USA 1873 Cover And Letter

Just for fun, here's a recent acquisition. Not the most beautiful cover, but as I'm finding lately, even the ugly ducklings can have a great back story.

The cover



The letter (kinda hard to read)





The house they lived in.



And the final album page.

Very cool! Back stories certainly do make things more interesting.

One small error to correct, the 4th line of write-up has the letter dated the 4th, rather than the 3rd. BTW, the year in the cancel is "unreadable" because there is no year date there to read. There is only a month and day in the two central slots for dating slugs.

And a question: Thursday, April 3rd occurs in 1873 and 1879. Why not 1879 for this letter?

Oh, ploppers! Thanks for pointing that out John. You read, and you read! and still things get through.

I zeroed in on 1873 for a couple of reasons, though I did know that it landed in 1879 as well (checked a perpetual calendar). Our friend Smauggie, on another site, pointed out that "It would be prior to 1879 as by then the US Post Office Department required a dated cancel and a dated received cancel on all (First Class and Registered) mail.' I thank Smauggie here, as I did there.

There is no receiver cancel on the envelope (the back yields nothing) and the year on the CDS is illegible or possibly non existent as you point out. Classifying the stamp as a #158 rather than a #184 (issued 1879) narrows the field. More an educated guess than fact, but sometimes that's all we have to go on.

Received marks: I would not rule out 1879 based on the lack of a receiving backstamp. Looking at the title page of the 1879 PL&R, it was approved March 3, 1879 as an act of Congress and has an introduction on the next page from the postmaster dated July 1, 1879. Thus your cover from possibly from April 1879 would not fall under this rule, since it was not distributed yet. Additionally, Leonard Piszkiewicz notes in his "Chicago Postal Markings and Postal History" that backstamping in Chicago was slow to be implemented and that not all mail was backstamped. I would expect the same in other places as this was much additional manual labor in the era before high speed canceling machines.

Stamp ID: What catalog number do you think the stamp is? You mention 158 or 184. Both have earliest documented uses after April 1873, which again would point to 1879. You might want to post a high resolution scan of the stamp and see what ID information the Banknote gurus can offer.

Another fairly simple approach is to seek other Richmond covers from this era which are dated. No doubt the handstamps in use in 1873 vs 1879 are different in style, letter spacing, overall size, etc.

I am not trying to be argumentative, just very cautious about weighing 1873 vs 1879 and not eliminating one possibility or the other on bad data.

John, Maybe I am missing something, but why are you talking about Chicago received dates when the item was received in Milwaukee?

In my experience, cancels with full dates, including years, were becoming more popular toward the end of the 1870's because of customer demand.

I used Chicago only as an example, which is why I stated in the next sentence that implementation might be slow in other towns (like Milwaukee). Len's book on Chicago is an incredible study which has applications to every other large city. He has an chapter on received mail.