Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
A letter sent sailing through the mail generally needs a stamp to pay its way. These are intended to be one-way tickets. To prevent recipients from prying off that prepaid postage and recycling it for another trek to a mailbox, postal services often “cancel” the stamps during transit, to indicate that they’ve been used.
In 19th-century America, this was often accomplished with a scribble or a scrawl, or else by stamping another pattern across the postage with ink. These latter styles were known as “fancy cancels”—and in Waterbury, Connecticut, they were pretty fancy, indeed.
There, a man named John W. Hill enlisted into service during the Civil War, serving as the postmaster for his regiment in the Union Army. When he landed back in Waterbury afterward, he took a job as a postal clerk. The gig wasn’t especially creative, but he kept busy; colleagues remembered him as “the man who works at the post office and is always whittling.”
Over the next few years, he carved slews of designs into cork, concocting a batch of regionally specific cancels.
The post For Sale: Fancy Canceled Stamps That Recorded Daily Life in a Connecticut Town appeared first on FeedBox.