Welcome to another great issue of the best car magazine in the country. Got a bad case of writer’s block this month, but I grabbed my thinking cap and in a matter of minutes I got it. So now I present to you a brief history of the Texaco oil corporation.
Like Gulf Oil, Texaco was founded in 1901 after a major oil strike at Spindletop near Beaumont, TX. The company was officially incorporated as The Texas Company in 1902 and the word Texaco was first used as a brand for asphalt, not gasoline (huh, go figure) in 1903.
The Texaco logo, a red star with a green capital “T” inside it, first appeared in 1909, but it would take another 50 years before Texaco would become the name of the company itself.
Texaco’s history is often confused with that of the Indian Refining Company, which The Texas Company bought in 1931. That buyout included the rights to Havoline Motor Oil, which has since become one of Texaco’s most recognized brands.
Indian gasoline would be marketed until 1943 as an economy brand of Texaco. During this same period, in 1930, Texaco’s premium Ethyl brand was introduced before being renamed as Fire-Chief in 1932. A second premium blend called Sky Chief was introduced in 1938.
Until the 1960s, Fire-Chief pumps were red while Sky Chief pumps were silver.
The green “T” inside the red Texaco star can help date Texaco-branded products. The earliest “T”s featured descending cross bars that turned up at their ends, as well as a pair of serifs at the base of the letter. By 1915, the “T” had taken on its more familiar shape, with the base of the letter mortised by two of the star’s inward-pointing edges.
As for the top of the “T,” the bars were now fully horizontal, with stubby, descending serifs on each end. But the biggest clue to a Texaco product’s date is the letter’s outline, which was black until the late 1930s and white thereafter.
This star logo appeared on porcelain signs, tin signs, gas globes, and all sorts of promotional items, from cigarette lighters and ashtrays to ink blotters and pens. Naturally the star also turned up on the various oil and lubricant cans made for Texaco products, most of which featured a green background, the same color as the “T” inside the star.
Signs bearing the Indian brand are also collected by Texaco enthusiasts, especially the pump plates featuring an abstract figure rendered in what looks like bead work.
Other signature signs include those advertising Fire-Chief, which have a red fireman's helmet on them; Sky Chief, which are marked by a trio of red chevrons, Diesel Chief and Fuel Chief, which commonly came in red and green, but rarely in yellow.
As with other petroliana, aviation and marine products are generally tougher to come by. Especially handsome, and prized by collectors, are the pump plates advertising Texaco Marine White Gasoline. In which the Texaco logo was set within a ship’s wheel and the words “Marine White” were written in a script that appears to be made of white rope. Texaco also made a Marine line of china, which were decorated with a small Texaco flag.
Other Texaco related brands to look for include Havoline, whose logo featured a large red disc outlined by a white circle and a blue one; that graphic was eventually replaced by the Texaco star, although the Havoline name persisted.
Caltex, which was a 1936 partnership with Chevron to develop oil resources in Bahrain and Indonesia, those products sometimes have a red star on them, while in other cases the word is accompanied by the Havoline name and its pre-star logo.
And then there’s McColl-Frontenac, which was acquired by Texaco in 1941 and sold its products under the Red Indian brand, that was the Canadian brand of Texaco.