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What makes postal history so interesting to me? Perhaps it has to do with all of the possible directions that one may take during the exploration that occurs when you research an item. A postal historian is naturally going to be looking at the postal rates paid, the postal systems used and the routes covered as a letter traveled from one place to another. From there, we can extend ourselves to the surrounding history of the communities, states, countries and/or peoples. We can investigate the world of business if there is an old invoice or order for product enclosed. We might be encouraged to look at the interactions of nations while we figure out why there was a delay of the mails. Or, we might be inclined to explore something about the correspondents - there are just so many ways this could go!
Some "Evocative" Philately
The US 1861 issue has attracted most of my collecting attention over the years - so it isn't a surprise that I picked up a few 1 cent Drop Letters. Essentially, a drop letter is an item dropped at the post office to be picked up by the recipient at that same post office. If you live in a small town, you would be aware of how this might have worked. For example, I have had a PO Box in Tripoli for some time. If I want to mail something to another PO Box in Tripoli, I could walk into the Post Office, hand the letter to the clerk and they would cancel the postage and could then place it directly into the recipient's box.
In the United States, there was a period of time when persons using drop letter service could pay less than the normal 3 cent mailing rate. This certainly seems fair if you consider these letters required fewer resources to execute the delivery! An example is shown on a display page I created below:
I don't recall buying this particular cover and I know it didn't cost me much at all. It's clean enough but nothing about it caught too much attention, so I sat on it for a while before researching it. Of course, I wanted to learn about Fairfield Seminary and you can see the results of my efforts on the page above.
This one is evocative for me now that I have done a little research. I was struck, in particular, by the combination of similarities and differences between 1863 Fairfield and the current day (2014) Fairfield. Living in Iowa, I have seen my share of small town structures disappear. Some of them I drove by day after day, taking some note of them until, one day, they were gone. I remember great amounts of activity around a place that used to have a farmstand, horses and other critters. That whole place is now a corn/soybean field. I didn't realize how much the old water tower in the town we live by was imprinted into our minds until they took it down. Now, I see a stylized silhouette of that water tower painted on a building and I find myself being nostalgic. There is not a good reason for it since I did not grow up in this town and I had absolutely no attachment to that water tower.
I don't think it's that I regret the change in some of these cases. It's more that I feel like the past is deserving of some place in memory and I wonder if things like this are properly noted in some fashion. I guess that is part of why I am a postal historian. While I am not wanting to live in the past, I do want to recognize, honor and learn from the past.
Something to Look Forward To
I will show another Drop Letter at some point in the next two weeks. That post will dig more into the rate and some of the restrictions for drop letters in the 1860s.
