering oil discovery on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. It even sponsored the Autopia ride at Disneyland from 1955 to 1970.

📜 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, like so many companies before and after it. 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! It's a handsome piece framed in an office or a den, and a perfect gift for anybody who works in oil and gas, a Philadelphia or Los Angeles history buff, or anybody who remembers filling up at an Atlantic or a Richfield station.