Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Co. Issued to and Signed by Harry Payne Bingham - 1931 dated Stock Certificate

Stock printed by International Bank Note Co., New York issued to and signed on attached transfer sheet at back by Harry Payne Bingham.

Henry Payne Bingham (December 9, 1887 – March 25, 1955) was an American financier, sportsman, art patron and philanthropist. He funded a series of expeditions to study marine life. Bingham prepared at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, and graduated from Yale University in 1910 where he was a classmate and roommate of Robert A. Taft, the son of President William Howard Taft who was later a U.S. Senator. The Taft School was run by Horace Dutton Taft, brother of the President and uncle of his roommate. Bingham, a financier, owned a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, which he sold in the fall of 1924.

He served as a director of the First National Bank of New York and of the Northern Finance Corporation of New York. In 1937, he joined the board of trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art along with Vanderbilt Webb and Arnold Whitridge. Later, he served as vice-president and donated to the Museum, including Peter Paul Rubens's Venus and Adonis, which he gave in 1928. In 1933, he gave "Omega", the 645 acre estate he inherited from his uncle to the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of New York. He was also a trustee of American Museum of Natural History and the New York Zoological Society.

During World War I, Bingham was a captain in the Field Artillery and served at the front for one year. He was also an amateur golfer, winning the golf championship of Long Island in 1924. In the 1920s he led a series of expeditions on his private yacht, the "Pawnee", that included biologist Albert Eide Parr and natural history illustrator Wilfrid Swancourt Bronson brought specimens and illustrations of marine life, donating them to the collections of the Smithsonian Institution and the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. 

Read More

Read Less