Antique 1915-1916 Chicago Rock Island & Pacific Railway Stock Certificate 🚂 Orange Border, The Rock

Was the Rock Island the First Railroad to Bridge the Mississippi? 🚂 An Antique 1915-1916 Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway Stock Certificate, Orange

Size: 11 1/2" x 7 3/4"

A real, issued certificate of THE CHICAGO, ROCK ISLAND AND PACIFIC RAILWAY COMPANY, INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF ILLINOIS AND IOWA, engraved by the AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY, NEW YORK. Up top a steam locomotive with AMERICA lettered on its tender runs with a man at the cab, the orange border holds CERTIFICATE FOR LESS THAN 100 SHARES in both corners, SHARES $100 EACH, and the TENS and UNITS punch columns run down the right side. Each one was filled in, sealed, stamped and punch-cancelled, with the transfer form on the back.

📅 1915-1916

This orange design is known from 1915 and 1916 - dealers and the sheets themselves run from early 1915 into 1916. The one you get will carry its own date, number, owner, share count and stamps, and may look a little different from the one in my pictures. Those were hard years for the Rock: the railroad went into receivership on April 20, 1915, and came out reorganized on June 24, 1917 as the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad.

🌉 The first bridge over the Mississippi

The Rock goes back to February 27, 1847, when Illinois chartered the Rock Island and La Salle Rail Road to join two river towns. But the railroad's early legend was made just outside Chicago, in Joliet. Local history holds that when the rails finally reached Joliet in October 1852, excitement ran so high that the company ran its very first train over the unfinished route ahead of schedule, the forty-mile run from Chicago greeted by trumpets, gunfire, ringing bells and cheering crowds along the right-of-way - still recalled by old-timers as one of the great spectacles of the young town. On February 22, 1854 it reached Rock Island, the first railroad to connect Chicago with the Mississippi, and on April 22, 1856 it finished the first railroad bridge across the river, to Davenport.

Two weeks later the steamboat Effie Afton hit that bridge and burned, taking a span with her, and in the lawsuit that followed a lawyer named Abraham Lincoln argued for the railroad - that bridges over navigable rivers were to everybody's advantage. The bridge stayed, and the rails kept heading west.

💸 Booms, busts and the end

In 1901 control passed to a group of financiers remembered in railroad histories simply as the Reid-Moore syndicate, whose appetite for expansion outran the money, and that's the road to the 1915 receivership on this certificate. The Rock bounced back, ran its streamlined Rockets, and got its own song, the Rock Island Line, but it went into its last bankruptcy in 1975 and, after a crippling strike in 1979, Judge Frank McGarr ordered it liquidated in 1980 - the biggest liquidation of an American company up to then. Financial lore also remembers investors like Henry Crown, who bought Rock Island debt for pennies at its lowest ebb and were vindicated when the railroad's assets proved worth far more than the market believed. And closer to home, Chicago commuters gave the Rock's old suburban coaches an affectionate gangland-era nickname - the Capone cars - a bit of local color passed down among city rail buffs. The last trains ran on March 31, 1980.

🚂 About these

They're about 11 1/2 by 7 3/4 inches, engraved on heavy paper. A natural for a train room, a Chicago or Quad Cities history wall, or anybody whose grandfather worked the Rock. The supply is finite - the Rock has been gone since 1980, nobody's issuing its stock again, and once these last ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.