Franklin One Cent With "I.r." Overprint.

Hello! Any thoughts on this stamp? Also looks like someone may have wrote with light pencil on it? Too bad its missing the corner. Any help is always appreciated!

1 of 3 overprinted revenue stamps from 1898 - the IR is for Internal Revenue

Got it. Thanks. So how many were distributed?

There were a LOT printed. 63,300,000 of the R154, 62,000,000 of the R155. The R153 is the least common, the overprint was apparently too small, so they only printed 314,980 before switching to the larger font.

Are you sure about that, Revcollector? This Wikipedia, look under overprints of 1898 section, says these were special ordered by a Purvis Printing company, per a steamboat line. By reading this, it seems like there were a limited amount of this overstamp. Of course, I'm not sure how accurate this info is and I may be misunderstanding. Here's the link...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reve...nited_States

That's just the 1c Trans Mississippi issue. I'd never seen that one before clicking on the link. Nice article - thanks for posting that

The overprint on the Trans-Mississippi one cent was done that way, and there were only 250 of each of those two specific overprints. The Daprix (2 or 3 known) is much scarcer than the Chapman (perhaps 12 to 15 known).
The 8, 10, and 15 cent values were overprinted specifically for the Michigan Mutual Insurance company which is why most have M.M. manuscript cancels.
The one cent and two cent values were done by the government and the large quantities are correct.

That link, while interesting has some issues, particularly in reference to the colonial and post-colonial era. The first federal issue was 1797-1801, the second 1801-1802 and again 1813-1817. Various states also issued revenue stamps beginning in 1794.
Revenue stamps fall into roughly five categories:
Alcohol
Tobacco
Food Products
Drugs and Narcotics
Financial Paper
I consider the odd exceptions such as playing cards or firearms transfer taxes to be part of the broad financial paper concept, and home use items like matches to be part of the broad food products area. A breakdown like this is just to make it easier to understand and categorize tax usages.

Thanks! Pretty interesting series!

Here are uses on typical documents. In both cases, the user canceled the stamp themselves with a date and their initials which explains the pencil marks noted by the original post in this thread. The second check from Carthage Indiana is Quaker dated as "8 Mo, 5" for August 5.

Somewhat off topic, so forgive me.

The Fletcher National Bank actually issued and circulated national bank notes. It was in business from 1898 to 1910. It merged with the American National Bank in 1910 and issued currency with the combined title too.

Here's a photo of one that sold via Heritage Auctions in 2007



http://currency.ha.com/itm/national...5767.s#Photo

That is a gorgeous note! Thanks.