Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Evocative Philately: Fairfield Seminary

Sheryll Ruecker came up with a brilliant topic idea for one of our recent Ebay Stamp Club "meetings" that occur online.  Her idea was that members should share evocative philatelic items for the December 2017 meeting. This is my third post in the series and it was originally authored in December 2017, edited and first posted here in April of 2018.  It was edited again and adapted for the "Cover A Day-ish" project.
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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. 

Monday, May 11, 2020

Leigh or Liege?

With the farm season going and a new job running, the time for in-depth work with the postal history is likely past.  However, I have long believed that small chunks of consistent effort can lead to a greater whole, so I am going to try my hand at creating a post on a single item for about 5 of every 7 days for a while.  This goes hand in hand with my efforts for daily posts on our farm blog and the facebook, discussion area posts I have been doing since March as a 'gift' to others during the pandemic crisis.  This one was first posted in the aforementioned farm blog just to mix things up for people - and to advertise this fine hobby to people who many not already be interested, but could become interested.

Choices Choices - Leigh/Liege? - England/Belgium?
Have you ever thought about how difficult it must be for postal people to deal with all of the bad hand-writing and mistaken addresses out there?  If you haven't, consider the item shown below.


The short story is that this letter was posted in 1858 in Le Havre, France.  It first went to England - which was NOT the correct destination - and then it went to Belgium.  Aha!  Right country!


Postal historians often enjoy letters such as this one because they show a journey that was a bit more complicated than most letters of the time took.  The markings on the back of the letter actually help us to tell the story:

  1. Le Havre Feb 28, 1858 (on the front)
  2. Le Havre A Paris Feb 28 (on the back - this was a marking for the mail train between Le Havre and Paris)
  3. Paris A Calais Mar 1 (on the back - train from Paris to Calais)
  4. London Mar 2 (on the front)
  5. Manchester Mar 2 (on the back)
  6. Leigh Mar 3 (on the back)
  7. Manchester Mar 3 (on the back)
  8. London Mar 4 (on the back)
  9. Angleterre par Ostende Mar 5 (on the back)
  10. Liege Mar 5 (on the back)


The sender of this letter had some issues with the correct spelling of Liege, Belgium - calling it “Leigh.”  The clerk on the mail train between LeHavre and Paris had lists of post offices to reference.  Finding no “Leigh” in Belgium, he did find it in England near Manchester.  Since the rate was the same (40 centimes) either way, he selected the town that matched the spelling best.  Once the letter arrived in Leigh, the postmaster there probably sighed a little and wrote “Try Liege Belgium” and put it back in the mail stream.

Of course, if you look at what this clerk wrote you could also think he wrote "Try Lieje Belgium."  I guess the writing issue didn't just belong to the general public?

More details for this item can be seen in the display page I have created for it.