New York State Stock 1841 - Delaware and Hudson Canal Company

Beautifully engraved certificate from the New York State Stock issued in 1841. This historic document is hand signed by the Treasurer ( J. Williams ) and is over 161 years old.

The history of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, reaching back, as it does, for nearly a century from the present time, and embracing the period of greatest commercial development of the State of New York, is unique in one respect. It is the only enterprise of its kind within the state that remained in the hands of its original projectors in spite of financial difficulties, doubts of its ultimate success and the active opposition of competitors, developing in later years into a great transportation and mining corporation which is today a power to be considered among similar interests. And yet this same company, in the early days of its precarious existence, was twice compelled to seek the powerful aid and financial backing of the State's credit, without which it may well be doubted whether it would have survived to attain its present success.

The initiative of this enterprise, was largely due to the powers of observation, the foresight, energy and persistence of William Wurts, who, with his brothers Charles and Maurice, were businessmen of Philadelphia. Without being a professional geologist, or even a hunter or trapper, he was fond of talking long tramps and excursions through the valleys and along the streams of northeastern Pennsylvania, sleeping in the forest wherever overtaken by night, and subsisting on provision from the knapsack of a chance hunter or upon the trout which he lured from the cool streams of the Lackawaxen and Lackawanna. As far back as 1812, while on one of these periods of wandering, he was attracted by the black stones which he noticed cropping out of the ground here and there. He became interested and, believing they had value, week by week and month after month, he followed and examined these outcroppings, noting their location, until he had practically traced the outlines of the great northern and eastern anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania.