Delaware and Hudson Company - New York

Beautifully engraved Specimen certificate from the Delaware and Hudson Company . This historic document was printed by American Banknote company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an old building. Overprint of name change of company to the Champlain National Corporation. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President and Secretary.






Certificate Vignette

In the early 1800s, railroads were the hottest investment in the nation. For decades, they fueled great waves of speculative investment that alternately fueled and collapsed the growth of the American economy. Giant enterprises that required enormous sums of money to construct, most railroads were funded by stock offerings to investors. Chartered on April 23, 1823, the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company (D and H) had one of the great initial public offerings (IPOs) of the early nineteenth century.

For seventy years, the D and H canal moved millions of tons of coal to market. When it was dissolved on April 28, 1899, the corporation simplified its name to the Delaware and Hudson Company, which operated the Delaware and Hudson Railroad Company. The railroad linked Montreal with Albany and Binghamton, New York, and Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and the latter line passed directly beneath Starrucca Viaduct. As the anthracite industry declined, D and H became less dependent on coal transportation and embraced its identity as a “bridge line” – a route that promoted the flow of “overhead” freight that did not originate or terminate on its lines, but rather went straight through on a north-south journey.

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About Specimen Certificates

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 were 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 has grown in popularity over the past several years.