US Single Line Cancel - How Common?

I don't often see single-line cancels and I've never seen one on a US stamp before. Or is this part of a larger cancel that would have included such details as the date? Does anyone know?



Thanks for looking!

What I believe you have is a bit unusual, but not particularly uncommon.

The one line city name (sometimes city and state name) rubber stamp was very commonly used in most US post offices for expediting the filling out of various forms as it avoided the clerks having to print the full name of the post office on every slip of paper that came to their desk.

While there are many communities with the name of "Bridgewater" in the U.S., the stamp might have read "BRIDGEWATER, MASS." or something similar. The traditional red violet ink color is typical of the type of ink used by the post office back in the day when applying many rubber stamp markings to envelopes whether it be for "AIR MAIL", "SPECIAL DELIVERY", "POSTAGE DUE", "RETURN TO SENDER" or in your case simply a town name.

The one line name stamp was never intended to be used in place of a cancellation, however, if a piece of mail came to a clerk's attention without the requisite postmark, it would not have been out of order for him to cancel the stamp with whatever means were available, whether it be the one line stamp shown in your illustration or merely defacing the stamp with a marker or pen.

Thanks for the info, wt1.