The Chicago Board of Trade




Board of Trade building c. 1913. 


CBOT, or the Chicago Board of Trade, was established in 1848, and is the oldest exchange in the world for trading of futures and options contracts.  In 1864, the CBOT created the first standardized contracts for trading grain, arguably the institution's most important innovation for the business of trading commodity futures.  Futures contracts enabled farmers and suppliers to manage risk associated with farming, and were an important innovation in making the United States the productive agricultural powerhouse it has been and remains today.

Starting in June 2012, 1898 revenue stamps featuring cancels by members of the Chicago Board of Trade began to make an appearance on this site.  The requirement to pay taxes on the sale of futures, primarily for grain, required huge numbers of battleship revenue stamps.  Battleship revenue stamps in the collections of virtually any US collector with years in the hobby are bound to contain cancels by CBOT members, but their identitification takes some work.  We've started that work here, using contemporary lists of CBOT members and futures memoranda of sale to decipher the cancels for many stamps removed from their documents.

Below is a list of links to these companies and their accompanying posts:


A. E. Seckel & Company
Cary W. Moore & Company
C. DePeyster Berry
C. H. Canby & Company
Charles E. Gifford & Company
E. D. Whyland
Fyffe Brothers & Company
Henry O. Parker
Henry W. Rogers & Brother
Hulburd, Warren & Company
J. J. O'Leary
J. P. Molloy
J. A. Edwards & Company
Jackson Brothers & Company

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