New York Stock Brokers: "BB & CO": Brown Brothers & Co., Brown, Bruns & Co., or Blake Brothers & Co.?

Identical corporate initials can confound the identification of firms that used 1898 revenue stamps, as the cases of H&H and AS&Co have demonstrated.  In the case today, we consider B.B & Co on the 1898 dollar values, likely used to pay taxes on stock trades.  At least three firms with these initials traded stocks on the NYSE during the 1898 tax period, and it is certain that all three of them used their initials to cancel documentary stamps.  The best known of the two was Brown Brothers & Company, a multinational firm with offices trading on the exchanges in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore.  Blake Brothers & Company also had members with seats in New York and Boston, while  Brown, Bruns & Company, appears to have traded only on the NYSE.  Brown Brothers would, through a merger, become Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the best known Wall Street firms of the 20th century.

A stock sale memo from Brown, Bruns & Company:  300 shares of a +$13 stock were sold, requiring $6 worth of documentary revenue stamps.  6 copies of Scott R182 were used, each with the same cancel: B. B. & CO.  Below is a single stamp from that memo:

B. B. & CO.

NOV  7  1900

A prominent B. B. & CO. cancel is used on the stamp above, much like that on the copy of R174 below:

B. B. & CO.

JAN XX 1899

BOSTON

We know the R182 stamp with the BB cancel is from Brown Bruns as the stamp is tied to a Brown Bruns memo of sale.  The $3 stamp is a bit trickier without the underlying document.  However, the cancel includes "BOSTON", indicating the stamp was cancelled in that city, where Brown Brothers and Blake Brothers had members with seats on the exchange there. 

I have mounted the R174 on page labeled Brown Brothers, but that could be in error.  This may be a Blake Brothers cancel.  

So we are left for now without any sort of evidence-basis possibility for the identity of the cancel above.  The two BB&Co cancels below show up occasionally.  The top two are in my collection:

Meanwhile, David Thompson sent the following scan awhile back:          

Brown Bruns ceased to exist and stopped trading by later 1990 or early 1901, making it less likely that the cancels on the four stamps above came from that firm.  My guess would be that one of the cancel types above belong to Brown Brothers, and the other to Blake Brothers.  Someday sale memoranda might show up that provide confirmation.

The 1905 year on the second stamp was clearly caused by an incorrect adjustment of the year date slug.