Nineteenth Century Questions

From 1850's......check out this address.....the sender sure wanted the delivery man to get this letter to its destination!!

Here is a 1810 folded letter from Post Office headquarters in Washington, DC with a similar descriptive address.





The enclosed letter was an offer of a postmaster position to Rufus Buckland, for the post office at Wallingford VT.




No record has been located to verify that Buckland ever was a postmaster at Wallingford (or elsewhere) Either the letter was not delivered, or perhaps he decided to decline the opportunity.

According to Postmasters & Postoffices of the United States, 1782-1811 by Robert Stets, a man named Lent Ives became postmaster effective 11/07/1810 (date his bond received at PO HQ), replacing a previous postmaster named Oliver Smith (mentioned in the letter).

Nice!!!

Early (1906 thru 1920) US "Automobile Blue Books" (the only real maps in the earliest years) were also very descriptive. Paved rural roads were rare and drivers at the time were literally on an adventure when traveling on unfamiliar roads.

The Blue Books fit well inside an automobile but reading them today provides insight into the state of road navigation in this time period. Without a lot of signage, navigation instructions often sounded like, "turn at large oak tree" or "turn left after passing a sheep pasture". The more rural the area, the more descriptive the navigation instruction became. Here is an example of a page from a Blue Book

Don

My mother was a school teacher and taught the Palmer method which Wiki has as

The Palmer Method of penmanship instruction was developed and promoted by Austin Palmer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was largely created as a simplified style of the "Spencerian Method", which had been the major standardized system of handwriting since the 1840s.[1] The Palmer Method soon became the most popular handwriting system in the United States.[2]

Under the method, students were taught to adopt a uniform system of cursive writing with rhythmic motions.

History

Alphabet and numerals from The Palmer Method of Business Writing
The method developed around 1888 and was introduced in the book Palmer's Guide to Business Writing (1894).[3] Palmer's method involved "muscle motion" in which the more proximal muscles of the arm were used for movement, rather than allowing the fingers to move in writing. In spite of opposition from the major publishers, this textbook enjoyed great success: in 1912, one million copies were sold throughout the United States. The method won awards, including the Gold Medal at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, in 1915, and the Gold Medal at the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, in 1926.[4]

Proponents of the Palmer Method emphasized its plainness and speed, that it was much faster than the laborious Spencerian Method, and that it allowed the writer to compete effectively with the typewriter.[5] To educators, the method's advocates emphasized regimentation, and that the method would thus be useful in schools to increase discipline and character, and could even reform delinquents.[6]

The Palmer Method began to fall out of popularity in the 1950s and was eventually supplanted by the Zaner-Bloser Method, which sought to teach children print writing (also called "manuscript printing") before teaching them cursive, in order to provide them with a means of written expression as soon as possible, and thus develop writing skills.[7] The D'Nealian Method, introduced in 1978, sought to address problems raised by the Zaner-Bloser Method, returning to a more cursive style of print writing. The Palmer company stopped publishing in the 1980s.