Antique Orange 1930s Irving Trust Company 🏦 Stock Certificate

What Was Irving Trust? 🏦 Irving Trust Company, orange 100-share certificate

Size: 13 1/2" x 9 1/2"

A big, bright orange stock certificate from one of Wall Street's great old banks, engraved by the American Bank Note Company. These are 1930s Irving Trust Company certificates for one hundred shares, each one cancelled, from a bank that was gone by 1988.

🔍 What's on it

Across the top, an engraved harbor scene: a seated woman in a laurel wreath holding a caduceus in one hand and a bundle of rods hung with a balance scale in the other, beside a shield marked ENTERPRISE with a plow and a sheaf of wheat under a rising sun. Behind her a train crosses a stone-arch bridge, paddle steamers work the harbor, a ship comes in under both sail and steam, and a strongbox sits at her side with a heap of coins spilling in front of it. Somebody at the bank note company packed a whole lot of commerce into one little picture. Under it, IRVING TRUST COMPANY in big shaded letters and INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 100 SHARES sits in the orange corner panels, and the body reads ONE HUNDRED shares of the capital stock at a par value of $10 each. There's an orange embossed-look seal with a spread eagle, IRVING TRUST COMPANY, NEW YORK, the registrar line for The New York Trust Company, and AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY along the bottom edge. All of it is framed in fine orange lathework. The back carries the transfer form, and the certificates are punch-cancelled.

Stock paper like this earns its markings: signatures and endorsements on the back, a transfer-agent or broker stamp, the cancellation punches, a pencil note from the ledger. That's history on the page, and it varies from one certificate to the next.

📜 The bank named for Washington Irving

The bank goes back to 1851, when the Irving Bank of the City of New York was founded, named for Washington Irving, the author of "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," who had become America's first internationally famous man of letters. His portrait even appeared on the bank's own notes. It grew into a giant: from 1913 to 1931 its headquarters was in the Woolworth Building, then the tallest building in the world, and in 1929 Irving was the fourth-ranked financial institution in New York and fifth in the whole country. After 1931 it moved to its own tower at 1 Wall Street, where it stayed for the rest of its life.

And then it was gone. After a year-long hostile takeover fight, the Irving Trust board agreed on October 7, 1988 to merge with the Bank of New York. The building at 1 Wall Street is still there, and a certificate like this is what's left of the bank that built it.

📅 How old is it?

This orange 100-share form is a 1930s printing. The registrar printed on them, The New York Trust Company, was itself merged away in 1959.

Some collectors research the other signatures on stock certificates and their history. I have never done this, as I can barely read my own signature, let alone one from over 100 years ago!

🏡 Display

That orange border looks sharp framed in an office, a den or behind a desk, and it's a great gift for anyone in banking or finance, or anybody who loves New York history.