Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Sinclair’s National Parks advertisements alongside the earlier 1930s “To visit Britain’s landmarks, you can be sure of Shell” campaign in the UK to understand how oil companies promoted travel via petrol automobiles to natural and cultural heritage sites.

Paper long abstract:

In 1955, Sinclair Oil Company launched a special advertising campaign in encourage the public to visit American National Parks. Full page advertisements in major magazines featured amazing US western park destinations like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Bryce Canyon. In addition, the Sinclair Auto Tour Bureau passed out free maps to help drivers plan their visits to the National Parks. Of course, the public was intended to visit via the family automobile -- and use Sinclair petroleum products to do so.

This paper examines Sinclair’s National Parks advertisements alongside the earlier 1930s “To visit Britain’s landmarks, you can be sure of Shell” campaign in the UK to understand how oil companies promoted travel via petrol automobiles to natural and cultural heritage sites. Deploying landscape painting and photography, these ad campaigns engage in forms of environmental storytelling that promote a vision of cars, roads, and petroleum as nearly invisible conduits to nature. These campaigns were part of a larger toolkit of activities, such as the US Mission 66 ten-year program launched in 1956 to expand National Park infrastructure, that aimed to reorient the natural and cultural heritage sites toward the automobile. Sinclair’s previously understudied National Parks series demonstrates that the twentieth-century petroleum industry moved far beyond promoting physical infrastructures of cars and roads to promoting their products as enablers of natural and cultural heritage.