US Postal Stationery Covers 1853 - 1855

Need advice on how to determine these postal stationaries whether they are U1,U2,U3,U4 or U5? What is measurements of knives.What do they mean by measuring wide at top and how do you determine paper as buff or not or whether it is some other paper. All the covers posted have watermarks.Thanks for all the advise and also for any other inputs and feed backs.

These appear to be the common ones, U9 & U10.

I love the cancels and think they more desirable (to me) than the cards themselves! Beautiful stuff.

A brief biography of Dr. Caruthers, the addressee on your first scanned cover:

Chasa U9 & U10? As per scott standard 2008 under United States Bob the U9 & U10 are totally different design.The only design the above meets is U1-U5,or I am reading and understanding the scott wrong. U9 & U10 are Franklin 1 cent and the above are Washingtons. U9 & U10 were only issued in blue and they are pretty expensive.

That's amazing wt1. Do you realize even back in the middle 19th century people in New york were retiring to Florida

sorry for the confusion... the DESIGN is U5, the SC#'s are U9 or U10 depending on the paper color.

Dr. Caruthers apparently moved to St. Augustine, Florida for health reasons as shown in this paragraph from a lengthy paper on the subject:



He later died there in 1894 at the age of 70:

Excellent wt1. You are really good at this. Salute!

Papers of the first Nesbitt envelopes are classed as white or buff. If it is not white, it is buff. Earlier catalogs recognized many shades of buff including amber buff sometimes listed as straw and salmon buff as the two extremes. Toning, the changes in the paper due to exposure to light and other things, causes a lot of confusion in these issues and many others.

Label dimensions are measured across the top from where the label ends intersect the outer circle. Label ends but not measurements will be the same in the upper and lower labels. Checking both labels helps avoid misidentification due to inking problems.

Counting the loops on each side is also helpful to identify the die. It is a problem with the Scott catalog to distinguish between the die (type) number and the catalog number.