Antique S.H. Heironimus Stock Certificate 📜 Virginia Americana RIP 2005

Size: 12 x 8 inches ~ Little to no wear. The left side still might have some of the original voucher left. They vary a little one to the next.

📜 A Piece of Downtown Roanoke

A $100 share certificate from S. H. Heironimus Co., Incorporated, the department store that anchored downtown Roanoke, Virginia for most of the twentieth century. An engraved eagle sits over a shield and a scroll lettered CONSTITUTION, above a blackletter banner with the company name. The gold foil seal at the lower left reads "S. H. Heironimus Company, Incorporated, Roanoke, Va., Incorporated 1906," the company's charter date, printed the same on every sheet. In the corner of the border is the printer's credit, "Goes," for the Goes Lithographing Company of Chicago, which had been printing stock certificate blanks since 1884. This was one of their standard blanks, printed up for Heironimus.

✒️ Two Versions

There are two versions on this listing. One was issued, signed by the officers and sealed, and never cancelled. The other is stamped CANCELLED across the face, the way a certificate was marked once its shares were retired, and on that one the printed date line has been changed, which is where its name on the listing comes from. These are issued certificates, filled in for their holders, so the handwriting, ink, stamps and pencil notes vary from sheet to sheet.

🏬 From Commerce Street to Campbell Avenue

Stewart H. Heironimus came to Roanoke in 1890, and on April 19 of that year he and his partner Lynn K. Brugh opened a dry goods store, Heironimus & Brugh, on Commerce Street. They had a float in Roanoke's 1892 Decennial parade, and in 1897 they started a new building on Campbell Avenue, finished the next year. In 1906 the firm incorporated as S. H. Heironimus Company, with Heironimus as president, and that's the date in the seal. By then Robert Lee Lynn Sr. had bought into the business, and his family would run it for generations. The store moved to Jefferson and Church in 1915 and into the McBain Building in 1935. In 1956 it issued stock to pay for a $1.3 million remodeling, and in 1980 Richard "Dick" Lynn became president.

It grew into the store both Roanoke and Lynchburg shopped at, but by the late 20th century a regional department store was squeezed between the discount chains on one side and the shopping malls on the other. The Dunlap Co. of Fort Worth bought the chain in 1993. The downtown flagship closed in January 1996, the Lynchburg and Roanoke mall stores closed in 2004 when Dunlap pulled out of Virginia, and the last one, at Spartan Square in Salem, closed in January 2005. That's the "RIP 2005" in the title.

🏛️ What's Left Downtown

The old Heironimus warehouse, built in 1912 for the Virginia Can Company, went on the National Register of Historic Places on February 22, 2006. The downtown Heironimus building came back to life in 2020: apartments called "The Heir" took their first residents in May, and a Mast General Store opened on the ground floor on June 17. So the name is still on the building. These certificates are a hard find, and one of the few paper pieces left of the store itself.