Stars

Showing off a couple of purple stars:

Stars? Here's a few..first one on O2, 3 different stars on O3, an O4, an O9, and two soft paper 3 cent Agricultures. Certainly not in the best condition, but you take a fancy cancel on a stamp of the Agriculture Department IF and when you find one!

Is it just the Agricultures that are hard to find with fancies? Because in general, I find it is more common to find fancies on officials than on regulars.

Four of the nine departments used vast quantities of stamps, and had nation wide dispersal, the Post Office, Interior, Treasury, and War departments. Because of that wide dispersal, there are all sorts of cancels on them. Four of the remaining 5 departments were used in limited cities, Executive, Justice, Navy , and State. On those stamps we see more of the regular cancels, and limited fancys.

The Agruculture Department sent pre stamped envelopes to farmers across the United States, for Crop reports and seed orders, which were mailed back to Washington D C. Since farms are rural, most of the post offices that these pre stamped envelopes were mailed from were small 4th class offices, were the postmaster had to purchase his/her own supplies. You'll find a large percentage of pen cancels on Agriculture stamps, and a fair number of cut cork cancels, but fancy cancels are harder to find.

phil - thank you for the very informative reply