Vintage 1960s Atlantic Refining Company Stock Certificate 🛢️ Orange, Common Stock, Under 100 Shares, Richfield Overstamp

What Became of the Atlantic Refining Company? 🛢️ The Atlantic Refining Company Common Stock, Orange, "Name Changed to Atlantic Richfield Company"

Size: 12" x 8" ~ Issued and cancelled. They vary a little one to the next. ~ little to no wear

Vintage 1960s The Atlantic Refining Company Stock Certificate! Oil Americana! This is the orange common stock certificate, engraved and printed by the American Bank Note Company, with the company's black vignette up top: a seated woman holding a globe among oil derricks, refinery towers, storage tanks and a laboratory flask. And across the middle, in bold red, is the best part of the whole certificate, the overprint that reads NAME CHANGED TO ATLANTIC RICHFIELD COMPANY.

Like everything I keep, these live in the dark at under 40% relative humidity and a steady 72°F, climate controlled, so any age they show, they had before they came to me.

🏷️ Every Word That Matters

• THE ATLANTIC REFINING COMPANY
• INCORPORATED IN 1870 UNDER THE LAWS OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA
• COMMON STOCK, PAR VALUE $10 EACH
• CERTIFICATE FOR LESS THAN 100 SHARES
• THIS CERTIFICATE IS TRANSFERABLE IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK OR IN PHILADELPHIA, PA. OR IN LOS ANGELES, CAL.
• REGISTERED: CHEMICAL BANK NEW YORK TRUST COMPANY, REGISTRAR
• COUNTERSIGNED: THE CHASE MANHATTAN BANK (NATIONAL ASSOCIATION), TRANSFER AGENT
• NAME CHANGED TO ATLANTIC RICHFIELD COMPANY, overprinted in red
• AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY, the printer

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

🔴 Why the Red Overprint

On January 3, 1966, the Richfield Oil Corporation of Los Angeles was merged into The Atlantic Refining Company, and on May 3, 1966 the company adopted its new name, Atlantic Richfield Company, the ARCO everybody remembers. That left the company holding stacks of beautifully engraved certificates with the old name on them. Rather than throw them away, they kept issuing them and overprinted each one in red to say the name had changed. So every one of these was issued after the May 1966 name change, printed as Atlantic and issued as Atlantic Richfield. Notice too that it lists Los Angeles as a transfer city, right alongside New York and Philadelphia.

Then on March 4, 1969, Sinclair Oil was merged into Atlantic Richfield as well, and the old Philadelphia refiner had become a coast-to-coast oil company.

⛽ 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 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.

🌴 Richfield of Los Angeles

Richfield Oil was founded in 1911 in California, and 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, just two years after the merger. Richfield made a pioneering oil discovery on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula in 1957 and 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. Once they're gone, they're gone, and with the paper era over, these last ones will only get more difficult to acquire.

🖼️ Display

Envision adorning your wall with a vintage historic collectible as a decorative piece in any home room! The orange and black with that red overprint really pops in a frame, and it makes a great gift for anybody in oil and gas or anybody who remembers an ARCO station.