Finance History | Foshay Tower — Thirty Dollars and Fifty Cents from a Minneapolis Pool

People treat APA as a Houston producer and a leftover ticker from Apache.

The public company began as a small Minnesota drilling pool that rented rooms in someone else's monument.

On 6 December 1954 Truman Anderson, Raymond Plank and Charles Arnao formed Apache Oil Corporation in Minneapolis with 250,000 dollars of funding. The first wells went into the Cushing field in Oklahoma the next year.

When crude prices sagged around 1960 the firm bought interests in the Foshay Tower, the 1929 Art Deco shaft at 821 Marquette Avenue. The 32-story building was Apache headquarters from the early 1960s until 1984.

In 1969 Apache listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The company's own history says the stock opened at 30.50 dollars a share, and that Plank bought the first 100 shares himself.

The mechanism is an oil partnership using a listed common share to outgrow the private drilling-program book. The later master limited partnership Apache Petroleum Company, formed in 1981, was a second experiment in the same direction.

Headquarters later moved to Denver in 1987 and to Houston in 1992. In 2021 a new holding company, APA Corporation, was placed over Apache Corporation. The operating wells did not move.

The pin is the public sidewalk on Marquette Avenue at the Foshay, now a hotel, where the 1969 listing still had its Minnesota address.

Photo: Danksergeant15, 23 June 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Foshay Tower, Minneapolis.