A Few Scott 210's With Some Interesting Cancels

Yesterday I was at the Spellman Museum in MA, and acquired a few Washington 2c with some interesting cancels. I've been having a fun time trying to ID them. From top to bottom I've been getting some initial thoughts with the Cole Cancellation Book. I am happy to receive input from what others here think of this initial researching.

Double lined cross (like CSL-15 or CSL-16)
Geometric (like GCR-179 but the holes seem a bit small in the book example)
Seashell (like Pi-49 or Pi-50)
US MAIL (like US-129)

The second one, the holes in the middle look a lot wider than the illustration

Love the 3rd cancel. You should soak the stamp to see if the stuff at the upper right will come off.

Keep in mind there were 44,512 post offices as of July 1, 1881 (Jan 1882 Postal Guide), thus any fancy cancel book must necessarily be a scratch-the-surface sampling, whether Cole's "Cancellations and Killers of the Banknote Era" or Willard's much earlier "The United States Two Cent Red Brown of 1883-1887", etc. Very few towns/cities or postmark designs have postmark listings approaching completion.

Also, many of these listings are based on tracings rather than scans or other photographic reproduction means. The tracing skill of each author may vary as well as the quality of the cancel impression they were tracing.

While some killers are truly unique to a particular city such as Waterbury or the Chicago "blues", many killers such as the Maltese cross or the intertwined US were sold by commercial suppliers and were used by countless offices. Without a significant portion of the CDS, it is virtually impossible to make a convincing attribution. The "Wheel of Fortune" killer is a good example, Willard notes slightly less than 50 towns when he wrote in 1970, Cole lists over 300 examples, while the more recent monograph by Larry Rausch has over 1000 entries and can be found here:
http://www.rpastamps.org/wof.html

very cool and clear cancels!

Neat cancels regardless of where they are from. That elaborate seashell cancel is amazing. There must be some story how Cash City, Kansas arrived at a seashell design for a postmark.

Cash City has an interesting history. The town was founded in 1886 by Cash Henderson of Wichita, on the belief that the railroad would be coming through the area. The town grew to about 500 people. An old map of the county shows two projected lines of railroad running through Cash City, but the roads were not built and the town finally disappeared.
https://www.ksgenweb.org/archives/1...sh_city.html

The Cash City post office opened in June 1886, a newspaper started in October, there were hotels, a blacksmith, shoe and wagon shops, a lumberyard, even a doctor, a drugstore and a mercantile. By all accounts, the town was booming, all on the premise that the railroad was coming through. Alas, news arrived the following year that the railroad would not come to the city. It was built 12 miles to the south. By 1888, the newspaper had dissolved, the businesses closed and most of the residents moved to nearby Ashland. By 1893, the town site was abandoned, most of the buildings torn down or moved. And by 1895, the Kansas Legislature official vacated Cash City.
- "Altering railroad broke Cash City"
http://kansasghosttowns.blogspot.co...sh-city.html

Agreed, in the end it's not the worst thing for me if I can't identify the cancels. I am just glad to have them and scanned for sharing. I can see why people focus so much on cancellations!