American Bank Note Company Lead Seal. 1850s.Ca. 1850? American Bank Note Company Lead Seal. 27.2x28.2mm, 217.3 grains. Very Fine. AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY NEW YORK on a peripheral band, followed by some decorative elements and surrounding the head and neck of an eagle, with numeral 1s above and below. Reverse is blank, but shows the irregularly cooled surface of the once molten lead. At 4 points along the rim and/or edge there are hints of a channel of the small copper wires that must have banded whatever item the ABNCo was protecting with this lead seal. We reached out to obsolete note researcher David Gladfelter to see if he had ever encountered such an item, and he wrote to us: "[T]his looks to me like an object that was used for security purposes, to seal up packages of bank notes printed by ABNCo. and delivered via an express company either to the bank or to a state official (Comptroller, in the case of New York state, Register, in the case of New Jersey) responsible during the free bank era for receiving the notes and holding them until the bank pledged proper security for their issuance such as public stocks and bonds and mortgages (see pledge die on Wait 2283, City Bank of Trenton 1.00). The person packing and sealing the notes for shipment would have taken a raw piece of lead and a pliers-like device with a die on it, tied up the package with some kind of copper wire, and sealed up the package by squeezing the lead over the wires leaving the security printers impression from the die on the lead seal. This way the recipient would be assured that the package had not been tampered with." This seems to be a very sensible explanation for this item-David felt that the 1s flanking the eagle might identify the employee doing the sealing, though we feel that that the 1s might actually represent the denomination of the notes in the sealed package. A rare relic of the most famous name in 19th century security printing, and an item that has never seen before by a few obsolete banknote experts we queried.
