Beautifully engraved Gold Bond specimen certificate from
Southern California Cement Company dated 1906. This historic document was printed by Franklin-Lee Bank Note Company and has an
ornate border around it with a vignette of the company's cement plant. This item has the signatures of the Company's President and Secretary and is over 100 years old. 105 coupons attached.
Certificate Vignette
Riverside Cement was incorporated on August 23, 1906, as the Southern California Cement Company. The company changed its name to Riverside Cement Company in the late 1920s. After years of various owners, Riverside Cement was most recently purchased by TXI in 1998.
TXI Riverside Cement is building a 2.2-million-ton plant expansion and modernization at Oro Grande, Calif.
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