Anyone Know The Cancelled Mark On This Franklin Stamp?

Hello! Any ideas on the cancel on this one? Anything significant? Thanks!

nothing particularly significant about this, which looks like the killer part of a standard steel duplex handstamp from the early 20th century. The absence of a town mark is a bit unusual, and there are two major possibilities. One is that the stamp was added to the card in place of a prior stamp or where a stamp should have been but was not placed. The other is that this was in fact used "up the road" on an RFD route (the address is on an RFD route) and the carrier happened to have this available. More typically, "up the road" mail was postmarked or cancelled in manuscript or with a privately acquired rubber stamp device.

It may just be the way I'm looking at this, but there is something about the cancellation(s) that intrigues me. In the LL quadrant I am seeing what looks like the top end of a weakly struck oval grid killer, whose bars are not quite running parallel to the four prominent bars in the center of the stamp. Question: Could the four parallel bars in the center be heavy pen strokes, or are they definitely stamped, either by a hand stamp or a machine?

Either way, it is hard for me to understand how that part of the cancel did not spill over onto the cover, and why there is no townmark. My only surmise is that the stamp may have been reused, and killed by the carrier as a courtesy (rather than lug it back to the P.O. for the usual penalties)? Imagination?

Ahh, I'm adrift on a sea of possibilities!

Thank you both for your comments and suggestions! I appreciate it! I am very new with postcards and stamps and have been lost in a pile of stamps and postcards for the last day or two! I'm just learning the basics and soaking as much up as I can so far. Stamps and postmarks are fascinating!

Essayk, it does look like pen strokes over the stamp. I never thought of that! Very interesting. Should I put this post in the postcard section of stamp community?

I also find it odd, as essayk pointed out, that there is no cancellation on anything but the stamp. I don't see how it could be re-used tho, as obliterating as the stamp cancellation is. Could it have been just stuck on the postcard so that it would "look" mailed to make the card look like an old cover?


-IBFS

Did the front get canceled instead?

@IBFS

Your picture of a reuse scenario is not how I would imagine it. Try to imagine the appearance of the stamp without the four heavy pen strokes in the center. Now the cancellation is rather faintly in the LL quadrant only. If that were remounted onto the postcard, and sent out for "up the road" delivery as paperhistory put it, then only the carrier would have seen it. Hypothetically: Knowing the kid on the farm that sent it, he might well have winked at it but killed the stamp just to make sure no one else tried that.

That is merely a plausibility based on nothing but surmise. Things like that did happen in rural America back then, so it was possible even if a bit fanciful to imagine. However, it is a way to imagine how the townmark might have failed to be applied to a stamp with a weak killer that needed strengthening.

Of course, if there is a townmark on the other side, or a machine cancel of some sort, then you can throw fancy out the window.