According to an essay written this year by Neil McElwee a Scottsman,
named Charles Lockhart living in the Pittsburgh area had been in the
petroleum business seven years before the commercial success of the Drake
Well in 1859. Lockhard bought crude from saltwells near Tarentum and
sold it to Pittsburgh distiller who made lamp oil. by 1858 this trade
ammounted to 1200 barrels yearly. In September of 1859 he joined with
other area men to form Phillips, Frew& Co. , to drill for oil on the
Allegheny south bank.
In 1865with other partners,the company became Warden, Frew & Co., to
buy crude fro speculation and resale in Philadelphia and New York. They
build a refinery in Philadelphia called the Atlantic. Charles Lockhart
became the first President of Atlantic Refining Company.
By the 1870’s Lockhart recognized the refining industry was overbuilt and
inefficient. He devised the Pittsburgh Plan whereby the refiners in the area
would consolidate and form the National Refiners Association in May of
1872 at Titusville, Pa. In October of 1874 the refining properties owned by
Lockhart, Frew and Warden merged with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, to be
named Standard Oil of Pittsburgh and the Atlanic Refinery in Philadelphia.
Lockhart and Warden were named to the Standard Oil board of directors .
When the Sherman Antitrust Act broke up the Standaerd Trust in 1911 John
Van Dyke became the president of Atlantic Refining Co. Atlantic now had
some new problems : It didn’t own any oil tankers . It had no oil wells or
pipe lines and had only three refineries in Pennsylvania.
Van Dyke developed a plan to expand from it’s current domestic markets of
Deleware and Pennsylvania. As evidenced by an advertisement from 1915
the company sold gasoline directly to the consumers home in tin cans.
The foreign business had no sales force. The domestic sales ground to a
halt when the U.S. entered into WW 1 in April of 1917. 50% of the aviation
fule sent to the emerging demand from the newley form air forces was
produced at Atlantic’s Point Breeze Refinery.
After the war the company focused on building up a fleet of company
owned tankers. A second part of the plan was to develop oil production
rather than relying on purchased crude By the mid 1930’s Atlantic was
producing from more than 1,000 wells in Texas, New Mexico, Kansas and
Oklahoma.
They opened a Paris office in 1919. They entered the South African, South
American and with Union Oil of Calaforina the Austrailian markets.
During the 1950’s Atlantic had a catchy jingle that went something like this,
“For business or pleasure
In any kind of weather
Atlantic keeps your car on the go
(fade on the go one the go)
Atlantic Refining made a go of it until 1966 when it was merged with
Richfield forming The Atlantic Richfield Co aka ARCO
The Alantic brand emerged in 1985when John Deuss bought the Atlantic
properties from ARCO and formed Atlantic Petroleum B.V. a netherlands
holding company. In 1988 Sun Company bought it and eventually desolved
it into Sunoco.
edit to insert Atlantic COTM banner image
[This message has been edited by Oldgas (edited 12-05-2007).]
