American Steel Casting Company - Jersey City, New Jersey 1890's

Beautifully engraved Specimen certificate from the American Steel Casting Company datd 189_. This historic document was printed by American Bank Note and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of a bald eagle holding a shield and United States flag. The certificate has a small cut in the upper center white border as shown in the scan, otherwise EF. This is the first time we have had this certificate for sale.


Certificate Vignette

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About Specimens

Specimen 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 and realized nice appreciation in value over the past several years.