Ashland Oil, Inc. - $1,000 Specimen Bond
Inv# SE3653 Specimen Bond
$1,000 8.80% Specimen Bond printed by Security-Columbian Banknote Company.
Ashland Oil, Inc. occupies a middle position in the oil industry, far smaller than the major international players but large enough to remain a powerful competitor in its own region. Middle, too, has been its traditional emphasis on the refining segment of the oil business, in which it has long enjoyed a reputation for excellence. Unlike most of the world’s great oil concerns, Ashland has never owned significant amounts of crude oil, and its marketing division did not come close to equaling the importance of refining in the company’s mix of sales for many years. In 1991, chemicals and road construction were also sizable contributors, but Ashland remains primarily a refiner and distributor of oil products. The history of Ashland Oil begins with J. Fred Miles and the founding in 1910 of Swiss Drilling Company, an Oklahoma corporation. Miles had been raised in Oklahoma and worked in the oil business from youth, and after gathering a store of capital created Swiss Drilling with two other men to explore and operate new wells. The years immediately following the breakup of Standard Oil’s near-monopoly in 1911 were challenging in the oil business, however, and Miles found that he could not survive on the low prices offered for Oklahoma crude. In 1916 he accordingly moved his operations to the new fields then opening in eastern Kentucky, where, with the help of some powerful financiers in Chicago and in Cleveland, Ohio, he obtained control of nearly 200,000 acres of oil land. Two years later the energetic Miles incorporated Swiss Oil Company in Lexington, Kentucky, with a group of backers that included the Insulls and the Armours of Chicago, with Miles serving as general manager and J.I. Lamprecht of Cleveland as president. Swiss Oil was soon one of the leading oil concerns in the state of Kentucky. Read more at https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/ashland-oil-inc
Stock and Bond Specimens are made and usually retained by a printer as a record of the contract with a client, generally with manuscript contract notes such as the quantity printed. Specimens are sometimes produced for use by the printing company's sales team as examples of the firm’s products. These are usually marked "Specimen" and have no serial numbers.
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