Vintage 1960s Atlantic Refining Company Stock Certificate 🛢️ Green, 100 Shares, Common Stock

Remember the Atlantic Refining Company? 🛢️ The Atlantic Refining Company, 100 Shares Common Stock

Size: 12" x 8" ~ little to no wear

A 1960s Atlantic Refining Company stock certificate in green - a real slice of oil-company Americana. In the engraved picture at the top a robed woman sits in front of a whole oil field, with derricks, refinery towers and storage tanks behind her and a chemist's flask at her side. 100 SHARES is printed in both upper corners and COMMON STOCK on either side, and under THE ATLANTIC REFINING COMPANY it says INCORPORATED IN 1870 UNDER THE LAWS OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA. The company seal at the bottom has a building at its center and PHILADELPHIA around its edge, with AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY printed underneath.

It was registered by the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company and countersigned by The Chase Manhattan Bank as transfer agent, and the printed signatures at the bottom belong to the treasurer and the chairman of the board. The facsimile signature over CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD reads Robert O. Anderson, the same oilman you'll meet a little further down, who was elected chairman on May 4, 1965. The back has the key to abbreviations, like TEN COM for tenants in common and UNIF GIFT MIN ACT for the Uniform Gifts to Minors Act, and the transfer form.

🛢️ Atlantic, From Rockefeller to ARCO

The Atlantic Refining Company started out in Philadelphia in 1866 as the Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company, right at the beginning of the oil business. In 1874 John D. Rockefeller bought it and folded it into Standard Oil, which gave him a major foothold on the East Coast. When the Standard Oil Trust divided up territory among its companies in 1886, Atlantic got all of Delaware, the southern half of New Jersey and the southeast corner of Pennsylvania, which basically meant the whole Philadelphia area. In 1892 it absorbed two fellow Standard companies, Acme Oil of Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh-based Standard Oil of Pennsylvania.

When the Sherman Antitrust Act broke the Trust apart in 1911, Atlantic was one of 11 companies out of 35 that got the rights to the Standard name, in its case for all of Pennsylvania and Delaware. Then it turned the name down. Like Conoco, Atlantic found its own name sold better than Standard, which was a rarity at the time. Over the years it grew up and down the East Coast, mostly by buying other companies.

Henderson Supplee Jr. ran the company through the 1950s. He had been president of the Supplee-Wills-Jones Milk Company in Philadelphia before he came over to Atlantic in 1947, became Atlantic's president in 1952 and is credited with restructuring and reviving the company, and he moved up to chairman of the board in 1964 before retiring in 1965. In 1963 a New Mexico wildcatter named Robert O. Anderson merged his Hondo company into Atlantic, and in 1966, as Atlantic's chairman and chief executive, he merged it with Richfield Oil of Los Angeles to form the Atlantic Richfield Company, better known as ARCO. Two years later, on March 12, 1968, ARCO and Humble Oil confirmed the Prudhoe Bay field on Alaska's North Slope, the largest oil field in North America. Anderson ended up the largest individual landowner in the United States.

The Atlantic name had one more run. ARCO sold its Northeast business in 1985, the new owner brought the Atlantic name back, and in 1988 Philadelphia's own Sunoco bought it. The last known Atlantic station, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, became a Sunoco in 1996.

🏦 The Banks and the Engraver

The Chemical Bank New York Trust Company was born in 1959, when the Chemical Corn Exchange Bank merged with the New York Trust Company. That merger doubled the bank's size and made it the third-largest bank in New York and the fourth-largest in the country, with $3.8 billion in assets.

The banks on the face have their own stories. The Chase Manhattan Bank was formed in 1955 when the Chase National Bank merged with the Bank of the Manhattan Company. The certificate was engraved and printed by the American Bank Note Company, formed in New York City in 1858 when several of the country's top security printers merged. It traces its roots back to a firm started in 1795 by Robert Scot, the first official engraver of the U.S. Mint, and during the Civil War it printed the federal Demand Notes for the Treasury.

🖼️ A Piece of History for the Wall

Imagine the conversations this will spark when your guests spot it on your wall. Stock certificates go all the way back to 1606 with the Dutch East India Company, and even the Walt Disney Company called it quits on paper certificates in 2013, so a real engraved certificate like this is a piece of history they just do not make anymore. These were printed on paper that puts your average dollar bill to shame, thick, durable stock that keeps them looking fresh for decades.

And don't even get me started on the signatures! I'll level with you, I can barely read my own John Hancock, let alone one from sixty years ago. For those of you with a keen eye and a passion for history, the names on these can be a fun rabbit hole to go down.

These are issued instruments rather than blanks. These worked for a living, so look for signatures, stamps, punch holes and other marks of it. That is the paper trail of a security that actually did its job, and it is what separates a document that lived from a blank that never did. Each sheet's names, numbers, dates, signatures and punches are its own, so the pictures show the type rather than your exact certificate.