Finance History|11 Wall Street — Two Million Common Shares After the Soap Merger

People treat Colgate-Palmolive as a Park Avenue staples house that always printed CL.

The 1930 issuer was still Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Company, two years after Colgate merged with the Palmolive-Peet soap combination.

The New York Times of 7 March 1930 recorded the listing application: 151,449 shares of 6 percent preferred stock at 100 dollars par, and 1,999,970 shares of common stock without par.

The Commercial and Financial Chronicle later that month recorded that the Exchange had authorized 144,459 shares of the 6 percent preferred and 1,997,785 common shares, with a small employee-contract add-on still to come.

The company's own history dates the first New York Stock Exchange print to 13 March 1930.

The 2006 annual report repeats that date in the same words.

The name dropped Peet only in 1953, when the letterhead became Colgate-Palmolive Company.

Headquarters moved to 300 Park Avenue in 1956. The 1930 tape still named the merged soap firm.

The mechanism is a post-merger listing, not a cash offering. The common and the preferred already existed. The Exchange admitted them.

Holders bought toothpaste in a tube and Palmolive soap, not a later pet-food line. Hill's arrived as a separate story in 1939.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where the 1930 common printed. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.