Vintage 1937 American Bank Note Co Stock Certificate 🦅 New York Eagle Vignette, De Coppet & Doremus

What Was It Like to Hold a Piece of the Company That Printed America's Own Money? 🦅

Long before anyone thought to frame old paper as art, a stock certificate like this one lived a working life — passed across desks on Broad Street, locked in a brokerage vault, stamped and cancelled and refiled a dozen times before it ever found its way into a collector's hands. There's something quietly thrilling about holding a certificate issued by the American Bank Note Company: the very firm whose engravers cut the plates for Civil War currency, foreign banknotes, and the stock certificates of half of corporate America — here, turning its own considerable engraving talent on itself. If any company on Wall Street knew how to make a piece of paper feel important, it was this one.

What This Piece Is

This is an original common stock certificate issued by the American Bank Note Company, incorporated under the laws of the State of New York and headquartered on Wall Street in Manhattan. It dates to 1937, squarely in the Great Depression years, and was made out to the Wall Street brokerage house De Coppet & Doremus — a firm whose own remarkable story is woven through this listing below. The certificate is printed by engraved intaglio process on heavy cream/ivory stock: a fine-line border of dense guilloche scrollwork frames the document, and at its center sits a magnificent vignette of a bald eagle, wings raised, perched atop a rocky outcrop — precisely the kind of engraving artistry ABN was famous for selling to banks, governments, and corporations around the world. The certificate carries hand-inked signatures for Treasurer and President, an embossed corporate seal, and registration and guarantee markings from Bankers Trust Company of New York, the transfer agent of record. Perforated cancellation marks run through the face of the document — the standard, expected mark of a certificate that completed its working life and was formally retired by the transfer agent, not a flaw but a piece of its paper trail. This is genuine new old stock: an authentic period-issued certificate, never a reproduction, preserved in dealer and collector hands ever since it left circulation.

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🦅 The American Bank Note Company: The Firm That Engraved Its Own Legend

The American Bank Note Company's roots reach back to 1795, when a Philadelphia engraving partnership called Murray, Draper, Fairman & Company was formed by Robert Scot — the very first Chief Engraver of the United States Mint — alongside three partners. That's not a marketing flourish; it means the lineage of the company that printed this certificate traces directly to the hand that engraved some of the young republic's first coinage dies. Through decades of consolidation among rival security-printing houses, the modern American Bank Note Company took shape in 1858, when several leading engraving firms merged under one name. A second wave of consolidation came in 1879, when the company absorbed its major rivals, National Bank Note Company and Continental Bank Note Company — bringing with it lucrative federal contracts, including the printing of U.S. postage stamps.

During the Civil War, ABN (alongside National Bank Note) was trusted by the U.S. Treasury Department to produce the federally issued "Demand Notes" — the government's emergency paper currency, printed under contract because the Treasury itself hadn't yet built the capacity to print its own money. That capacity came later, when the Bureau of Engraving and Printing took over U.S. currency and stamp production in the 1860s and '70s — and rather than shrinking, ABN simply looked outward. The company became the trusted security printer for governments around the globe, eventually supplying banknotes, stamps, and secure documents to more than one hundred countries. Company histories describe it, at its peak, as official printer for sixty-one nations and the United Nations itself — a private New York engraving house effectively printing money for much of the world, while also quietly filling the vaults of American railroads, oil companies, and banks with stock and bond certificates exactly like this one.

This certificate was issued in 1937, deep in the Great Depression years — a period the company's own later corporate retrospectives would describe candidly. Looking back decades later, on the firm's centennial, company historians recalled the decades after 1911 as ones that witnessed "almost every imaginable sort of political, economic and scientific upheaval, including two world wars, several world-shaking revolutions, high prosperity, deep depression" — and noted that through it all, the company built on the marriage of fine art and secure engraving technology simply endured. That endurance is worth pausing on: in the same year millions of Americans were living through the hardest economic stretch of the twentieth century, ABN's engravers were still cutting eagles and guilloche borders with the same unhurried craftsmanship the firm had used since the previous century.

The company's fortunes shifted again decades later. In 1970, new ownership renamed the parent organization International Banknote Company, with American Bank Note continuing on as its flagship subsidiary. Further consolidation in 1990 created United States Banknote Corporation, at the time the second-largest security printer in the world and the only one publicly traded in the United States. The century did not end kindly for the old firm — in 1999 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, emerging restructured in 2002. Its work continues today under the name ABCorp, headquartered in Boston, a lineage stretching unbroken back to Robert Scot's Philadelphia engraving shop of 1795.

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🏙️ New York, New York: A Broad Street Landmark and a Bronx Tower

The address behind this certificate is one of the most storied blocks in the Financial District. American Bank Note Company's headquarters stood at 70 Broad Street, a five-story building erected in 1908 specifically to house the firm — a building considered important enough to its neighborhood's history that it has since been designated a New York City landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was here, in the heart of Wall Street, that certificates like this one were prepared, signed, sealed, and sent out to shareholders and brokerage houses across the city.

But the far larger physical footprint of the company sat uptown, in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. Built between 1909 and 1911, contemporaneously with the Broad Street headquarters, the American Bank Note Company's Bronx printing plant stretched an extraordinary 465 feet along Lafayette Avenue, its 91-foot clock tower rising at the building's midpoint and becoming a genuine neighborhood landmark. This was the working heart of the operation — the plant where the actual presses ran, where generations of Bronx engravers, printers, and craftspeople spent entire careers producing currency, stamps, and certificates for nations around the world. The plant remained in operation until roughly 1984, after which the building passed through several owners and renovations before earning its own New York City landmark designation in 2008 — a rare honor for an industrial building, but a fitting one for a site that quite literally helped print the paper trail of global commerce for most of the twentieth century.

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💼 The People on the Paper: De Coppet & Doremus and the Vanished World of the Odd-Lot Broker

Every certificate tells two stories — the company that issued it, and the hands it passed through. Here, the second story is arguably even more colorful than the first. De Coppet & Doremus was not an industrial concern buying stock as an investment; it was one of Wall Street's two dominant odd-lot brokerage houses — specialized firms whose entire business was executing trades of fewer than one hundred shares for individual investors, the small blocks too modest for the big Exchange houses to bother with. Odd-lot trading was its own strange, essential ecosystem on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and De Coppet & Doremus, along with its great rival Carlisle & Jacquelin, effectively controlled it for decades.

The firm's lineage traces back to 1875, when a predecessor partnership, Jacquelin & DeCoppet Brothers, became the very first odd-lot dealer of its kind on the Exchange. The deCoppet family's imprint on the firm ran deep and, delightfully, extended well beyond finance. Edward J. deCoppet, an early partner, was also the founder of the Flonzaley Quartet in 1903 — one of the most celebrated string quartets of its era — and it was said that a love of music, as much as business, bound the firm's partners together; one later partner, engineer Rowland Stebbins, reportedly joined the firm only because his cousin, deCoppet, offered him the position. A later André De Coppet, born in New York in 1892 and educated at Princeton, inherited his father's seat in the firm in 1916 and became a prominent figure in Exchange circles before going on to build a serious reputation as a collector of European and American manuscripts. Partner Robert Doremus, meanwhile, chaired the Exchange's own Clearing House Committee — putting the firm's name at the literal center of how Wall Street settled its trades. The firm was social as well as serious: a 1921 New York Times account records the De Coppet & Doremus company baseball team defeating rival firm Post & Flagg 7 to 3 to claim the "Wall Street championship cup," a charming reminder that the men behind these certificates also had a scoreboard to settle on summer afternoons.

The odd-lot business model that made firms like De Coppet & Doremus indispensable eventually became commercially unworkable as trading patterns shifted through the twentieth century. By 1969, with odd-lot volume shrinking to a small fraction of the Exchange's total business, De Coppet & Doremus and Carlisle & Jacquelin agreed to merge as a matter of what was openly described as "economic necessity," completing the combination on January 1, 1970, under the name Carlisle, DeCoppet & Co. The specialized odd-lot arrangement the two firms had run for so long later became the subject of a landmark piece of American law — the odd-lot pricing practices of Carlisle & Jacquelin and De Coppet & Doremus were challenged in a sprawling class-action antitrust suit brought on behalf of millions of small investors, a case that wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court and remains cited today in law schools for its rulings on class-action notice requirements — an unlikely legal legacy for a firm best remembered for quietly clearing fifty-share stock certificates like this one.

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🦅 The Eagle, the Engraving, and Why This Certificate Looks the Way It Does

The bald eagle vignette at the center of this certificate isn't incidental decoration — it's a signature piece of the American Bank Note Company's own visual language, the same tradition of allegorical, patriotic engraving the firm used on the currency and stamps it produced for governments worldwide. The dense guilloche patterning in the border, all those interlocking fine-line curves, existed for a practical reason as much as an aesthetic one: this style of engraving was extraordinarily difficult to forge by hand, which is exactly why security printers like ABN relied on it for money, stamps, and stock alike. Fittingly, the very company whose engravers devoted their careers to protecting other people's paper from counterfeiters used that same craftsmanship to dress up its own stock certificates — corporate self-confidence rendered in ink and copper plate.

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📜 Why Pieces Like This Still Matter Today

Collectors of vintage financial documents — a hobby with the lovely, old-fashioned name of scripophily — prize certificates like this one precisely because they sit at the intersection of art, history, and Wall Street lore. A certificate from the American Bank Note Company carries a peculiar double weight: it is both an artifact of American finance and a genuine sample of the engraving craft that shaped how money itself has looked for well over a century. Collectors of Wall Street memorabilia, engraving and printing history, Americana, and Depression-era finance all gravitate toward pieces like this, and it's easy to see why — few objects let you hold, in one frame, the story of a landmarked Broad Street building, a vanished Bronx factory tower, and a forgotten breed of Wall Street broker who ran a baseball team on the side.

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🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🦅 Frame it solo with a wide cream mat to let the eagle vignette and engraved border take center stage
• 📈 Anchor a Wall Street or finance-themed gallery wall alongside vintage ticker tape, ledger pages, or brokerage ephemera
• 🏛️ Pair with other American Bank Note Company or security-printing pieces to tell the engraving-house story visually
• 💼 Hang in a home office, den, or study for instant old-money, old-Wall-Street character
• 🎓 A natural gift for anyone in finance, law, or economics — especially collectors drawn to Depression-era history
• 📚 Display alongside books on Wall Street history or American engraving and printing craft

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🎁 Who Collects These

This certificate speaks to several overlapping collector interests: scripophily enthusiasts who collect antique stock and bond certificates for their engraving artistry and corporate history; Wall Street and financial-history collectors drawn to Depression-era documents; fans of American Bank Note Company specifically, given its remarkable dual identity as both printer and subject; devotees of engraving, intaglio printing, and security-document craft; and anyone building an Americana or New York City history collection who wants a tangible link to Broad Street's landmarked buildings and the Bronx's long-vanished printing plants.

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❓ FAQ

Is this an original certificate, or a reprint?

It's an original, period-issued certificate from the American Bank Note Company — not a modern reproduction. It was engraved, printed, filled out, signed, and formally cancelled as part of its genuine working life on Wall Street.

What are the small punched holes and perforations across the certificate?

Those are cancellation marks, applied by the transfer agent when the certificate completed its life as an active security. Perforated cancellation was the standard, expected way a retired certificate of this era was formally voided — it's part of the document's authentic paper trail, not damage.

Why is this certificate made out to a brokerage firm rather than an individual investor?

De Coppet & Doremus was one of Wall Street's leading odd-lot brokerage houses, specializing in trading small blocks of shares — fewer than one hundred — for individual customers. Firms like this routinely held certificates in their own name in the ordinary course of executing trades, which is how a certificate can carry a brokerage house's name rather than a private investor's.

Did American Bank Note Company actually print money and stamps, in addition to its own stock?

Yes — that's exactly what makes this piece unusual. ABN was one of the world's foremost security printers, producing banknotes, postage stamps, and stock and bond certificates for governments and corporations across more than one hundred countries, including work for the U.S. Treasury during the Civil War. This certificate represents the company turning that same engraving expertise on its own shares.

Who was Bankers Trust Company, listed on the certificate?

Bankers Trust Company of New York served as the registrar and guarantor of transfer for this certificate — a standard role for major Wall Street trust companies of the era, whose job was to verify and record the legitimate transfer of shares between owners.

Does American Bank Note Company still exist?

The company went through several corporate transformations over the decades — becoming International Banknote Company in 1970, then United States Banknote Corporation in 1990 — before a bankruptcy restructuring around the turn of the millennium. Its lineage continues today under the name ABCorp.

Is this certificate a good display piece even for someone with no interest in stock collecting?

Absolutely — many collectors buy pieces like this purely for the engraving artistry. The eagle vignette, the fine guilloche border work, and the overall design make it a striking piece of framed Americana on its own merits, independent of any financial history.