National Postal Museum

What is “Off” about “Offsite”

By Rebecca Johnson, Preservation Technician and Offsite Coordinator

Almost every museum has offsite storage. As museum collections continue to grow, more spaces are needed to store all of the artifacts; this usually means finding a second, third or fourth location. In Washington, DC where real estate for storage is extremely expensive, some of the Postal Museum’s storage facilities are often miles away from the museum in industrial areas where square footage is more affordable; this is when it’s called “offsite storage”. With a collection containing items such as large, motorized vehicles and heavy industrial machinery, it’s easy to run out of space quickly.  All of the objects stored in these offsite locations are treated with the same standard of care as those stored at the museum. We even have space for staff to work at these offsite storage facilities where they monitor, maintain and improve storage conditions. Offsite storage is managed by the preservation department, but all collections staff and curators have full access to the spaces and artifacts.

Crating large murals for long-term storage.

    

Objects stored on open shelving.

Opening crates for processing.

Some great discoveries inside crates.

Rigging of Hong Kong Mailbox to transfer to new crate.

On any given day, you can find Postal Museum staff hard at work, protecting the artifacts at our offsite storage facilities. With the help of grants, we have been able to crate almost all of our oversized objects for their long term preservation. We also work on building micro-environments for some of the small objects for preservation purposes. The staff works out there to update the museum database and take photographs of all objects stored offsite. Offsite is also a great place for some of our larger donations to be processed (surveyed, cleaned, rehoused, and photographed) because of the sheer quantity of objects, without being in the way of other staff members.

NPM curator sorting through donation.

Preparing South Pole Safe for photography.

Surveying mural for conservation treatment.

Surveying objects for information gathering.

Mass transfer from USPS waiting to be processed.

Prepping portrait for photography.

Other random projects that have been known to happen at one of these many offsite storage spaces include picking the lock on a safe to see if anything is inside, and repairing a flat tire on a bicycle. The Postal Museum staff has also opened up old crates from previous decades to check on the objects and sometimes rehouse the objects if necessary. There are regular inventories of offsite storage spaces to make sure every object is accounted for in the museum’s database. We are grateful that these storage facilities allow us to keep acquiring additional artifacts to interpret philatelic themes and the history of U.S. postal operations.

 

 

Cleaning handstamps.

Conservation treatment of international mailboxes.

Exciting new discovery off-site.

Picking safe lock to see what's inside.

Sorting through a transfer from USPS.

Repairing flat tire on historic bicycle.

 

Hindenburg Passenger Ticket

By Cheryl R. Ganz, Philately Department

May 6, 2013: 76th Anniversary of Hindenburg Disaster

Burtis J. “Bert” Dolan’s passenger ticket survived the final flight and disaster of the German zeppelin Hindenburg. Through the courtesy of the Burtis J. Dolan family archive, the ticket is now on exhibit in the Smithsonian National Postal Museum exhibition Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic. The ticket, #2398, was purchased from the Zeppelin operating company only two days before the May 3, 1937, departure from Frankfurt, Germany, and signed by Captain Ernst Lehmann, who perished after the crash landing. The ticket cost was 1,000 RM, equivalent to about $450 during the Great Depression. This is possibly the only surviving passenger ticket from that final flight.

Business colleagues from Chicago, Dolan, an executive in the perfume business, and Nelson Morris, an executive in the meatpacking industry, had crossed paths in Nice, France, during their spring 1937 business trips in Europe. Morris convinced Dolan to change his travel plans. Rather than return home by sea, why not travel on the Hindenburg, which was making its first trip of the season? A faster trip would allow Dolan to surprise his family with an early return for Mothers Day. Morris paid the additional costs over ocean liner travel for Dolan’s zeppelin ticket, and Dolan paid Morris’s Hindenburg bar tab just before the landing.

On May 6, 1937, at 7:24 p.m. local Lakehurst time, Dolan and Morris stood side by side at the Hindenburg’s starboard promenade windows (near the reading and writing room) to watch the landing crew grab the ropes and moor the great zeppelin. One minute later, a jolt shook the passenger cabin. The two friends grasped a post to stay on their feet as the Hindenburg’s bow surged upwards. Panicked, they jumped from a window, first Morris and then Dolan. Morris later recalled, “The most remarkable thing that I know in my life, I took metal rods an inch thick in my hands and I broke them. They broke like paper.” After clearing the wreckage, he turned and looked back for Dolan, but did not see him. Dolan perhaps paused to help someone at the window before running clear. In so doing, he was caught in the tangle of burning girders that surrounded him. He died in the disaster, leaving a widow, Mildred, and four children, who did not even know he had been aboard. Dolan’s body was identified by his passport and passenger ticket in his pocket, and he was still holding the rosary given to him by his wife.

The family learned of Dolan’s Hindenburg passage from Nelson Morris’s brother Edward, who shared the secret. Shocked, the family anxiously followed the news. They received the devastating confirmation from a priest who had performed last rites. Recovered, burnt items from Dolan’s body were returned to the family, including his passport, ticket, and the invoice for Morris’s onboard expenses and two telegrams. Dolan had written a letter to his wife, which was in an unfranked envelope addressed to her marked “strictly personal.” In the touching and emotional letter he told his wife of his personal conflict in flying against her wishes and that should anything happen enroute, “None of us know the Lord’s will.”

Read more: Dennis Kromm, “Homecoming,” The Zeppelin Collector (July 1988) 59-63. »

 

Burtis J. Dolan’s passenger ticket salvaged from the final flight and disaster of the German zeppelin Hindenburg, May 6, 1937. Courtesy of the Dolan family archives.

 

 

Salvaged passport of deceased passenger Burtis J. “Bert” Dolan. Courtesy of the Dolan family archives.

 

 

Burtis J. Dolan’s family members visit the Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic exhibition and view the portrait of family friend Nelson Morris. Left to right: granddaughter Mary Alice and great grandsons Matthew, Timothy, and Brian.

Learn more about the Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic exhibition.

 

1972 Peace Corps Stamp Artist David Battle Visits Museum

By, Patricia Raynor, Loan Coordinator

David Battle, whose design concept was used for the 1972 Peace Corps Stamp, visited the Postal Museum on April 12. Jim O’Donnell and I interviewed Mr. Battle in 2010 for an article on the Peace Corps stamp and were delighted when he contacted us that he was planning a visit to Washington, DC. While at the museum, Mr. Battle spoke fondly of his visit to Washington in December of 1971 when and his family were invited to attend the ceremony announcing the Peace Corps stamp.

Peace Corps stamp issued February 11, 1972

 

David Battle also designed the cachet for the 1971 first day cover that he is holding.

The National Postal Museum has the original Peace Corps stamp art on loan from the U.S. Postal Service’s, Postmaster General Collection. Annette Shumway, museum technician PMG Collection, brought out the art for him to examine in person.  He showed us how graphic artist Bradbury Thompson added an extra dove in the adaptation for the final design as the design of the Peace Corps stamp was vertical and his original design was square.

 

 

David Battle examining the 1972 Peace Corps stamp art with Annette Shumway overseeing on the right.

Bradbury Thompson note from the National Postal Museum Library, Third Assistant Postmaster General, Stamp Design Files.

David Battle lives in Ohio with his wife Esther.  His art frequently appears in the Antioch Review.

Photographs by James O’Donnell

To learn more check out:
David Battle and the story behind the Peace Corps stamp
http://postalmuseum.si.edu/museum/1d_peace_corps_stamp.html

The Postmaster General Collection
http://postalmuseumblog.si.edu/2012/07/the-postmaster-general-collection.html
                                

Mary Katherine Goddard – Colonial Postmaster and Printer

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

Mary Katherine Goddard worked with her brother, William, in his printing shops in Providence and Philadelphia before the pair moved to Baltimore, Maryland. Left to manage the daily operations of the family's print shop while her brother was away drumming up support for his Constitutional Post, Mary Katherine Goddard published The Maryland Journal, numerous almanacs and broadsides. Goddard’s printing coup was her publication of the Declaration of Independence on January 18, 1777. It was the first copy of the Declaration listing all of the signers to appear in print.

The Maryland Journal

Declaration of Independence as printed by Mary Katherine Goddard

Two years earlier, she had become Baltimore's postmaster, a position she held successfully for fourteen years. In 1789, Postmaster General Samuel Osgood removed her from the position.

Osgood wanted Goddard gone so he could appoint a political ally, John White, to the post. White was inexperienced in postal operations and an obvious patronage choice. So to try and quiet potential outrage about giving White the job, Osgood gave Baltimore’s citizens what was, at that time, a far more acceptable reason for removing Goddard. She was a woman. Yes, when the citizens of Baltimore petitioned for her reinstatement, they were told that the position would require "more traveling . . . than a woman could undertake." And while the petition did finally make its way to President Washington, he declined to overrule his Postmaster General.

Goddard’s fourteen years of great service to the citizens of Baltimore were at an end. Mary did not fare much better with her brother. He returned to the city having lost a hoped for opportunity to run the national postal system. In need of an occupation, he took over Mary’s  printing business.

Mary Goddard turned to selling books, stationery and dry goods. She died in Baltimore on August 12, 1816, still beloved by the community she served so well.

Secrets of the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery

By Cheryl Ganz, Philately Department

When visitors come to the opening of the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery on Sunday, September 22, they will see stamp rarities, learn wonderful stories about stamps and mail, and experience philately in ways they never imagined. But one thing they will not see is a small, flat box hidden behind the walls in the post office’s old vault space!

On February 28, 2013, Allen Kane, NPM director (above-left); Glen Hopkins, design and construction manager (center); and Cheryl Ganz, lead curator (right), hid a time capsule. The staff and Council of Philatelists (a museum advisory board of top stamp collectors) contributed to the contents with signed business cards, philatelic journals and artifacts, museum publications and ephemera, and tokens of life in America in 2013. A message inside to those who someday will open the time capsule tells them that it was stowed in memory of W. Wilson Hulme (1946-2007), the Chief Curator of Philately who dreamed of a Philatelic Center of Excellence but died before the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery was conceived.

John Hotchner, Council of Philatelists, Signing Stairwell.

In addition to the time capsule, during construction, staff and the Council of Philatelists signed beams and the stairwell recently put in place by Clark Construction Group. Many left messages so that, if the building is ever dismantled, future generations will know how very excited we all are to share the creation of the world's largest postage stamp gallery.

Staff Members Signing Beam.

 

 

What’s that Whishing Sound?

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

America’s postal service went underground 120 years ago today. No, it wasn’t on the run or trying to be a 19th century “hipster.” It was the first US postal use of a series of underground pneumatic tubes, using six-inch iron water pipes to carry mail underground between post offices and railway stations. Powered by pressurized air, canisters would fly between stations at 30 mph. Philadelphia started the trend with a tube line that connected the central post office at 9th and Market Streets with a railway station four blocks away at 24th and Chestnut Street (the post office still stands, but the train station was torn down in the 1960s). 

Mail sent through the tubes moved between the stations in just two minutes, compared to 15 minutes the trip usually took by wagon. In attendance was Postmaster General John Wanamaker, who had made certain that the first test of the service would be in his hometown of Philadelphia. He placed a Bible wrapped in an American flag (1) into a tube that went flying out with a loud whish! Only a few minutes later the tube, with contents, was sent back on a return trip. The experiment had been a success. Postal officials and workers continued testing the tubes with a decreasingly iconic collection of items including postcards, newspapers, a pair of shoes, a loaf of bread, oranges, apples, a bunch of violets, and a laundered shirt.

Pneumatic tube receiver and transmitter machine at the Philadelphia post office.

Wanamaker was wary of the potential cost of building and operating the service, so the Post Office Department contracted with private companies to build and maintain the tubes, and then paid an annual rent of $3,450 for using them. In Philadelphia the tubes were constructed and owned by the Electric Pneumatic Transit Company. Payment for the service at first came from the appropriations assigned to the mail messenger service.

The Philadelphia service was followed a few years later by pneumatic tube construction and use in New York City, Boston, and Brooklyn. The first line in New York City was run between the main city post office and a branch office in the Produce Exchange and was operated by the Tubular Dispatch Company, not quite 4,000 feet away. While a wagon could carry dozens of mailbags between the two offices, the busy streets slowed wagons. But a pneumatic canister could carry 600 letters at once below the streets, making the same trip in a minute and 30 seconds. Chicago and St. Louis also used pneumatic tube mail service, but in neither city did the service obtain the reach and viability that it had did on the East Coast.

This pneumatic canister is on display in the museum’s “Customers and Communities” exhibit. It was used in the last years of the service, in New York City in the early 1950s.

One of the most intriguing pneumatic tube routes wasn’t underground at all. In fact it ran between the Brooklyn and New York City main post offices across the Brooklyn Bridge. The 1.65 mile route was built and operated by the New York Mail & Newspaper Transportation Company after a couple of years of debate, court-ordered work stoppages and other delays. It operated from August 1, 1898 to April 28, 1950 when it was removed for construction on the bridge but never restored. This pneumatic tube service operated from 5am to 9pm Monday through Saturday, carrying 126,350 letters and 20,250 newspapers each day. The Department paid an annual rent of $14,000 for the service, which used cast iron tubes 8 3/16” in diameter. The tubes allowed mail that traveled by wagons in 30 minutes to speed across the bridge in 3 ½ minutes. By 1898 the system connected 21 local post offices in Manhattan to the main post office. As late as 1914, 30-percent of first-class letters sent through the city's main post office were transmitted by pneumatic tube.

Unidentified postal worker next to a piece of equipment that sorts and sends tubes off through different pneumatic tubes in the system.

By 1918 the Post Office Department began replacing its horse-drawn wagons with automobiles, which carried mail between railway stations and post offices even more rapidly than the pneumatic tube system. During World War I, the Post Office Department suspended the service to conserve funding for the war effort. After the war, it restored the service, but while post offices and business centers moved with relative ease, the underground pneumatic system did not. New York City continued using a portion of the pneumatic tube service into the 1950s, but by then it was basically obsolete. The Post Office Department suspended it in 1953, pending review, but never reinstated it.

Workers at a New York City post office loading and preparing pneumatic canisters for the tubes.

(1) Wanamaker sent a message with the package reading, “First use of the pneumatic postal tube in the United States is to send through it a copy of the Holy Scriptures, the greatest message ever given to the world. Covering the Bible is the American flag, the emblem of freedom of 65,000,000 happy people.”

 

To Rotate or Not to Rotate?

By Rebecca Johnson, Preservation Technician and Offsite Coordinator

All paper fades over time. In the museum conservation world, we call it “burning”. While the term might sound overly dramatic, too much light on paper causes irreversible damage. In extreme cases, excessive burning can render documents illegible, thereby losing the historical significance. So when the Postal Museum installs an exhibit, our Preservation department carefully surveys, or reviews, every artifact to determine its fragility and sensitivity to light. Some objects are deemed too sensitive to remain exposed to light for the duration of the exhibit, so the curators select additional artifacts for “rotation”. After one artifact has been on display for its scheduled period, it is removed from the exhibit, returned to storage, and replaced by the next artifact in line.

It takes several staff members to complete the rotation.

    

Preservation staff preparing for rotation.

Removing object from exhibition.

    

Replacing display panels.

Rotating artifacts.

Several of the artifacts in our current exhibition Fire and Ice were determined by our preservation department to be fragile.  They were allowed an 11 month display period. So 11 months after the exhibit was first installed these sensitive artifacts were rotated out. The artifacts in this second rotation are not the same as those in the first rotation, so the museum needed to update the descriptions on the exhibit panels to match. This is no easy feat! It takes several people to make sure the right artifacts are removed from the exhibit and that the new artifacts and panels are properly installed in the correct places.

Carefully removing 3-D artifacts from panels.

    

Removing paper artifact for rotation.

Drilling holes in new panel for rotation.

As a final step, the preservation staff measures the light levels to make sure they are not over 4 to 5 foot candles (or 40-50 lux hours). This low lighting, as well as having the lights visitor activated, helps to extend the exhibition life of an artifact. Some areas of museums may seem too dark and it may take a while for your eyes to adjust, but this small difference helps the artifacts remain in good condition for future generations.

 

Checking light measurements.

    

Lining up artifacts on new panels.

Placing covers back on exhibit panels.

    

Taking light measurements.

 

Zeppelin Hindenburg Passenger Visits Fire & Ice Exhibit

In memory of the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster, Dr. Horst Schirmer, one of the airship’s passengers, visited NPM’s special exhibition, Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic. Dr. Schirmer, a physician at Johns Hopkins, was only six years old when he flew on a Hindenburg test flight to evaluate a new propeller design. His father, Dr. Max Schirmer, had been one of the zeppelin’s technical designers and flew on many zeppelin flights. He was a wind tunnel expert who studied aerodynamics during the era that streamlining emerged as the cutting edge technology.

Dr. Schirmer toured the exhibition with Dr. Cheryl Ganz, Chief Curator of Philately. He remarked that “the one word he would use to describe the exhibit is fantastic!" He was impressed by how a fairly complicated story for a small space was arranged to flow, capturing how the individual passengers and the crew members became partners to survive the disaster. Below are some of his remarks. Compare them to your own impressions of the exhibit and the web story that accompanies Fire & Ice.

"The exhibit’s design to tell the story in way that would be relevant to a younger generation struck me as the most important aspect of your Fire & Ice exhibit. I was quite taken seeing how it brought the stories of the survivors to the front of the “stage,” primarily because I had never thought that way about the few that made it home. I found it very much thought-provoking."

"I had never really thought about a MAIL ROOM!  Much less THE mail room!  Where it was, how important it was (to the success of lighter than air travel), much less the complex process by which the mail was handled once it was on board. I certainly was aware that mail revenue was crucial to the operating finances, but I didn't realize how it all was accomplished!  The location of the mailroom above the control gondola was a complete surprise! This was all new to me, I admit!"

"My father would have been amazed at the interest shown today in what was his life and livelihood some 75-100 years ago. Those who worked on the zeppelins believed that they would change the way of the world, and Fire & Ice reveals how so much of that story has to do with the PEOPLE that made it happen. It wasn't just the machine."

 

Dr. Horst Schirmer recalls life aboard the German airship Hindenburg with curator Dr. Cheryl Ganz.

Dr. Horst Schirmer examines relics salvaged from the zeppelin Hindenburg’s wreckage after its disaster on May 6, 1937.

Imagine Traveling to the New American Frontier!

By Reema Ghazi, Youth Experience Coordinator

In our partnership with the Capitol Hill Cluster Schools, we (EdLab) arrange mission-based field trips to various Smithsonian museums and ask students to use museum objects as a launching point for further investigation into a broader challenge.

Recently, we took our Watkins Elementary fifth grade to our home base, the National Postal Museum, to investigate what it would have been like to travel out west onto the new American frontier in the 1800's-- and to investigate how travel has changed today, and how it's become a nearly universal part of life.

The students explored the museum galleries looking for clues into what travel to the West might have looked like, and then interviewed museum visitors about their experiences with travel and starting a new life. At the end, the students recorded audio entries about museum objects from the perspective of a 19th century traveller to the west-- to be built into broader podcast journals about the journeying life in the time of Manifest Destiny.

Check out one of the students'  journal entries here: http://audioboo.fm/boos/1108102-maisie-museum.

For information about EdLab, click here.

The Steps of Prep

By Lindsay Rowinski, Museum Technician

Starting in mid-February, objects for the National Stamp Collection section of the new William H. Gross Stamp Gallery have been shipped out to the Smithsonian's Office of Exhibits Central (OEC) about every month or so. The panels were designed to present the objects in sections based on historical time frames or significant historical events. The objects have therefore been organized according to their corresponding historical sections (above). We ship about three of these sections per delivery to OEC.

 

Clamshell boxes used to store objects for shipment and to store prepped objects before they are mounted to panels

Once they get to the Office of Exhibits Central in Landover, MD, the objects are either backed and wrapped or encapsulated. These are the two primary methods by which we preserve objects that will be mounted to graphic panels. When backing and wrapping we use both mylar (clear polyester film) and mat board. The process of backing and wrapping is just what it sounds like. We cut a piece of mat board to the shape and scale of the object, leaving about a sixteenth of an inch of mat board all around. The board is our backing. Then we place the object on the mat board and wrap the mylar around it. We leave a small boarder of mat board around the object so that the edges of the object do not get crushed when the mylar is pulled taught and attached to the back with double stick tape. The corners of the mylar must also be cut so that we are working with a mylar shape that can be wrapped, or folded, around the mat board.

Most of the backed and wrapped objects are in the early sections that contain covers with wax seals. It is important to back and wrap these covers so that the wax seals have a firm support and do not bend and crack. We also back and wrap objects that are too thick to be encapsulated. Check out the process of backing and wrapping in the fun and instructional video below!

 

Adjusting stamps before I finish encapsulation

  

Adjusting magnetic strip before I run an ultrasonic weld

The encapsulating process only involves mylar. Because we are exhibiting these paper objects for 30 years (our longest exhibition of high value material) we are also including buffered tissue in with objects that are not gummed or perforated to stabilize the Ph levels of the paper. When encapsulating an object we are essentially sandwiching the object between two sheets of mylar and then creating a seal around the object. We create the seal using an ultrasonic welder that uses high-frequency vibrations to bind the two sheets of clear polyester film together. The machine is essentially hammering the polyester together at a very fast pace. When we try to encapsulate objects that are too thick the welder is not able to weld the mylar completely together. This is why we choose to back and wrap the thicker objects.

An example of multiple stamp encapsulation. This combination of Confederate stamps from Nashville and New Orleans is particularly attractive. Here are some links to more information about these particular stamps:
http://postalmuseumblog.si.edu/2012/05/fantasy-philately-collecting-stamps-from-tatooine-and-alderaan.html

http://arago.si.edu/index.asp?con=2&cmd=1&id=167847&img=1&pg=1

In order to encapsulate several stamps at once I take two pieces of mylar, one on top of the other, and run a weld across the bottom of them. Then I take tongs and place several stamps along the weld line and run welds on each side of each stamp so that they are welded on three sides. I then place a spot weld at the top of the stamp instead of a run to allow for air exchange, and then trim the edges.
The encapsulator is a beautiful tool and especially helpful for preserving paper as it does not use heat at all. We had the manufacturer of the Polyester Encapsulation System make a miniature version of the machine just for this project. The smaller machine is perfect for working on encapsulations of stamps and makes the overwhelming amount of tiny encapsulations much more manageable. Most of the objects for the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery will be encapsulated rather than backed and wrapped.

Four kivas filled with panels patiently waiting their turn to be adorned with objects.

    

Open kiva showing the interior organization system of bins.

Once all of the objects for a particular section have been prepped we are then ready to mount them to their respective panels. Just as with backing and wrapping, we use double stick tape to adhere the back of each protected object to its panel. First we align the object to the text that describes it, then we set up rulers to guide its placement, and finally we place the object with the tape in its place. And that is how we complete a panel. Now just multiply the process of prepping about 13,000 objects by the process of mounting them to 750 panels, and you’re only looking at the amount of work that is going in to the National Stamp Collection (NSC) portion of the new gallery. The NSC is the densest section of the Gross Gallery, but there are many other sections to complete when this one is done!

 

Pulling a panel fresh from the kiva without any objects mounted to it. This particular panel illustrates an H grill and a split grill from the Benjamin K. Miller Collection.

 

First mounted objects!