1898 Revenues: E. S. Wells: Another Documentary Printed Cancel

Saturday, August 30, 2014

E. S. Wells: Another Documentary Printed Cancel

The pursuit of documentary printed cancels continues. Today is presented a new cancel to me from the proprietary medicine firm E. S. Wells. The term medicine here is used somewhat loosely, as the firm was well known for making a rat poison it called "Rough on Rats".

The firm used printed cancels on proprietary stamps, and used what appears to be the same canceling plate on 2 cent documentary stamps, likely for their use on checks. Blocks that include the manuscript-style red printed cancel are illustrated here on the 5/8c proprietary and the 2c documentary. In both cases it appears the 1898 plate was used. But for the 2c, part of the second 8 has been removed so that the number more closely resembles a 9. If anybody has an example of an E. S. Wells 2c documentary on a check, please write or send a scan of the check to 1898revenues@gmail.com. We'll post the scan here.

1898

E. S. Wells

JUL 11

1899

E. S. Wells

The last 8 in 1898 has had the lower left portion of the number planed off to resemble a 9

Sheet music cover the E. S. Wells smash hit, Rough on Rats

From Matt Reynolds, in a comment at the East Carolina Digital Collection website:

"The Wells Company, based in Jersey City New Jersey, offered a wide range of products including Rough on Corns, Rough on Itch, Rough on Toothache, and Wells’ Health Renewer. Wells promoted all of the company products far and wide in both newspapers and via advertising cards. He even produced a Rough on Rats song touting the effectiveness of the poison, which included the chorus: “R-r-rats! Rats! Rats! Rough on Rats, Hang your dogs and drown your cats: We give a plan for every man to clear his house with Rough on Rats” Sadly, some purchasers of the product chose to misuse it both to take their own lives and to take the lives of others. The most notorious case of the latter was the poisoning of Ada Appelgate by her husband Everett Appelgate and his mistress Frances Creighton. Both were convicted of murder in 1936 and were sent to the electric chair at New York’s Sing-Sing prison shortly after.

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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.