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Union Oil Company of California (UNOCAL) records
LSC.0449
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Contributing Institution:
UCLA Library Special Collections
Title: Union Oil Company of California records
Creator:
Union Oil Company of California
Identifier/Call Number: LSC.0449
Physical Description:
45 Linear Feet
(90 boxes, 52 cartons)
Date (inclusive): 1884-2005
Abstract: The Union Oil Company of California was
a major petroleum producer, refiner, and marketer incorporated in Santa Paula, California,
on October 17, 1890. The company, later reorganized under the Unocal Corporation, remained
one of America's oldest and largest independent enterprises, with operations throughout
southern California, the United States, and Southeast Asia, up until its 2005 merger with
the ChevronTexaco Corporation. Photographs, negatives, and employee publications comprise
the bulk of the collection, but the records also contain early field and gauge reports,
financial ledgers, correspondence to and from the company's founders, lease and stock
agreements, annual reports to stockholders, speeches and remarks by company executives,
films, and various memorabilia.
Physical Location: Stored off-site. All requests to access
special collections material must be made in advance using the request button located on
this page.
Language of Material:
English .
Open for research. All requests to access special collections materials must be made in
advance using the request button located on this page.
Physical Characteristics and Technical Requirements
CONTAINS AUDIOVISUAL MATERIALS: This collection contains both processed and unprocessed
audiovisual materials. Audiovisual materials are not currently available for access, unless
otherwise noted in a Physical Characteristics and Technical Requirements note at the series
and file levels. All requests to access processed audiovisual materials must be made in
advance using the request button located on this page.
Property rights to the physical objects belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. All
other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the
responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the
copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not
hold the copyright.
[Identification of item], Union Oil Company of California records (Collection Number 449).
Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Provenance/Source of Acquisition
Gift of Michael Thacher, 2004 and 2005.
Collections are processed to a variety of levels depending on the work necessary to make
them usable, their perceived user interest and research value, availability of staff and
resources, and competing priorities. Library Special Collections provides a standard level
of preservation and access for all collections and, when time and resources permit, conducts
more intensive processing. These materials have been arranged and described according to
national and local standards and best practices.
Processed by Brandon Barton, May 2010.
UCLA Catalog Record ID:
6894275
The Union Oil Company of California was incorporated on October 17, 1890, in Santa Paula,
California, after founding members Lyman Stewart, Wallace L. Hardison, and Thomas Bard
merged their respective California oil interests: Hardison and Stewart Oil, Sespe Oil, and
Torrey Canyon Oil. Union's early years were marked by struggle and infighting between the
company's founders; nonetheless, its first producing wells accounted for nearly one-fourth
of California's oil production. By 1900, Lyman Stewart remained the sole founder still with
the company, and under his auspices, and those of the Stewart family, Union Oil began its
first real era of rapid growth. In late 1900, Stewart moved the company's offices to Los
Angeles, and from there Union Oil quickly expanded south through Los Angeles County and
beyond. In response to the popularization of the automobile and the demand for motor oil,
which the company itself had helped to foster by marketing oil fuel as a viable energy
source, Union began to open service stations up and down southern California, augmenting
these stations with twenty established ones acquired from the purchase of Pinal Dome Oil in
1917. With this distribution network and the introduction of its iconic 76 retail brand,
Union Oil, or Union 76 as it came to be known, helped to shape both southern California's
landscape and its history.
Midway through the twentieth century, Union had built the world's first oil tanker, had
begun drilling in Alaska and Colorado, and had begun to experiment with oil shale and
alternatives to crude oil. By the 1960s, however, two-thirds of the company's production
still came from California. In that same decade, the company's strategy shifted dramatically
as Fred Hartley was appointed CEO and Union Oil saw another era of revitalization. To keep
Union competitive, Hartley pushed for increased oil exploration and expansion, and he
invested substantial resources into developing geothermal power and liquefied natural gas as
an automotive fuel. Union Oil's merger with the Pure Oil Company in 1965 also won Union Oil
a significant international reputation as a producer, refiner, and marketer. The merger,
unprecedented in size, made Union the ninth largest oil company in the United States and led
to huge oil and gas discoveries in Southeast Asia. Throughout the remainder of the sixties
and seventies Union Oil continued to grow, becoming the world's largest producer of
geothermal power in 1967, signing the first gas sales contract with Thailand in 1978, and
joining Standard Oil and Phillips, among others, to form the Alyeska Pipeline Service
responsible for building the TransAlaska Pipeline.
With this growth, Union Oil also saw an increase in public relations disasters and takeover
bids. In 1969, one of Union's drilling platforms off the coast of California leaked hundreds
of thousands of gallons of oil into the water and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara. The
incident helped turn public and political opinion against offshore drilling and likewise
gained the company a bad reputation among environmentalists. To compound these troubles,
Union had fallen into greater and greater debt trying to fend off several takeovers towards
the end of the century and in 1983 had to reorganize under the Unocal Corporation as a
defense against further such attempts. Despite its financial difficulties, the company
continued to grow outside of the United States, particularly in Asia and Latin America,
eventually even becoming profitable again. The final years of the Union Oil Company were
marked by speculation as to the company's future, further talks of takeovers, and more
negative press-including revelations that Unocal had been dealing with the Taliban regime
before September 11, 2001. After more than 100 years as one of America's largest and most
historied independent companies, Union Oil and Unocal finally agreed in 2005 to be acquired
by the ChevronTexaco Corporation.
Records span the entirety of the company's history with stock certificates from before the
1890 merger to newspaper articles covering the final days of Unocal's independence.
Photographs, negatives, and employee publications comprise the bulk of the collection, but
the records also contain early field and gauge reports, financial ledgers, correspondence to
and from the company's founders, lease and stock agreements, annual reports to stockholders,
speeches and remarks by company executives, films, and various memorabilia. The collection's
robust visual materials document the broad spectrum of Union Oil's operations and activities
(and those of Pinal Dome Oil and the Pure Oil Company, which Union Oil acquired in 1917 and
1965 respectively) both in the United States and overseas, especially in terms of fields,
refineries, oil exploration, and transportation (including innovations in tanker and
aviation technology). In addition to cataloging the history of one of America's biggest
independents, the collection tells the story of oil more generally and of the push for
alternative energies and delineates the growth and development of southern California in the
twentieth century.
Arranged in the following series:
- Documents and Correspondence
- Films
- Financial Records and Reports
- Memorabilia
- Negatives
- Advertising
- Employees
- Miscellaneous
- Offices
- Oil Fields
- Plants
- Absorption
- Compression
- Dehydration
- Ports
- Refineries
- Research
- Service Stations
- Shore Facilities
- Transportation
- Auto
- Aviation
- Tankers
- Trains
- Photographs
- Employees
- Environment
- Financial Records and Reports
- Geothermal
- Miscellaneous
- Offices
- Offshore
- Oil Fields
- Overseas
- Ports
- Publications
- Public Relations
- Refineries
- Research
- Service Stations
- Shore Facilities
- Transportation
- Auto
- Aviation
- Barges
- Tankers
- Trains
- Publications
Pinal Dome Oil
Company Records (Collection 220)
. UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E.
Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Union
Oil Company of California -- Archives