Can Anyone Read This Massachusetts Postmark?

I'm struggling to try and decipher the city or town name shown on this box cancel type postmark. The only thing I am certain is the State is "Mass." for "Massachusetts":



Anyone care to take a guess as to what the city or town name might be?

I'm stumped.

Southbridge?

I thought about that, but the third letter looks too much like an "N" rather than a "U" that I discounted it. But sometimes overinking plays tricks like that on you.

Any other possible suggestions?

Looks like the PSS-413 Southbridge MASS precancel with either a blob of ink on the "U" or the "U" is inverted - unlikely because it is a common precancel and that error has never been described in catalogs.

Thanks. Is there anything to the fact that your example shows the precancel in a vertical orientation versus my example shown horizontally?

Also notice the left side of the stamp has the last 2 letters due to the misalignment of the cancel, and it looks like "ge" to me. In Chasa's examples, the first one shown uses lower case letters as the 2nd is all uppercase.

that precancel was designed to be fit when applied up or down, but normal and inverted are not uncommon
... and the lowercase 'ge' is at the back of both

I am going to go with Southbridge also (that ge on the left kind of settles it). Real stumper though.

I agree, but I'm also going with the possibility that what appears to be an "n" in the third letter could be an inverted "u" in the name "Southbridge". Whether it's a known variety or not, I have a hard time accepting the idea that the third letter is just overinked as it looks too much like an inverted "u" in that position.

Here is the Mass. state government list of cities that begin with the letter S.

Salem, Salisbury, Sandisfield, Sandwich, Saugus, Savoy, Scituate, Seekonk, Sharon, Sheffield, Shelburne, Sherborn, Shirley, Shrewsbury, Shutesbury, Somerset, Somerville, South Hadley, Southampton, Southborough, Southbridge, Southwick, Spencer, Springfield, Sterling, Stockbridge, Stoneham, Stoughton, Stow, Sturbridge, Sudbury, Sunderland, Sutton, Swampscott, Swansea

does this help at all?

I can accept (and believe it is correct) that the town name is Southbridge, but I still think the third character (that looks like an "n") is an inverted "u".

To take the above image one step further, I inverted the third letter in the right stamp:



I'm still leaning toward it being an inverted "u".

You also could drop these people a line.

http://www.paphs.org/

Southbridge, Stockbridge and Sturbridge are the one ones ending in "ge" and it certainly doesn't start with St, which as bad as it looks only leaves Southbridge. Yes? NO?