1898 Revenues: Cancel for November 25: Provident Life & Trust Company Of Philadelphia

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Cancel for November 25: Provident Life & Trust Company Of Philadelphia

THE PROVIDENT LIFE & TRUST COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA.

11 Mo

1898

Interesting big cancel, with a long name spelled out in a CDS.

Top it off with "11 Mo" for November, a Quaker dating method in which the names of the months are not used. Provident Life and Trust was likely a Quaker owned and operated company.

David Thompson sent me this image of an R175 with a similar cancel to that above.

Another example of a Provident Life cancel.

From Wikipedia:

The Quaker "plain calendar," or "scriptural calendar," differs from what Quakers refer to as the "world's calendar". The plain calendar uses numbers to denominate the names of the months and days of the week. It emerged in the 17th century in England in the general non-conformist movement but became closely identified with Friends by the end of the 1650s and continuously since that time.

The plain calendar does not use names of calendar units derived from the traditional names due to their derivation from pagan deities. Instead, it uses ancient terminology as found in the bible where the days of the week were numbered; for example, Jesus' followers went to the tomb early on the First Day of the week. From this, the plain calendar week begins with First Day (equivalent to the traditional Christian Sunday) and ends on Seventh Day (Saturday). Similarly the calendar's months run concurrently with the traditional months albeit named First Month, Second Month, etc..

***

Provident Life and Trust Company: In 1922 The Provident Life and Trust Company split into two companies: the Provident Mutual Life Insurance Company and the Provident Trust Company. Eventually through mergers and name changes the Provident Trust Company would become the Provident Naional Bank and eventually the Provident National Corporation. After Provident National Corporation merged with Pittsburgh National Corporation in 1982, the merged companies became PNC, one of the largest banks in the United States today.

Provident Life & Trust Company building,

409 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia

Built in 1879 and demolished in 1959

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Unusual Ink on the 1898 Series Dollar Values

THESE STAMPS ARE BOTH SCOTT R191! From fugitive ink to color changelings with unknown origins. These are both copies of R191. Can only exposure to light produce the color changes you see in stamp on the right? Or possibly a soak in bleach or other chemical? I doubt it. These stamps have so many examples of changelings that there must be something else happening. The ink used on this dark green series of stamps was different than that known on any other BEP printed stamps, never mind the varnish square. It is likely the BEP was experimenting with ink on this issue. Inks are discussed further if you click on the stamps.

Collecting Cancels

Welcome to 1898 Revenues, a website that features the stamps used to pay the Spanish-American war taxes imposed by the US Government starting in July, 1898. But while this site features those stamps in general, a focus is on their cancels, and on the firms that applied them. Unlike US postage stamps, which were canceled by the US Post Office and now Postal Service, revenue stamps were ordered to be canceled by their users in such a way that the identity of the user and the date was included in the cancel. This makes the collecting possibilities nearly endless, so that a single variety of stamp, for example, the 2 cent battleship stamp intended to pay documentary taxes, had potentially millions of different users, and therefore as many different cancels. Please browse the site and discover the collecting possibilities, made so much more accessible now through online sales. Cancels on these stamps have become much more interesting and accessible with the massive amounts of archival and historical data available on line. Rather than hours spent in libraries or with heavy volumes to identify cancels, search engines allow for cancel sleuthing at home.

Battleship Proprietary Printed Cancels: Updating the Joyce/Chappell Lists

In the 1950s, Morton Dean Joyce updated a list of printed cancels on the battleship proprietaries compiled by Clarence Chappell. Joyce's is a very long list consisting of more than one hundred companies and thousands of cancel dates. In the years since Joyce completed his list, many new cancel dates have been demonstrated to exist, and an update of the 1950s list is needed.

This site is attempting that update. Using the Joyce/Chappell lists and the former collection of Henry Tolman (ARA #25) as a base, a gradual effort will be made to post updated lists to the best of my knowledge, making a call for those that can contribute new dates and new images of those cancels.

Following in this column are quick links to excel files of these lists by company. Also are links to the posts that I have made on this blog regarding these companies and their cancels.