Easton Post Office plans pictorial postmark for Waterfowl fest
Easton Star-Democrat
Published: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 7:10 AM CST
EASTON The Easton Post Office will offer a special pictorial postmark sponsored by the Tidewater Stamp Club to commemorate the 38th annual Waterfowl Festival.
The stamp will be offered at the Waterfowl Festival from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Nov. 14 and 15, and from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 16.
As a community service, the U.S Postal Service offers pictorial postmarks to commemorate local events celebrated in communities throughout the nation. Customers have 30 days to obtain the free postmark. Those attending the festival may obtain the postmark at the Waterfowl Festival Station established at Easton High School, 723 Mecklenburg Ave....
Putting a stamp on history
By KATIE SULLIVAN
Community Editor - Easton Star-Democrat
Published: Sunday, March 9, 2008 1:00 AM CST
EASTON Piecing together a town's history can be like putting together a puzzle. Although there are many ways to do research, including looking through old newspaper articles and pictures, there's also a lot of history to be found in old mail, including envelopes, also called covers, and stamps.
St. Michaels resident Carol McCollough collects oyster advertising covers from all over the country, and internationally if she can find them.
"A lot of these were return addresses and they're very elaborately decorated, not like return envelopes today," McCollough said. "They get to be very elaborate."
Her collection includes covers from many local oyster businesses, including Thos. & Jones & Co. of Cambridge and W.B. McKenzie & Co. of Oxford.
"This is real history, this is something that happened, people's lives were affected," said McCollough. "All these advertising covers are documentation of businesses, people and sometimes they're the only thing we have."
On July 3, 1775, the first post office was established in what was called Talbot Courthouse, now Easton. By 1800, 13 post offices had been established around the Mid-Shore.
"That was good for an area that was as agricultural and as rural as we were," said Hope Messick of Easton. "There was no bridge to connect us to the western shore and the only way you could get here was by boat or go all the way up to the head of the Bay and around. And the roads that we did have were pretty miserable."
Before then, you could give your mail to dispatch riders or stage coaches and they would carry it on. The first official stamp was issued in 1847. Before that time, postmasters determined the price of mail by where it was going and how much it weighed. The price was written in the top right-hand corner and it was pre-paid.
"They didn't even have envelopes at the time," Messick said. "The just folded the paper to make the envelope and used sealing wax to hold it together. Obviously you didn't send anything valuable."
After the government officially issued stamps, they still weren't required until the late 1850s.
"Between what Congress said they had to do and what people did was often a lag time," Messick said. "So they allowed a lot of mail to go through even though it didn't have a stamp on it, just as long as it said it had been paid for."
In one of her collections, Messick has a few letters that were stamp-less, addressed to her great-grandfather A.J. Willis of Caroline County. One of these letters even states on the envelope that the letter was carried by steamboat.
Messick explained that many local post offices didn't have as many rules and regulations as they do nowadays.
"Since a lot of (the postmasters) worked out of a building other than an actual post office, like a general store or even their own homes sometimes, it was pretty hard for post office vendors to keep track," Messick said. "It wasn't a sort of cut-and-dry method of delivery of the mail as it is today. Postmasters could do pretty much what they wanted."
To piece together history on the Eastern Shore, you can look at markings on the envelopes, the stamp and routes that were taken.
Carol Armstrong of Royal Oak has an envelope that was sent from Shannahan & Wrightson Hardware Store in August 1900 to Mr. Shannahan in London. The store was once located across from the courthouse in Easton.
"My great-grandfather started the hardware store with his first cousin," Armstrong said. "I try to retrace (the envelope's) travels, see how it got from Easton to London."
Messick's collection focusing on the postal history of Easton tells a lot about businesses in town. These businesses include Easton National Bank, which was where Bank of America in Easton is today, and Thompson & Kersey Foreign and Domestic Dry Goods, which is now Murdoch's Gardens.
Her family also has more than 2,000 letters from her great-great-uncle, who lived in Texas, to her great-great-grandfather, A.J. Willis of Caroline County.
"It's eye-opening to see what it had been like to live on the frontier," Messick said. "It's a way to document not just people's lives or the event that people describe but what the mail went through."
Messick, Armstrong and McCollough are members of the Tidewater Stamp Club. The group will be holding a show from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, March 15, at the Easton Fire House. The event includes exhibits by members, dealers and the Post Office with a pictorial postmark. There will also be items for children and beginning collectors.
"Postal history encompasses where it's been, where it's going to, what route did it take and what rates were in effect," McCollough said. "Every envelope has a story."
Every Stamp Tells a Story
By JOY LA PRADE
Community Editor - Easton Star-Democrat
Published: Saturday, March 3, 2007 2:00 AM CST EASTON Some 1847 postmasters were careful with their scissors, snipping neatly down the middle of the margins that separated one Benjamin Franklin from another.
The postmaster who first handled this stamp, however, was a bit careless. When he scissored the 5-cent bit of paper from its sheet, he also cut off the bottom corner of its neighbor to the right.
The 1847 Benjamin Franklin stamp was the first postage stamp ever issued by the U.S. government, and 160 years later, the one affixed to the first page of Hope Messick's stamp album provides a history lesson in the development of the postal service. When stamps were first printed, postmasters had to cut them apart with scissors, then dab a brush in a paste pot and swipe it across the back of the stamp to stick it on a letter. Many postmasters were careless with their scissors or brush, chopping up sheets of stamps or ruining them with globs of paste; this led to the development about 10 years later of perforated stamps backed with gum adhesive.
The postmasters weren't the only ones causing problems. Some Americans were not happy to have to pay the government to send their mail, so they erased the ink from used stamps and mailed them again. In response, the government began to print stamps with 'grills', small indentations made by a metal tool. This made the paper better absorb ink so it couldn't be erased.
Though millions of stamps have been printed in the United States since Messick�s Benjamin Franklin first rolled out of a press, that single square of paper provides a glimpse into the history of the country and its citizens' relationship with their government.
But stamps don't have to be a century old in order to be interesting or unique.
Every stamp tells a story - that's what makes collecting them so interesting, says Messick, an Easton resident and president of the Tidewater Stamp Club.
"You can learn so much history, geography, culture," she explained. "It�s just amazing."
The Tidewater Stamp Club, based in Easton, will host its 25th anniversary show this Saturday. Though stamps can be valuable, it wasn't the excitement of a treasure hunt that drew the club's 40 or so members into collecting - it was the stories.
Royal Oak resident Carol Armstrong, a founding member of the Tidewater Stamp Club, still remembers the rainy weekend that introduced her to stamp collecting.
She was 10 years old, and since the weather was keeping her inside, her father gave her his old stamp collection. She spent the weekend organizing it, and was hooked. Soon she sent away for her first stamp, a 'Black Jack.' The Black Jack was a 2-cent stamp first issued in 1863, and it featured an engraving of President Andrew Jackson in black ink. The Black Jack was printed to mail magazine and newspaper deliveries, but if there were shortages of stamps at the local post office it was often cut in half to pay lower rates. Armstrong paid $2 for the Black Jack, a significant investment for an elementary school student, but nothing compared to the $1,350 she spent a few months ago for an 1869 Abraham Lincoln stamp, which cost 90 cents when it first printed.
"It was a surprise - I didn't expect to get it," said Armstrong, explaining that she won the stamp from a Delaware auction by bidding just half its estimated value.
Many stamp collectors, or philatelists, a term that refers to someone who studies stamps, choose to collect certain specialty or themed stamps. The story behind a stamp often draws a collector in, and as the collection grows, it tells a story of its own.
This is the case for Carol McCollough of St. Michaels, a marine biologist who has built a collection around Alvin, the deep-sea diving submersible from Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution. She collects Alvin-related 'covers,' a term that refers to an envelope with a stamp and a cancel. A cancel is the ink that covers the postage stamp and prevents it from being used again.
"They do a wonderful job of documenting what Alvin has done," said McCollough.
Though McCollough can buy Alvin covers on eBay, she has created many of her own by preparing an envelope, sending it to the ship for the Alvin crew to sign, and having the postmaster stamp it with a cancel.
Two of her favorite covers were created this way. One was made when Alvin was used to retrieve a hydrogen bomb lost in the Mediterranean in 1966. Another was autographed by Cindy Van Dover, who in 1990 became the first woman to serve as pilot for the submersible. That cover, McCollough said, may be her favorite.
"It was very hard for women to work on the ship and be accepted as dive members," she explained. "To become a pilot was a huge accomplishment."
So far, McCollough has 300 Alvin-related covers. It's a large collection, but there's room to grow - Alvin has made about 4,000 dives.
Stamp and cover collections focus on every subject imaginable. One member of the Tidewater Stamp Club, Messick explained, collects stamps of Princess Diana. There are collectors who specialize in the British royal family, others in cats, still others in lighthouses. There are those who collect covers from the Lusitania, Titanic or Hindenburg. Some people only collect errors.
Messick, a former history teacher, has mostly focused on U.S. stamps since she began collecting more than 20 years ago. She can tell the story behind each stamp in her collection, from the 1847 Benjamin Franklin stamp to several sets showcasing Chinese art.
"It's the history and the story that gets told on the stamp that got me interested," she explained. While she owns several valuable stamps, Messick says their real worth can be valued by those stories, not the cash a dealer might pay.
"Basically a stamp collector is collecting bits and pieces of paper, and it's worth only what the collector thinks," she said.
The Tidewater Stamp Club's 25th anniversary show is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. this Saturday at the Easton Volunteer Fire Department Hall on Creamery Lane.
Giving her stamp of approval
Easton Star-Democrat
Published: Monday, March 12, 2007 2:00 AM CDT
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| PHOTO BY ERIN FLUHARTY Future stamp collector Erin MacFarland, 6, smiles as she looks at many different styles of stamps during the Tidewater Stamp Club's 25th Anniversary show Saturday at Easton Fire Department. |
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