Beautiful engraved specimen Gold Bond certificate from the
Abendroth Brothers dated in 1920. This historic document was printed by American Bank Note Company and has an
ornate border around it with a vignette of an allegorical man and woman. This item is over 87 years old.
Certificate Vignette
Abendroth Brothers manufactured iron stoves, fancy yard pieces, hollow ware, planters boilers, and plumbers' iron, enameled and galvenized ware. Foundry at Portchester, New York. The Abendroth Brothers foundry was one of the largest industries in latter day Port Chester. It was large enough to have its own locomotive.
About SpecimensSpecimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".
Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.
These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.