Show Your 1851-61 Era Cancellations And Postal Markings

$5.00 very well spent!

Yes it was

I think this item is kind of neat. It is a yellow CDS from Athens.

Some backstory on these (2) Athens covers from Siegel -

Neat item TX -- Thanks for showing it !!

Interesting cancel and background, txstamp. Thanks for showing it.

Here is a clear strike of a Salem X Roads New York postmark (Alexander-Simpson 266). The settlement was renamed in 1857. The history is below.

The stamp is from sheet position 15R3. The 1857 deep claret color and July postmark date its use to July 1857, two months before the post office name was discontinued.




In February of 1835, a post office was established in Salem X Roads. The name Salem X Roads came about when a group of eight or ten citizens gathered in 1834 to decide a name for this village and post office which at that time was simply called Corners.

Each resident wrote a favorite name on pieces of paper which were tossed in a hat from which was drawn the name Salem. Since there already was a Salem in New York State, the name Salem X Roads was adopted.

A D. Howell was the first postmaster of a settlement containing approximately 11 houses, a store, blacksmith shop and a physicians office. The post office was located near the corner of what now is Main Street and Lake Avenue. A daily mail run was made from Buffalo to Erie, PA. and back, through Salem X Roads, by horses drawing a stagecoach which also carried passengers. The pounding of hooves and sound of grinding wooden wheels along the roadway stopped in 1852 when delivery of mail and passengers was contracted by the Buffalo & State Line Railroad.

Salem X Roads remained the name of the village and post office until Sept. 7, 1857 when, because of the continued confusion with the downstate Salem, the decision was made to change the name. According to the popular account, a meeting was held where, after much discussion took place, two names were combined of two prominent family names in the community which were Brockway and Minton to form Brocton.

https://www.brocton.org/history

That's a very nice strike of that.

X was used quite a bit back in the day with towns named "cross roads". Its always pretty neat to see.

Here are a pair of 11A singles with Sha-k'pay Minnesota Territory postmarks. The stamps are positions 19R3 and 20R3, apparently from the same sheet but used on separate covers. This unusual postmark has both a hyphen and an apostrophe. It's a shame these stamps weren't left on paper to preserve the rest of the postmark.

The screenshot from the Siegel Wade Saadi "Struck on Stamps" Collection, Part 2 shows the full postmark with a Leap-Day date.

According to the Siegel listing, the name of the post office was changed to Shakopee in 1857.

https://auction.siegelauctions.com/...008?PageNo=1

@classic - Nice. Very nice. Your post compelled me to post this cover that I picked up recently. It kinda goes with yours

Wow! Nice follow-up, TX. What a beautiful Shakopee strike! Thanks.

Among the cheaper items I got at Boston 2026 a brilliant red cds on the 24. It will replace my current main stamp in my album.

Nicely centered, and I like brightly contrasting colored cancels like that. Just shows that you don't need to spend a lot of money to make an improvement to an already good looking album page.

Red always seems to look good on the blue 1c stamps

Red works well for the green 10c Washingtons too. I'm trying to complete 31-35 with only red cancels

I finally got around to scanning this very cool cover that I picked up last year at a show.

If you care to read it, I wrote a description here:

https://www.philamercury.com/covers.php?id=30409

The cover has 3 #11's, likely plate 4, and interestingly enough, the other three 3c stamps are from an inner line plate (11A), and are all singles. The 1c stamps are Ty IV (9).