Mid Continent Petroleum

Company History: The history of Mid-Continent is somewhat fuzzy, due to the extreme complexity of the businesses involved in its formation and the limited availability of records from this period.

It all started with Josh Cosden of Tulsa, Oklahoma in the mid teens. Mr. Cosden, a prominent businessman and local celebrity in Tulsa, is briefly described in this article from the Harvard Business School:

Known as the "prince of petroleum," Cosden is credited with establishing Oklahoma as a major oil producing state. Starting with a small parcel of land, he built a $35 million oil business in ten short years. Through his oil discoveries and exploration, he almost single-handedly quadrupled the population of Tulsa at the turn of the century.

Mr. Cosden established Cosden Oil & Gas Co., building its new headquarters building (called the Mid-Continent building) in 1916. Mid-Continent Petroleum Corporation was organized as Cosden & Company, a Delaware corporation, in 1917. Various Cosden holdings were re-incorporated as Mid-Continent Petroleum during a forceful restructuring that took place in 1925. It was at this time that the Mid-Continent building in Tulsa officially became the headquarters of the Mid-Continent Petroleum Corporation.

The company's stations began selling gasoline at stations under the Diamond name at some point in the early to mid- 1920s. The stations sold motor oil, kerosene, Diamond gasoline, and an anti-knock version known as Nevr-Nox. This antiknock compound must have been something other than Ethyl at the beginning, because it was touted as being ?non-poisonous? on some versions of signs and globes from the 1920s through 1933.