Vintage 1950s Studebaker-Packard Stock Certificate 🚗 Blue, 100 Shares, Detroit Michigan Engraved

Remember Studebaker-Packard? 🚗 Vintage 1950s Stock Certificate, Blue, 100 Shares, Detroit

Size: 12" x 8"

🚗 A blue engraved Studebaker-Packard certificate for 100 shares, from the Detroit years, when Packard had just bought Studebaker and the two old independents were trying to stand up to the Big Three together. It's American Bank Note Company engraving, and it's a piece of the plan that was supposed to create a fourth big American carmaker.

🔍 What's On It

STUDEBAKER-PACKARD CORPORATION, INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN, for ONE HUNDRED fully paid shares of COMMON STOCK, PAR VALUE $10 PER SHARE, with big 100 numerals in the upper corners and an ornate blue border. Up top is the engraved vignette: a seated woman in a flowing cloak between two bare-chested workmen, one with a pickaxe. It reads THIS CERTIFICATE IS TRANSFERABLE EITHER IN NEW YORK CITY OR DETROIT, names the Detroit Trust Company and the City Bank Farmers Trust Company as registrars and Guaranty Trust Co. of New York as a transfer agent, and has a printed corporate seal, facsimile officers' signatures and AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY along the foot. The back has the Article IV text and the assignment form.

Those printed banks date the plate. City Bank Farmers Trust became First National City Trust at the end of January 1959, and Guaranty Trust merged with J.P. Morgan the same year, so these come from 1954 to 1959. Some carry the facsimile signature of James J. Nance, the Packard president who ran the merged company, and later ones carry his successor's.

These are issued certificates, filled in for a holder, countersigned and later punch-cancelled, so expect endorsements, agents' stamps and cancellation holes. That's the paper trail of a security that did its job, not a condition problem. Each one in the stack is a little different that way.

🏭 The Merger That Was Supposed to Save Them

In 1954 the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit bought the Studebaker Corporation of South Bend, Indiana. The bigger plan was for Studebaker-Packard to join Nash-Kelvinator and Hudson in a four-make American Motors Corporation. Then Nash's George W. Mason died suddenly in 1954, George Romney took over, and disputes over sharing parts sank the whole idea.

Packard's people also found out Studebaker was in worse shape than they'd been told. Studebaker needed to sell about 282,000 cars a year to break even and sold about 82,000 in 1954. After a terrible 1956, Nance left, Curtiss-Wright took over management, and the car business moved to South Bend, ending production in Detroit, which is why a Detroit certificate like this belongs to those first few years. The Packard name was gone after 1958, the company became the Studebaker Corporation in 1962, South Bend closed in 1963, and the last Studebakers came out of Hamilton, Ontario, in 1966.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1950s Studebaker-Packard Corporation stock certificate, blue, 100 shares, $10 par common
• Transferable in New York City or Detroit; American Bank Note Company engraving
• About 12" x 8", issued and cancelled
• You'll get one certificate like the ones shown; dates, names, signatures and stamps differ from one to the next

🖼️ Frame it for an office, a den or a garage, next to a picture of a Hawk or a Packard Caribbean.