Let's See Your Territorial Covers!

I think you are confusing two general eras: (1) the pre civil war private carriers with (2) the post-1863 free city delivery service by the post office which was expanded from large cities to ever smaller cities as the last half of the century elapsed based on population and postal revenues. There are many other cities using a "carrier" mark in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890.

I've been collecting carrier cancels for years, but there doesn't seem to be much available information about them. My biggest question is how did the POs decide which pieces of mail merited delivery by a carrier?

To run off on this tangent ... It seems logical that:

1. Post 1863, the city would have to be large enough or have high enough postal receipts be given permission to establish carrier service. These threshholds of size/revenue are documented in several sources, see one below.

2. The mail piece needed to have a street address on it or be addressed to a large company well-known to the PO. Note that some cities which started city delivery used a handstamp on mail to encourage patrons along the lines of "Have your mail addressed to street and number".

3. I don't think there is any "deciding" to be done. If the city had city delivery and a mail piece had an address on it within the delivery area (I would read this as the "city limits") then it would go out with the carriers, although clearly only a modest percent of street-addressed mail has any "carrier" marks on it.

4. Mail without street addresses would still go the the general delivery section.

_____________

J. David Baker's "Postal History of Indiana" has a chapter on city delivery listing Indiana towns and the sequential national number of the town'delivery establishment and the date of that establishment, so there must be a complete national list in the USPOD records. This source documents the early town-size & receipt requirements.

Len Piszkiewicz also discusses carriers in his monumental "Chicago Postal Markings and Postal History"

As cities grew, one of the challenges was a logical numbering of streets, etc. From what I understand, most cities adopted the "Philadelphia Plan" of numbering prior to being granted city delivery service.

To go with a cover I posted earlier in this thread,
https://goscf.com/t/20687&whichpage=4#565859
...the one linked above, was probably carried by Jones & Russell, since there was no government mail service to the mines yet.

Here are two more covers addressed to the early pre-Colorado mining area.
These were both taken from St Joseph, MO to Mountain City by the Central Overland California & Pikes Peak Express Co.

The one from Brownville originated in a territory - the Nebraska Terr, and was carried into the US (St Joseph) then on into the Kansas Terr.

Note the Mountain City Terr difference. The Jefferson Terr was organized by the miners to get them some representation - but it was not recognized by the US.

Those are both gorgeous covers! Jefferson Territory -- I had not heard of that in this context. The "State of Jefferson" was an idea kicking around in Southern Oregon and Northern California but never came to anything. Thanks for sharing these!

Hi I have stamps from my great grandparents and have never collected though always been interested and im just getting to know how to understand stamps .Could you tell me what a cover means
Thanks Matt

Cover: An envelope or piece of postal stationery, usually one that has been mailed. Folded letters that were addressed and mailed without an envelope and the wrappers from mailed parcels are also covers.

Matt.Australia

"Cover" = "Envelope" though as rodgcam says letters that were then folded and stamped and addressed are covers also.

rodgcam says that covers were "usually" mailed. There are a couple of significant exceptions to that. So-called FDCs -- First Day Covers -- are, at least in modern times, mostly NOT mailed. They are postmarked and returned to the person who submitted them for postmarks. In fact, most modern FDCs are not even addressed. A lot of WWII patriotic covers (covers illustrated with war-themed cachets) were also unaddressed and not mailed.

These covers that were not mailed are considered "philatelic," a technical use of the term you might want to be familiar with. It refers to covers specifically created by philatelists as philatelic "souvenirs" rather than covers used in normal mail service. A technical term for the latter would be "postal history covers."

Welcome to the wide world of philately!

Basil

Well, this thread seems to be back for another round of eye candy. Let me see if I can contribute a few newer ones:

Well, this one isn't really a "Territorial." It was the "Department of Alaska" from 1868-1884, then the "District of Alaska" until 1912. Didn't become an official "Territory until then.

Wouldn't that be five then?

Maybe.
One list says 6, but some may be duplicates or false reports, so maybe less than 6. So I guess that I should have said that "one researcher says that there are 6, but there is some uncertainty as to the accuracy of this number," but that would take up too much space.

It would seem fairly easy to assemble a first-stab census of 1869 uses from Alaska with illustrations.
"not more than 6 known..." might be a concise phrasing too.

I like.
Noted and changed on the page.
Thanks
Chip

Chip - what was the origin for your estimate of 6 covers from Alaska? The reason I ask is that I was just looking-up a cover in the 1869 Issue Census published by the 1869 Pictorial Research Associate and it reports an "estimate" of 6 3¢ 1869 covers from Alaska but it is a statistical estimate simply multiplying an estimated survival rate against the number of 3¢ stamps shipped to Alaska, and not an actual record of covers observed.