Vintage 1960s Atlantic Refining Company Stock Certificate 📜 Oil Americana! Blue

What Was Atlantic Refining Preferred Stock? 📜 The Atlantic Refining Company, 3.75% Series B Cumulative Preferred Stock Certificate

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

Oil Americana at its finest! This is a vintage 1960s stock certificate for 100 shares of the Atlantic Refining Company's 3.75% Series B Cumulative Preferred Stock, engraved and printed by the American Bank Note Company in rich blue. Up top, a black engraved vignette shows a seated woman holding a globe among oil derricks, a refinery and a big chemist's flask, the whole story of the oil business in one picture. THE ATLANTIC REFINING COMPANY runs across in bold capitals, with the company's seal from Philadelphia at the bottom.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• THE ATLANTIC REFINING COMPANY
• INCORPORATED IN 1870 UNDER THE LAWS OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA
• 100 SHARES, CUMULATIVE PREFERRED STOCK, 3.75% SERIES B, PAR VALUE $100 EACH
• REGISTERED: MORGAN GUARANTY TRUST COMPANY OF NEW YORK
• COUNTERSIGNED: THE CHASE MANHATTAN BANK, TRANSFER AGENT
• AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY (the printer)

Those two banks help date the paper. Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York was formed in 1959, and the Chase Manhattan Bank took that name in 1955, and in 1966 the company became Atlantic Richfield. So these certificates belong to the late 1950s and 1960s. The one you see most often is the green common stock with the same vignette; this blue one is the $100 preferred. These are real issued certificates, signed, punch-cancelled and stamped on the back when the shares changed hands.

🛢️ Atlantic, from Standard Oil to ARCO

Atlantic goes back to 1866, when it was set up in Philadelphia as the Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company, and it was incorporated as Atlantic Refining in 1870. In 1874 John D. Rockefeller bought it into his Standard Oil empire, which gave him a major presence on the East Coast, and by 1886 Atlantic controlled the Philadelphia market across Delaware, southern New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania. When the government broke up Standard Oil in 1911, Atlantic was one of eleven companies given the right to the Standard name, and it turned it down, because its own name sold better.

In 1966 Atlantic merged with Richfield Oil of the West Coast to become the Atlantic Richfield Company, ARCO, and bought Sinclair Oil in 1969 to fill in the middle of the country. The Atlantic stations in the Northeast were sold off in 1985, went to Sunoco in 1988, and the last Atlantic-branded station became a Sunoco in 1996.

🏡 Display

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 history buff, or anybody who remembers filling up at an Atlantic station.