Wells Fargo & Company Specimen - California

Beautifully engraved specimen certificate from Wells Fargo & Company printed in 1991. This historic document was printed by the American Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of the portraits of Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, situated infront of a galloping six horse stage coach. This item has the printed signatures of the Company’s President and Secretary, and is over 22 years old. For security purposes, the lower right corner was cut as seen in the scan.


Certificate Vignette



Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified financial services company with $370 billion in assets, providing banking, insurance, wealth management and estate planning, investments, mortgage and consumer finance from more than 5,800 branches across North America and elsewhere internationally.

Stock research by OldCompany.com (old stock certificate research service).

About Specimen Certificates

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates were made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that has grown in popularity over the past several years.