Antique Dunsmore Business College Stock Certificate 📜 from 1910s

Size: 12 x 8 inches ~ Unissued, with little to no wear. They vary a little one to the next.

🎓 An Unissued Share in a Staunton Business College

This is a blank, unissued stock certificate for The Dunsmore Business College, Incorporated, of Staunton, Virginia - never filled in, never signed, the owner's name and share count left empty exactly as it came off the press. It's engraved with an ornate border, a gold foil seal, and an oval portrait of a bearded, older man (uncaptioned) at the upper left, over the printed lines "Incorporated Under the Laws of the State of Virginia," "Authorized Capital Stock, $100,000," and "Shares $25.00 Each." The reverse carries the certificate's transfer form, printed in green.

📜 The 1914 Re-Incorporation

The company name on this certificate - "The Dunsmore Business College, Incorporated" - and its $100,000 authorized capital tie this exact form to a specific moment: the college's re-incorporation on February 20, 1914, recorded that year in Virginia's own corporation filings, with J. G. Dunsmore named as its principal. The school had actually been chartered once before, by the Virginia legislature back in 1884, so this certificate represents the second, updated corporate life of a school that was already three decades old by the time it was printed.

🖋️ Caldwell-Sites Co., Roanoke

The printer's own imprint runs along the bottom: "CALDWELL-SITES CO., ROANOKE, VA." And look close at the lower-left border: a tiny oval reading "Goes" is worked into the scrollwork, the mark of the Goes Lithographing Company of Chicago, which sold engraved certificate blanks to printers all over the country. Goes made the blank; Caldwell-Sites printed the college's name and terms on it. Caldwell-Sites was a real Staunton-and-Roanoke stationery and printing firm, incorporated in 1904 with C. R. Caldwell as president and treasurer, still doing business into the 1950s. The state's own corporation filing for Dunsmore Business College lists a "C. R. Caldwell" right alongside J. G. Dunsmore - very likely the same Staunton man who printed this certificate also had a hand in the college's own incorporation.

👨‍🏫 James Gaston Dunsmore

James Gaston Dunsmore grew up on a farm in Monroe County, took a Master of Accounts degree at Eastman National Business College in Poughkeepsie in 1871, and opened his first commercial school at Sinks Grove the following year. He moved the operation to Staunton in 1880 and turned it into a full-time business college in 1882. By century's end it had taught more than 1,600 students. Dunsmore ran the school until his death in 1922; it changed hands afterward, enrollment thinned out, and it finally closed in 1977 - a run of over a century from that first schoolroom at Sinks Grove. Its 1900 building on West Beverley Street sat empty for decades; in 2026 it was funded to become senior housing.