Antique Early 1900s Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad Stock Certificate 🚂 Orange, CB&Q Locomotive Vignette

Where Did the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Begin? 🚂 A Little Aurora Railroad That Became the Burlington Route

Size: 11 1/2" x 7 3/4" ~ Cancelled, with punch cancels and revenue stamps. They vary a little one to the next.

This is an antique Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad Company stock certificate, printed on heavy engraved stock with a salmon-orange border and a diagonal "SHARES $100 EACH" overprint across the face. I like where the Burlington started better than the giant it turned into: it began in 1848 as the Aurora Branch Railroad, chartered by folks from Aurora and Batavia, Illinois, and became the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy in 1855. Railroaders shortened all of that to the "Burlington Route," a name borrowed from two towns on its line, Burlington, Iowa and Quincy, Illinois - not from Boston, even though Boston is where the money and the paperwork lived.

🏦 Why a Chicago Railroad Did Its Business in Boston

Look at the certificate and it tells you: shares "transferable only... at their Office in Boston." One of the company's principal founders was John Murray Forbes, a Boston merchant, and Boston capital ran the Burlington for most of its independent life. The registrar on the front is the National Bank of Commerce of Boston, which had its headquarters in the Sears Building - and in 1886 its vice president was Colonel Norwood Penrose Hallowell, wounded at Glendale and again at Antietam, who later commanded the 55th Massachusetts, one of the earliest all-Black regiments of the Civil War. That's a name worth knowing.

🗓️ The Buyout That Set Off a Wall Street Panic

Here's the part that turns a handsome piece of paper into a slice of Wall Street history. By 1901 the Burlington ran from Chicago clear across Iowa to the Missouri River - its Iowa line first reached the river in November 1869. From there it crossed Nebraska and had its rails into Denver, at the foot of the Rockies, by 1882, and it had a line up to meet the Northern Pacific near Billings, Montana. What it didn't have was a line to the Pacific, and its president, Charles Perkins, believed it belonged inside a big transcontinental system. He figured the best fit was James J. Hill's Great Northern, because the Burlington's river line up to the Twin Cities tied Hill's home base of St. Paul straight to Chicago. In the spring of 1901, Perkins set a price of $200 a share, and James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway, together with the Northern Pacific and with J. P. Morgan behind Hill, bought up nearly 98% of the Burlington's stock, effective July 1, 1901 - outbidding the railroad man E. H. Harriman, who wanted the Burlington's own route into Chicago. Harriman didn't take the loss quietly. So he went after the Northern Pacific itself and cornered its stock, and the rush to cover those shares set off the Panic of May 1901 - a few of the craziest days Wall Street ever saw, with the market breaking on the afternoon of May 8. The whole fight was eventually settled by folding the railroads into the Northern Securities Company, which the U.S. Supreme Court broke 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 - ordinary paperwork on the surface, with one of the great corporate battles in American history underneath.

📮 Little Battleships Stuck to the Paper

Affixed to certificates like this one are small engraved stamps that most people walk past assuming are postage. They're not - they're United States documentary revenue stamps, the "Series of 1898" battleship design, required under the War Revenue Act of 1898 to help pay for the Spanish-American War. The values from half a cent up to 80 cents are each engraved with a warship in the style of the USS Maine, whose loss in Havana Harbor in February 1898 helped start that war in the first place, and the tax that put these stamps on stock transfers ran from July 1, 1898 to June 30, 1902. The ones in the photos carry that battleship design in a few different denominations, handstamp-cancelled by the transfer agent. One sheet in the photos also carries a one-dollar stamp, and that one is the series' other design, the one used for its dollar values: a standing figure of Commerce, with a big black "1" printed across it - the mark of the second printing in 1900. It's a nice bit of federal tax history riding along on a railroad share.

🚂 The Locomotive Engraved at the Center

The engraving in the center is a beauty - a 4-4-0 American-type steam engine with its cowcatcher out front, bell and headlamp up high and smoke pouring off the stack, at a riverfront with a paddle steamer behind it and a man with a basket on his shoulder by the tracks. The American Bank Note Company engraved it - founded in New York in 1858, imprint here New York & Boston - the same company that printed the Union's Demand Notes in the Civil War, so this train comes from the same hands that made the country's money.

🚄 Onward to the Zephyr and Burlington Northern

The Burlington kept growing long after this certificate's era. Its Pioneer Zephyr, a gleaming stainless-steel diesel streamliner, made a record dawn-to-dusk run from Denver to Chicago on May 26, 1934 - the first American diesel-electric streamlined passenger train. The company itself lasted as an independent line until March 2, 1970, when it merged into Burlington Northern. This certificate belongs to the company in its earlier, independent decades, back when the fight over who would own it was front-page news.

I've handled a lot of old railroad paper, and this one earns its keep: an engraved share, a Boston paper trail, a Wall Street panic, and a Spanish-American War tax stamp, all riding on one sheet.