On eBay Now...Antique Early 1900s Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad Stock Certificate 🚂 For Sale
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Antique Early 1900s Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad Stock Certificate 🚂:
$24.95
Size: 11.5 x 7.75 inches ~ Cancelled, with punch cancels and revenue stamps. They vary a little one to the next.
🚂 An Engraved Share in the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy RailroadAn antique capital-stock certificate of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad Company, headed “United States of America” over “State of Illinois,” printed with a salmon-orange lathe-work border and a diagonal “SHARES $100 EACH” overprint. The company started small — the Aurora Branch Railroad, chartered in 1848 by citizens of Aurora and Batavia, Illinois — before it was reorganized as the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy in 1855 and grew into the road railroaders called the “Burlington Route,” after Burlington, Iowa and Quincy, Illinois.
🏦 A Chicago Railroad, Run From BostonThe certificate itself explains why: shares were transferable only “at their Office in Boston.” Boston merchant John Murray Forbes was one of the company’s principal founders, and Boston money ran the Burlington for most of its life as an independent railroad. The registrar printed on the face is the National Bank of Commerce of Boston, based in the Sears Building; its vice president from 1886, Colonel Norwood Penrose Hallowell, had been wounded at Glendale and Antietam and later commanded the 55th Massachusetts, one of the first all-Black regiments of the Civil War.
🗓️ The Buyout That Set Off a Wall Street PanicIn the spring of 1901, Burlington president Charles Perkins priced the stock at $200 a share, and James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway, with the Northern Pacific and J. P. Morgan behind Hill, bought roughly 98% of it effective July 1, 1901 — beating out E. H. Harriman, who wanted the Burlington’s route into Chicago. Harriman answered by trying to corner the Northern Pacific’s own stock, and the resulting scramble touched off the Panic of May 1901. The dispute was settled by folding the railroads into the Northern Securities Company, which the U.S. Supreme Court ordered broken up in 1904 under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The cancel stamps on the ones in the photos fall in May 1901, right in the thick of it.
📮 Series of 1898 “Battleship” Revenue StampsAffixed to certificates like this one are United States documentary revenue stamps, not postage — the “Series of 1898” battleship design, required by the War Revenue Act of 1898 to help fund the Spanish-American War, in force from July 1, 1898 to June 30, 1902. The ones in the photos are handstamp-cancelled by the transfer agent.
🚂 The VignetteEngraved at the center is a 4-4-0 “American”-type steam locomotive at a riverfront, a paddle steamer behind it and a man shouldering a basket beside the rails, cut by the American Bank Note Company (formed in New York in 1858, imprint New York & Boston — the firm that had printed the Union’s Demand Notes in the Civil War).
🚄 Later HistoryThe Burlington’s Pioneer Zephyr ran a record dawn-to-dusk Denver-to-Chicago run on May 26, 1934, the first American diesel-electric streamlined passenger train, and the company merged into Burlington Northern on March 2, 1970.
📋 Specifications- Issuer: Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad Company
- Item type: engraved capital-stock certificate
- State of incorporation: Illinois
- Transfer office: Boston, Massachusetts
- Printer: American Bank Note Company, New York & Boston
- Color: salmon-orange engraved border on cream stock
- Vignette: 4-4-0 steam locomotive at a riverfront
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