Trying To ID An Official Treasury Dept Postcard From 1899

I cannot find this anywhere, anyone know if it has a Scott ID or how to identify it?

It is a correspondence between the Treasury Dept and Local Postmasters. Form id is 2-2221.

Dated Feb 25 1899. Cancelled, but no stamp or imprint.

Thanks!


*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

I'm pretty sure this is not a Scott listed item, as very few "Official" postcards and envelopes of this type were.

Can you post the other side? I suspect this is an acknowledgment to the Postmaster that his Quarterly Account for either the Post Office stamp business or Money Order Business had been received, and was either correct, or had a credit or debit error. There are slightly different variants for each contingency.

Not listed in Scott; it's pretty much like any indicium that reads "postage paid". "Official business" was probably enough to show that it is, and the corner card elements were probably added to it to have everything in one place.

Very obviously, this form could exist in different types over a period of years. Unfortunately, Washington DC postal history seems not to be of much interest.

Plans to produce a catalog that covers penalty imprint covers and postal cards keeps getting derailed. There are thousands of varieties as any local print shop could print penalty imprints as long as they followed the guidelines. However, it would still be nice to have these items cataloged, at least by department and imprint type.

And yet ... official mail cards and envelopes from Washington, DC are a fruitful place to search for experimental and short-run machine cancels as the Post Office Department often ran a stack of this uniform-sized official mail as live test material.

Your card has a Barr-Fyke machine cancel, one of the less common brands, and which exists in nearly a dozen variants from DC over a span of a few years as part of a contract, thus each machine arrangement is very short-lived.

Exactly! I can only suppose if you weren't born or lived in a city or town, you don't collect that place(?) Millions work and have worked there.