Help With Stamp Less Cover, U.states Horse Shoe Shaped Postmark

hi all,

hoping for help on this horse shoe shaped u.states postmark on a cover from jamaicaplain, MS to canada.
any info welcome.

This is called an exchange marking, and was used at border crossings, or exchange offices. The Canadian Post Office used a similar marking for mail heading the other direction across the border.
I'm sure more knowledgeable members can give you more detail about them.

thank you james! never saw this before...

The type with sans serif letters was use for various periods of time between 1851-75 by various post offices. Give us a height vs width of the marking in mm and perhaps we can identify the office where this marking was used.

Informative

Superb info. what a great community is this!!

the with of the whole marking is 34.63mm and hight 20.71

the bar itselve is 7.38mm wide

A straight line cross border exchange marking was also used by some US post offices around this time such as this one mailed from Hudson, NY to Port Dover, Canada West in 1855. The Treaty Rate was 10-cents US (6d Canadian).

Dutch U.S. Stamp Collector - are there any Canadian transit markings on the back of the cover? The Canadian exchange offices typically applied a transit mark when the cover entered the Canadian mails. The you STATES exchange office marking is likely from the US exchange office that corresponded with the Canadian office in the transit marking.

Likely was exchanged in Vt, as that would be the most direct route from Boston area to Sherbrooke.
If you have a date, it can narrow down which exchange office probably applied it.
C.

...and the straightline "UNITED STATES / 6d" was used in Buffalo, Oswego, and Rochester, NY from 1854-61

Dutch US Stamp Collector, Thank you for posting your stampless cover and inquiring about the U. States exchange marking.

jamesw, hy-brasil, docgfd, and chipg, Thank you all for the interesting additional information and scan. Years ago I researched the marking on this U.S. #117 in my collection, and got as far as finding what the full marking might have looked like, but I didn't go as far as finding the background information that you all have provided in this discussion.

I sincerely appreciate all of you sharing your postal history and knowledge.

Nice cover. Jamaica Plain is one of the neighborhoods in the City of Boston and I have lived there for a while. It was originally settled in the late 1600s around Jamaica Pond which is still there today. It is a very old neighborhood that was declining in the middle of the 1900s but in the past 30 or 40 years it has become a trendy neighborhood in the city and is known as an "hip" place to live for younger people, especially since Boston has a much larger than usual percentage of people under 30 living there, partly because there are 58 different Universities in Boston. The name itself, Jamaica Plain and Jamaica Pond, is unclear as to where it came from. One theory is that it is somehow related to the rum trade from the Island of Jamaica in the Caribbean to Boston, but that does not make much sense to me as during the early days of this area most of the population were strongly Puritan which is a strict religion that does not condone drinking alcohol or much of any kind of 'frivolous fun'. The other theory which does make sense to me is that when the British colonists arrived in 1630 to establish Massachusetts Bay Colony and the city of Boston they encountered the local Indian tribes who had a well known chief whose name was 'Kuchamakin'. This theory is that the English speaking colonists interpreted his name to something they could more easily pronounce which was 'Jamaican' since the colonists already knew that word.