Antique 🚂 1893 Big Four Railroad $1000 Gold Bond - Bond Only, No Coupons For Sale

Size: 15 x 10 inches ~ Punch-cancelled. They vary a little one to the next.

Someone at The Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway - the line everyone just called the "Big Four," after the four cities strung across its own corporate name - was planning a full century ahead when this $1,000 General Mortgage 4% Gold Bond went to press: dated May 15, 1893, a corporation existing under the laws of the States of Ohio and Indiana, out of a $50,000,000 authorized issue, with the principal not due until June 1, 1993 and interest paid every June 1 and December 1 in New York City, in gold coin of the United States of the present standard of weight and fineness. American Bank Note Company of New York - the preeminent security printer of its era, engraving currency-grade work for railroads, banks and governments around the world - engraved and printed it on heavy cream security stock, its name arched in bold black lettering above the vignette, with The Mercantile Trust Company of New York standing as trustee. A red serial number is printed top left and right (not quoted here), and a round engine-turned guilloche rosette - the same kind of fine anti-counterfeiting device used on currency and passports - is worked into the lower field. Every bond is hand-signed by the company's officers, executed under an embossed corporate seal, certified by the trustee, entered on a reverse registry panel, and punch-cancelled at the close of its working life; this listing covers both the bond alone and a version that still carries part of its coupon sheet, each coupon a $20 gold promise payable at the company's agency in the City of New York, to whoever held it.

Two allegorical women anchor the central vignette - one gripping a sickle, the other a sheaf of wheat - standing between a pair of steam locomotives, and collectors know the scene as "The Reapers," prized ever since as some of the most detailed vignette work the firm ever produced for a railroad security. Princeton University's library catalogue traces the engraving to G.F.C. Smillie and his uncle James Smillie, cut in 1874; G.F.C. had picked up the trade at 17 working under that same uncle at American Bank Note, and by 1894 he'd moved on to the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, spending the rest of his career cutting the nation's actual currency.

The "Big Four" name is misleading - it was a single railroad, formed June 30, 1889 out of three merging lines: the Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Indianapolis Railway, the Vanderbilt family's own "Bee Line"; the Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis and Chicago Railroad; and the Indianapolis and St. Louis Railroad. The Bee Line put the new company inside the New York Central orbit from day one. The bond itself is New York paper through and through: a New York trustee, a New York engraver, and principal and interest payable in New York City. The result was one Midwestern trunk system running through Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, and within a year of forming, in 1890, it had absorbed the former Indiana, Bloomington and Western Railway too. One of its ancestor lines traces back to the Indianapolis and Bellefontaine Railroad, chartered in 1848, and further still to the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad, chartered in 1832 as the very first railroad company incorporated in the state of Ohio.

Despite the name, the Big Four actually lived in Indianapolis, not Cleveland: the company built its headquarters there, the Chesapeake Building on South Meridian Street, in 1929 - it's a hotel today. Between 1904 and 1908 the railroad built a major repair shop complex at Beech Grove, Indiana, which Amtrak bought out of the bankrupt Penn Central in 1975 and still runs today as one of its principal heavy-maintenance facilities. Up in Bellefontaine, Ohio, the company kept the largest roundhouse between New York City and St. Louis - old-timers in railroad towns from Indianapolis to Bellefontaine still tell stories about this line, and local legend holds that engineers and shopmen took real pride in working for "the Big Four," measuring their town's own standing by the size of that roundhouse. Local legend also has it that around 1901, company leadership personally rejected an elaborate depot design from a Cincinnati architect as too showy for a working railroad - told here as the story it is, not a documented fact.

Melville E. Ingalls ran the Big Four as president from that 1889 merger straight through 1905, meaning every bond in this 1893 series went out under his signature era. New York Central absorbed the line fully in 1906 and formalized its hold with a 99-year lease in 1930. Among the railroad's other projects: the Ohio River bridge at Louisville the company took over in 1895, reborn in 2013-2014 as a pedestrian and bike crossing still carrying the Big Four's name. The railroad itself later passed through the ill-fated Penn Central merger of 1968, was rescued into the government-formed Conrail in 1976, and was finally split between CSX and Norfolk Southern in 1997.

• Issuer: The Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway Company ("Big Four")
• Denomination: $1,000 General Mortgage 4% Gold Bond
• Date: May 15, 1893
• Printer: American Bank Note Company, New York
• Trustee: The Mercantile Trust Company, New York
• Condition: punch-cancelled