1898 Revenues: New England Railroads: A January Tour

Sunday, January 6, 2013

New England Railroads: A January Tour

Over the next two weeks or so this site will highlight railroads operating in New England at the turn of the century. By 1898, New England was thickly criss-crossed by a network of railroad track and railroad companies.

Big and dominant railroads like the New York Central controlled assets in the region, like the Boston and Albany, but smaller independent lines prospered as well, like the Rutland.

Railroads featured:

Boston & Albany Railroad
Boston & Providence Railroad
Boston & Maine Railroad
Old Colony Railway
Central Vermont Railway
Maine Central Railroad
St. Johnsbury & Lake Champlain Railroad
New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad
Rutland Railroad

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For all those that have sent emails over the past week and a half, sorry for the unresponsiveness. The day after Christmas the family and I traveled to Egypt. We've just returned, after an all night flight from Cairo to Nairobi via Khartoum. I will catch up on emails over the next few days. I am swamped with work correspondence too, so stand by. Hope you are having a great new year!

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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.