In the dark of the night around 11pm Union Pacific’s Overland Limited train was stopped just south of Omaha, Nebraska by a pair of men holding pistols and wearing handkerchief masks. When the train stopped, another pair appeared and demanded the mail clerks open up the door to the mail car. They refused and one of the thieves shot out a window in the car door. The Railway Post Office clerks complied with the order, opening the door. The thieves took seven registered mail pouches from the train, sending the clerks and the train back on their way, ordering the engineer to return the train to the Omaha station. The registered mail pouches were destined for New York, Chicago and Washington, DC. Continue reading

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 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. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

David Battle, whose design concept was used for the 19 72 Peace Corp 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. Continue reading

On April 18, 1891, near Kipton station, 40 miles west of Cleveland, Ohio, the fast mail train #14 collided with the Toledo Express. The fast mail was running at full speed, and the Toledo express was almost at a spot where it would traditionally pull over on a siding to let the fast mail pass. The massive collision killed nine men, six of them postal clerks working on the fast mail train. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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.... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

By: Calvin Mitchell, NPM Research Associate On January 1, 2013 at 9:00 A.M. the United States Postal Service (USPS) held the first- day ceremony for the Emancipation Proclamation commemorative forever stamp in the magnificent Rotunda Gallery of the National Archives. The selection of January 1, 2013 as the first- day of issue was historically consistent as the date marked the 150th Anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln. Scheduling the first- day ceremony on New Year’s Day resulted in the stamp’s release on a Federal holiday, which is a rare event, but scheduling the first-... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator On December 9, 1887, 125 years ago, a gang of train robbers stopped and boarded the St. Louis, Arkansas and Texas Railway train just as it began to pull out of Genoa, Arkansas, 30 miles north of Texarkana. After forcing the train to a stop, the men ordered the engineer to set fire to the Southern Express Company car unless the man inside surrendered and unlocked the door. He did so, and the thieves proceeded to gather up a few thousand dollars from the car. As one of the men began to make his... Continue reading

By Reema Ghazi, Youth Experience Coordinator EdLab has officially kick-started its partnership with the Capitol Hill Cluster Schools. Since September, we've been working with teachers and students at Peabody Pre-K, Watkins Elementary, and Stuart Hobson Middle School to introduce them to mission-based learning. The kindergarten class we are working with at Peabody Pre-K will be doing a mission to uncover and raise awareness on the history of their school. An essential part of this process is encouraging students to be curious about their surroundings, so one of our first steps in this mission project was to explore the statue sitting... Continue reading

By Lindsay Rowinski, Museum Technician As a part of the preservation department at the National Postal Museum, my main focus is preparing all of the two-dimensional objects for exhibition in the new William H. Gross Stamp Gallery. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done behind the scenes before the new Gross Gallery can open in 2013. As the amount of people and material continues to grow, the amount of workspace in the Preservation Department continues to shrink. As a result, we are now working both on and off site to meet our goals to prepare the new... Continue reading

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator On November 8, 1958, an employee of Harry Winston’s New York City jewelry store mailed an ordinary looking package at the mail city post office. The package was anything but ordinary. It held one of the most famous gems in America, the Hope Diamond. The employee paid $145.29 to mail the package. Postage accounted for only $2.44 of the total cost. The rest was for insurance totaling $1 million. This valuable gem traveled safe and sound to the museum through the US mail. In Washington, the package was delivered by local letter carrier James... Continue reading

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator By the mid 20th century the Post Office Department’s Railway Mail Service (RMS) had been moving and processing mail across the country for almost a century. The service had long shown that having men sort mail while on board moving trains helped speed mail service. But by the end of the Second World War, train service was declining, taking the railway mail train cars with it. More and more mail was being moved aboard aircraft. Postal officials wondered if there was a way of taking the sorting expertise of the men riding the RMS... Continue reading

Although the title – Smithsonian Contributions to History and Technology, No. 56: The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia: select papers, 2010-2011, the latest volume for the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press- is a lively collection of papers that examine postal history. Rarely do scholars of postal organizations and systems meet and discuss their ideas and research with scholars of philately. In an attempt to bridge this gap, the National Postal Museum and the American Philatelic Society hosted the first Winton M. Blount Postal History symposium on 3-4 November 2006 to bring together these two research groups to discuss postal history.... Continue reading

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator The mail train car, following the explosion and subsequent fire. Most people think of train robberies as a 19th century event, complete with Butch and Sundance blowing up a train car, or Jesse James and his gang taking on the evil railroad companies. But a violent and tragic train robbery attempt was made in 1923. On October 11 of that year, three men, twins Roy and Ray DeAutremont and their young brother Hugh ambushed Southern Pacific train #13 in southern Oregon, just as the train was emerging from a tunnel. The detonator used by... Continue reading