Please Help With This Boonville CA 1886 Cover

I have a cover that has 2 letters associated with it - one from August and the other from Ocober, 1886 - the stamp on the cover is a US 210 A57 2c red brown by my estimation - please correct me if I am wrong. The cancel on the stamp is very faint, but you can work out the beginning of the word Boonville with magnification. Here is the front and back of the cover, I have not scanned in the 2 letters from the envelope but will if someone wants to see them, the letters are from a mother to her son - please bear with me on the size, I do not remember the optimum size for posting here:




Any information you can give me as to this cover would be most appreciated. Thank you so very much, Julie

Hi Julie,
Here is what I have on Boonville postmarks. For the time period and the life time of the stamp the postmark should be Men-140, of which there has been one date reported. Real shame the postmark isn't more visible, but as you'll probably remember, I'm always interested in a Mendocino County cover.
This post office was one of the first post offices in the county, opened as Anderson on 18 Oct 1858, the second office opened in the county, but there are no Anderson postmarks recorded, though I have seen two manuscript covers sold on ebay in the last 20+ years.
The heading PM COMP is taken from Alan Patera's booklet California Postmaster Compensation which tells what the postmaster was paid for the year. an indication of the size of the office.




The filesize limit is 200 KB

The postmark: A scan of just the postmark with the contrast/exposure shifted radically darker might get it to show up enough to read/identify it with certainty.

The letters: Recipients often filed several letters in one envelope and discarded the other envelopes. The envelope date may not match either letter.

Hi LittleriverPhil,

Of course I remembered immediately that you collect Mendo postmarks when I saw this cover - thank you so very much for the information on the postmark - I am amazed at how little compared to today the postmaster's yearly salary was back then. Thank you for providing the information regarding the postmarks, it is greatly appreciated.

Hello John Becker,

Thank you so much for your suggestion John, I tried about 10 or more different scans and cannot get this one to come out, here is the best I was able to do:



The postmark is just too light, it will not show up. Thank you for your suggestion however, it was worth a try :)

Thanks to both of you for your replies to my post, I appreciate it very much. Julie

As you say the postmark is very weak. Have you tried RetroReveal?

http://retroreveal.org/

May be able to get a date matching one of the letters. They traveled about 25 miles. An interesting address, a name used three times, all DPOs
The Navarro Ridge post office changed it's name to Navarro 22 Nov 1888. There was a mill town about a mile away at the mouth of the river of the same name also called Navarro. May have moved location in 1888 as well. That post office closed on 31 Mar 1902. Wendling, a newer mill town 14 miles back up river next changed it's name to Navarro on 2 Dec 1902. That post office closed 19 Mar 1914.

I wonder if there's any postal history from Boonville out there that was written in Boontling....

I'm sure there is. I've seen a few postcards in Bootling.
There is a burger place I always stopped at when in Boonville that has a map of Anderson Valley written in Bootling. Directly across Hwy 128 (Boonville's main street)there was a coffee shop named "the Honn of Zeus", bootling for cup of coffee. The locals developed this language so they could talk about people passing thru the valley. There are several books about Bootling.

Here in the Bay Area I see Anderson Valley Brewing Company delivery trucks with "Bahl Hornin'" (Good Drinking) on them. I drink their Boont Amber Ale now and then.

Lol! I drywalled that brewery when it was built. Hadley Vineyards too. Heard a lot of boonling working in the valley. Nephew-in-law speaks it.

I had no idea they had their own language in Boonville, have been through there tons of times in my life - but never stopped in the town long enough for anything other than a meal. Very interesting indeed.

I did try the retroreveal, I had taken the picture using the grayscale setting on my scanner, apparently I need to re-do the scan with the RGB option, then maybe the retroreveal software will be able to run, getting an error message currently.

Julie