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Mississippi Valley Co. 1873 Stock Certificate Signed by Colonel Henry S. McComb

Currency:USD Category:Coins & Paper Money / Stock & Bond - Certificates Start Price:90.00 USD Estimated At:130.00 - 260.00 USD
Mississippi Valley Co. 1873 Stock Certificate Signed by Colonel Henry S. McComb
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Mississippi, 1873. 5 Shares I/C Capital Stock Certificate #15, Black text with black border and brown background, Train exiting building at center. Fine condition, NBN. Henry S. McComb (1821-1881) was a leather merchant and railroad promoter. During the American Civil War, he became one of the largest military contractors, providing tents, knapsacks, and other gear along with leather goods. He had close contact with President Lincoln, Edwin M. Stanton, and other leaders of the war effort. He raised and equipped at his own expense, the Fifth Delaware Regiment, of which he was colonel. Through his military and political connections, McComb was drawn into the Union Pacific Railroad project, and he was a member of the infamous Cre_dit Mobilier, the insiders' ring that acted as construction company to the Union Pacific. It was McComb's dissatisfaction with the division of the spoils that brought the workings of the Cre_dit Mobilier into the open, creating one of the great scandals of the Grant Administration. After the war McComb became a carpetbag operator in broken-down southern railroads. He acquired the Mississippi Central between 1865 and 1868 and expanded it into a trunk line running from Cairo, Ill., to New Orleans. He developed the town of McComb, Miss. in connection with this project and was for a while the president of the Southern Railroad Association. However, McComb remained a relatively small-time operator in the railroad world, an industry already dominated by large trunk lines and Wall Street empire builders. All of his southern railroad ventures collapsed in the wake of the Panic of 1873 and were absorbed by larger systems. In 1880 McComb purchased a small Wilmington railroad, the Delaware Western, and promoted it as a link in a possible second line between Philadelphia and Baltimore. That territory was then a theater of a complex, many-sided contest involving the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio and the Gould and Vanderbilt interests. For a while McComb was at the center of this intrigue, but it was his last speculation. He died on December 30, 1881.