1898 Revenues: Cancel for June 12: Louisville and Nashville Railroad

Friday, June 11, 2010

Cancel for June 12: Louisville and Nashville Railroad

L. & N.

JUN

1900

R. R. CO.

When I was a boy growing up in New Orleans and on the Mississippi gulf coast, L&N and Illinois Central trains and their locomotives produced the most common sights and sounds among all railroads. The L&N was one of the greatest of the southern railroads. Its mainline cut south through Alabama to the Gulf Coast. The Illinois Central ran south through Mississippi to get to New Orleans. The L&N played a major role in the Civil War and in World War II. But like almost all of the great early railroads, the L&N has been consolidated with others. The L&N is now a part of CSX.

1896 L&N Route Map

Author's Note: From the point of view of somebody who grew up hunting and fishing in the Louisiana marshes, enjoying summers and weekends on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and playing on the beaches of the Florida panhandle, BP's CEO, Tony "I want my life back" Hayward, can go to hell.

See this post from over a year ago for the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad. Ship island is a Mississippi Gulf Coast barrier island that might disappear because of the oil spill. The oil will coat the island, destroy the vegetation and grasses that hold it together, and wave action will erode it to oblivion.

It is fascinating to watch people like the Texas Governor call this disaster an "Act of God", when every aspect of the rig and its operation were man-made, and for the head of the US Chamber of Commerce to call for the American tax payer to pay for the cleanup. These "leaders" have no idea what they are dealing with. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives that will be permanently hurt by this disaster, and they will have no time for politicians like the Governor of Mississippi that continue to downplay the impact of the spill. Democrats and Republicans alike are on the dole of the oil companies, but eventually the politicians, oil firms and especially BP will realize that the populist anger that will continue to mount over this spill will overwhelm even the lobbying and campaign contribution power of the oil firms.

From where I live in Nairobi, Kenya, I can't even watch the news anymore. The news from the Gulf either makes me depressed or stirs me to anger as the places of so many thousands of hours of my childhood memories are destroyed.

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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.