A farm, a factory, and a growing town in one engraved scene, marking seventy-five years of American banking.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Catalog Number: Scott #987

• Denomination: 3 cents (3¢)

• Date of Issue: January 3, 1950

• Printing Method: Rotary Press, Engraved (Intaglio)

• Perforation: 11 × 10½

• Color: Yellow Green

• Subject: A rural and industrial landscape, marking the 75th anniversary of the American Bankers Association

• Format: Commemorative single

CONDITION ANALYSIS (Seller-Assessed)

• Status: Used

• Grading: Fine

• Postmark: Faint black machine postmark of wavy lines running across the right side. The landscape design and the text remain clearly readable.

• Obverse: The framed landscape, the twin 3¢ numerals, the anniversary dates, and the arched association inscription are all sharp and identifiable.

• Reverse: No original gum present, as expected for a used stamp. The paper shows light age toning, with no tears or thinning visible.

• Centering / Margins: The design sits comfortably within its ornate frame, with even margins on all four sides.

• Perforations: Intact on all four sides. This stamp retains an attached right sheet selvage. 

HISTORY

The American Bankers Association was founded in 1875, a moment when the United States was still knitting together a modern financial system out of a patchwork of local and state banks. In the decades after the Civil War, banking was expanding fast alongside railroads, factories, and westward farming, and the ABA formed to give the industry a common voice, shared standards, and a way to coordinate on everything from fraud prevention to currency policy.

This stamp marks the association's seventy-fifth anniversary, and its design makes an argument about what banking is for. Instead of a portrait or a bank building, the engraving shows a working landscape: a farm in the foreground, a factory with smokestacks on the hillside, and a town spread across the valley. The message is that finance exists to feed agriculture, industry, and community growth, that credit is the quiet engine behind the visible economy.

Issued January 3, 1950, in yellow green, the stamp arrived as postwar America entered a long boom, with banks financing the suburbs, cars, and businesses of a confident new era. It is a modest commemorative for an industry that rarely gets celebrated on stamps, framing the business of money as part of the larger story of national growth.

STEVEN SAYS

Instead of a bank building, the design shows a farm, a factory, and a town, the idea being that banking is what quietly funds all of it. This particular copy still has a strip of the sheet margin attached on the right, which some collectors like to keep. It marks seventy-five years of the bankers' association.