Commonwealth Edison Company - Illinois 1938

Beautifully engraved RARE specimen $1000 Bond Certificate from the Commonwealth Edison Company dated 1938. This historic document was printed by the Columbian Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an allegorical woman between a power generator and towers with an electric train underneath. This item is over 68 years old. Coupons attached on right side. This is one of the earliest bonds we have seen from this famous electric utility.








Certificate Vignette

The company was founded in 1913 as a merger of the Cosmopolitan Electric Company into the original corporation named Commonwealth Edison incorporated in 1907.

The Commonwealth Edison Company became UniCom Company in 1994. PECO bought Chicago-based Unicom and became Exelon in 2000. The new company distributes electricity to 5 million customers: 3.5 million in Northern Illinois, through ComEd, and 1.5 million in the five-county Philadelphia region, through PECO Energy. In addition, Exelon distributes natural gas to 425,000 customers in Pennsylvania. Both PECO and Unicom were leading nuclear plant operators, and more than 70% of Exelon's 19,000-MW generating capacity comes from nuclear plants. Other generation interests include AmerGen Energy, a joint venture with British Energy, and Sithe Energies (49.9%); the firm also markets wholesale and retail power.

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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 over the past several years.