A Question About US Postage Permit

I know... but, I suppose that they are more closer to permits than someone who are collecting, for example, FDC's or stamped postal covers. Someone who saw a thousands of meters, probably sporadically also saw a plenty of these once, here and there...

I believe the post office on the 1860 card is Waneka (which is Dunn County).

and it is sent from Sunapee(?)... probably Wisconsin, too...

btw. I found that Sylvania died in 1900., in Menomonie... All her children had a father's surname - Blair. There is no any Miss Vane Dodge after her, especially in Menomonie, where she came to her future husband.

Sunapee was in Goodhue County, Minnesota. Next state to the west of Wisconsin. Sunapee was only named that from 1858 to 1863, when it was renamed to Roscoe Centre. Roscoe Centre's post office looks to have closed in 1882.

These little post offices were pretty ephemeral. Waneka is described as a farmhouse post office with delivery and dispatch three times a week.

I initially also that that it is Minn. state, but was unable to find ANY SINGLE information about Sunapee, so I suppose that it should be Wisconsin there. It is strange how this traveled so far away without any postmark...

From the 1830's through the turn of the century, Wisconsin (and Minnesota to a lesser extent) was the country's source of lumber. Lumber camps would open up, turn into small towns, then disappear when the area became deforested.

This resulted in a lot of small-town post offices that became DPOs by the 1920's.

As CJD pointed out, in 1860 Sunapee was in Goodhue county Minnesota.

Roscoe Center was founded in 1858. At that time it was known as Sunapee, and Truman Parker was appointed postmaster. The name was changed to Roscoe Center in 1863. At this point is now a small settlement, and here also is the Norwegian Lutheran church, a. commodious structure capable of seating 500 people.

Copied from Here - Scroll down to Roscoe Township.

http://genealogytrails.com/minn/goo...istory5.html

Still looking into the Mail permit but the earliest use I can find for Permit mail is 1920's. The Postmark is the Permit, and the Stampless might have been hand delivered by someone traveling.

I thought that "Sunappe Minn." is handwritten by a post officer... it is very different handwritting from the one which appears in the letter and on the recipient address. Also, it is visible in the letter that a person who wrote the letter named his town as a Roscoe, and Sunapee was name of the PO at that time... so, I think that "sender's destination" lines probably wrote someone connected with the Post Office.

Sunapee was in Roscoe Township. A Township is a way of breaking down the land into smaller, more manageable bites. In the midwestern U.S., at least, townships are generally more or less square, six miles on a side, or 36 square miles.

Sunapee would be a little dot on the map within the township. So that is one possible explanation.

Waneka was a stop on a stagecoach line, so it would have been an easy place to get to, if you had any reason to want to go there.

Maybe this excerpt from Wiki on Mr. Walter Bowes will help explain things ... (this was BEFORE he met up with Mr. Pitney):




Assuming the above is accurate, we can dete permit printing back to 1912.

Actually we can go back a little before that.

On April 28, 1904, the United States Congress authorized the use of permit Mail. Subsequently, in 1908, Walter H. Bowes invented a stamp canceling machine and started supplying the machines to the Post Office, after incorporating his company, Universal Stamping Machine Company.

So it appears as if the earliest Permits were issued in 1904 or later.

This item is a permit mailing. Happens that when Pitney Bowes started their meter business they used the same design used at that time for permits. The only difference was the "M 0000" vertical between the wavy lines and the value frame. The post office didn't like the similarity and ordered PB to change the design, which they did in about 4 months.
It might be pointed out that PB sold an almost identical mailing machine for printing permits on envelopes and for cancelling mail by the post office. The permit and the meter printed by PB machines were almost identical except for that vertical "M000".
US Domestic Postal Rates 1972 to 1999 by Beecher and Wawrukiewicz shows that permit mailing became possible in 1904. Permit mail always required that a certain number of identical items be mailed at the same time, thus this letter was part of a large mailing.
The use of a meter allowed a user to frank individual mail pieces and that was not allowed with the permit.
Still looking to see when that particular design was first used.

Glad you found us here derotty as there are a few of us that collect Meters and your research has been most appreciated and helpful.

Decrotty

I contacted him, but forgot to mention on which forum and topic we are... but he found as... easily... he must be a giant!