National Postal Museum

Remembering the Titanic

By Daniel Piazza, Philately Department

This year’s anniversary of Titanic’s sinking is a pretty low-key affair. Last year was the centenary, and there were hundreds of commemorations all over the world that garnered a lot of media attention. Everyone is interested in a hundredth anniversary, but a hundred-and-first somehow does not seem as important.

A crowd will gather at the Washington, D.C. Titanic memorial, as they do every year, but it will be a fraction of the three to four hundred who showed up last year at midnight.

If you don’t want to venture to the Southeast waterfront, you can instead come to the National Postal Museum and see original sketches of the memorial by its sculptor, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, on loan to us from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

 

Loan from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Even if you have viewed Fire & Ice before, a number of new pieces were installed in January that make it worth a second look. The National Archives in New York has loaned us a manual of ship’s regulations that once belonged to Titanic survivor and White Star Line managing director J. Bruce Ismay. Published in 1907, the book was standard issue on all ships belonging to the International Mercantile Marine Co., including Titanic. We have opened it to the page dealing with “Custody of the Mails.”

 

 

Loan from National Archives and Records Administration (New York)

One of the most famous radio transmissions of all time is memorialized on this Marconi company form from Olympic’s radio room. At 1:13 a.m., one hour and forty minutes after striking an iceberg, Titanic tells Olympic, “We are putting the passengers off in small boats.” This was one of the last intelligible messages sent by Titanic. “N.Y.T.” stands for “New York Time,” which Second Officer Charles Lightoller reckoned was 1 hour and 33 minutes behind Titanic’s time.

 

On loan from Dr. Edward and Joanne Dauer.

Chicago physician Frank Blackmarr, a passenger aboard Carpathia when that ship received Titanic’s distress signals, assisted the ship’s surgeon treating survivors. He collected numerous relics of the disaster, including the autographs and addresses of Titanic’s four surviving officers. The autographs, from top to bottom, are: Fourth Officer James Graves Boxhall; Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller; and Fifth Officer Harold Godfrey Lowe. Third Officer Herbert John Pitman signed on a separate sheet (not shown).

 

 

Loan from Brian, Maria, and Alexander Green

So, even though the “big anniversary” is behind us, a visit to Fire & Ice at the National Postal Museum is a new opportunity to learn about the disaster and reflect on the enormity of Titanic’s loss.    

 

Putting Rural Free Delivery on the County Level

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

When the Post Office Department began delivering mail to rural Americans as an experiment in 1896, the service was limited to selected routes in a handful of states. For the service to really prove useful, the Department wanted to organize it on a county-wide level.

On April 3, 1899, a specially designed vehicle that allowed two clerks to receive, postmark, sort and deliver mail set out from Westminster, Maryland. A third employee drove the wagon. The wagon was the first in the area, and was part of a plan to cover all of Carroll County, Maryland by Rural Free Delivery service.

Carroll County was selected in part because it was the home of Edwin W. Shriver whose designs for were used as a base for the county-wide service. Shriver and his assistant, Horace G. Reese, set out on the morning of April 3, 1900 from the Westminster post office at 6:40 a.m. with the mail. The wagon was driven by Harry H. Harbough. The trio was followed by photographer Joseph H. Kritchen and postal officials in a carriage. Shriver’s delivery wagon traveled from Westminster to Warfieldsburg, Baile, Dennings, Crawford’s store, Taylorsville, Winfield, Gist, Klee’s Mill, Bird Hill, Smallwood, Fenby, and returned to Westminster, a twenty-mile round trip reaching 200 rural families. Patrons showed their enthusiasm for the service by gathering in crowds at spots along the route, offering standing ovations to the service at Crawford’s store and Winfield.

Westminster postmaster Milton Schaeffer gave the clerks 238 letters, six postcards, 261 newspapers and circulars, and five packages for the day’s run. While making their rounds, the clerks received three letters for delivery along their route and 36 letters, four postcards, two registry receipts, one money order, and two registered letters from patrons for processing at the local post office. The clerks stopped for a meal from 11am – noon at the Gist post office and still managed to return to Westminster’s post office by 3:30 p.m., two hours ahead of their scheduled time.

A family greets the new rural postal wagon on its journey in Carroll County, Maryland.

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.”

 

Singing a Postal Song

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

You might know the lyrics to “Please, Please Mr. Postman,” or “Return to Sender,” but how about “My Parcel Post Man” or “The Old Postmaster?” Folks have been writing songs about their mail, and what it brings (or doesn’t) for more than 100 years. Over the years the museum has compiled a listing of more than 300 mail-themed American songs. The earliest we found was “Mail Line Packet,” copyrighted in 1857 by P.P. Werlein & Company. Between then and now, hundreds of songwriters have weaved musical tales of love letters and sad letters, and a wide world of postal dramas.

Postal workers have inspired more than a few songs. A Boston, Massachusetts music teacher named John G. Murdock wrote “The Letter Carrier’s Grand March” in 1874. Letter carriers received another music tribute when a prolific musician and teacher, Harry J. Lincoln of Philadelphia, wrote “The Letter Carriers March and Two Step” in 1926. The museum has a copy of Lincoln’s sheet music for this piece in its collection.

The year 1881 must have been a hard one for older Americans. Two songs were published that year urging more letter writing. A.W. Filson’s “Write the Old Folks at Home” and the slightly more pleading “Write to the Sad Old Folks at Home” by Robert Hornung and Theodor Wolfram.

The Post Office Department’s brand new free rural delivery system inspired M.C. Bales to write the “Rural Mail Route Waltz” in 1902, the year that Rural Free Delivery became an official service. And a couple of decades after America’s flying mail service began Jimmy Mundy and Benny Goodman set America swinging to their “Air Mail Special”

But aside from a song here or there touting the postal system or its employees, the bulk of America’s postal songs have focused on what was most important to the people – the mail itself. Songs of gratitude for good news delivered by mail are side by side to ballads of despair for the letter that wasn’t written. Max Sturm’s mournful 1886 song “Letter That Never Came” expressed sorrow at not receiving a letter from a loved one. Sorrow that would find itself put into song again a half a century later in Frankie Brown’s “No Letter Today.”

From joy to sorrow, from wondering if a letter will ever come, or wondering what it will say when it gets there, musical mail songs have been created using a wide range of musical styles. From marches to ragtime, swing to pop, songwriters have used the innate drama of the pause before opening a letter, or the wait for the carrier’s footsteps outside the door to see if someone was thinking of you as the backdrop for stories of mail’s role in our lives.

“Good Mister Mailman” by Joseph E. Howard, 1898

 

“The Old Postmaster” by Joseph W. Stern, 1900

Very Special Deliveries

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

On February 19, 1914, May Pierstorff, just short of her 6th birthday, was “mailed” from her parents’ home in Grangeville, Idaho to her grandparents’ house about 73 miles away for just 53-cents worth of stamps. May’s parents were taking advantage of parcel post service, which began just the year before. In the early years of this service, customers and postal officials were still getting used to how the service could be used. But mailing children?

Young May Pierstorff, the most famous of the parcel post children packages.

Amazingly enough May wasn’t the only child entrusted to parcel post service. But before images of babies bouncing around in mailbags start appearing in your head, the children whose families entrusted them to the Post Office Department were “mailed” by traveling with trusted postal workers (in May’s case, a relative who worked on the Railway Mail trains).

The first child “mailed” in the U.S. was an unnamed boy in Batavia, Ohio in mid January 1913. The son of Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Beauge of Glen Este, Ohio was carried by Rural Free Delivery carrier Vernon Little to its grandmother, Mrs. Louis Beague about a mile away. The boy’s parents paid 15-cents for the stamps and even insured their son for $50.

On January 27 Mr. and Mrs. J.W. Savis of Pine Hollow, Pennsylvania entrusted their daughter to rural carrier James Byerly out of Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, who delivered her safely that afternoon to relatives in Clay Hollow. The daughter cost her parents 45-cents to send.

In spite of that busy start, the rest of the year passed without postal officials having to face other children traveling by mail. May’s travels in early 1914, along with an inquiry about mailing children that month inspired Postmaster General Burleson to issue directions to the nation’s postmasters that all human beings were barred from the mails.

Of course for some, laws are meant to be broken. And merely a month after the “no-humans” announcement, rural carrier B.H. Knepper in Maryland carried a 14-pound baby from its grandmother’s home in Clear Spring to the mother’s house in Indian Springs, twelve miles away. A local newspaper reported that the baby slept through the entire trip.

A year later, the longest trip by a child “mailed” through parcel post was made by six-year-old Edna Neff. She traveled from her mother’s home in Pensacola, Florida, to her father’s home in Christainburg, Virginia. There is little information on the specifics of Edna’s trip, which was made by railway mail train other than her weight, recorded as just under the 50-pound limit resulting in a trip cost 15 cents in parcel post stamps.

The year of 1915 was a banner year for mailing children. Unburdened by regulations now on the books against mailing children, two more trips were made after Edna’s that year. In March rural carrier Charles Hayes of Tarkin, Missouri carried Mr. and Mrs. Albert Combs’ daughter Helen by parcel post for 10-cents. Hayes delivered Helen to her grandmother, Mrs. C.H. Combs, whose home was also on his route. That September, three-year-old Maud Smith made her parcel post journey when she traveled from her grandparents’ home to her mother’s, Mrs. Celina Smith of Jackson, Kentucky. A local newspaper noted that this particular trip was being investigated by the postal officials. Superintendent John Clark of the Cincinnati division of the Railway Mail Service asked the Caney, Kentucky postmaster to explain who he allowed the child onto the train as parcel post in clear violation of postal rules. Perhaps it was the public notice of the investigation, but for whatever reason, it appears to have been the final case of “child mail.”
 

Carriers and photographs had fun with the idea of “mailing” babies. This image is not only a part of a collection of Smithsonian photographs on Flickr, but is the most popular photograph from the Institution in that collection.

 

This “baby in the mail” fun photograph takes the idea a step farther by having the baby be the letter carrier.

 

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.

USPS Unveils Inverted Jenny Stamp

Director of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum Allen Kane and USPS Director of Stamp Services and Corporate Licensing Susan McGowan unveiled the preliminary design for an Inverted Jenny stamp at the APS AmeriStamp Expo stamp show in Louisville, Kentucky today (Friday, January 18, 2013).

 

$2 Stamp Collecting: Inverted Jenny Stamp (Stamp design reflects preliminary artwork and is subject to change.)

The preliminary design includes replicas of America’s most famous stamp and one of the world’s most famous errors. The margins of the stamp sheet feature images related to the 24-cent Curtiss Jenny stamp and the 1918 inaugural airmail service, including pilot Major Reuben Fleet of the Army Air Corps and the Washington DC – Philadelphia - New York airmail flight route. In the upper left corner is the main post office in Washington, DC, at the time, which would process airmail and currently houses the National Postal Museum.

This famous U.S. stamp printing error occurred at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing during the week of May 6-13, 1918. One sheet of one hundred stamps with an inverted image of a blue airplane escaped detection. The error occurred either when an inverted carmine frame sheet

The 24-cent Curtiss Jenny invert error

was fed into the small hand press for the second impression or when the plate printer, after inking and wiping, placed an inverted blue vignette plate into the press. The biplane featured in the design is the famous JN-4-H "Jenny," modified by replacing the front cockpit with a mail compartment.

Another post office in Washington, DC, sold the error sheet on May 14, 1918, to William T. Robey. The lucky collector sold it to Eugene Klein, a Philadelphia stamp dealer, for $15,000. Klein then sold the sheet to collector Colonel H.R. Green and recommended breaking the sheet into blocks and singles to sell. The entire discovery and sales received enormous press.

The new stamp sheet will be issued on September 22, opening day of the National Postal Museum’s William H. Gross Stamp Gallery. The Gross Stamp Gallery will be the world’s largest stamp gallery. A block of four of the original 1918 Inverted Jenny will be on permanent display courtesy of Bill Gross.

 

 Click here for USPS press release.