1898 Revenues: Cancel for March 17: Tradesmen's National Bank

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Cancel for March 17: Tradesmen's National Bank

In 2009, when this site first began, and into 2012, I regularly posted a "cancel of the day". A stamp was posted with a cancel for that day (except for the year, of course), and a bit of history was often given about the company or individual that applied the cancel. That hasn't been done in years, partially because I haven't posted in so long, but also because I just stopped organizing posts around the dates of the cancels.

Today's stamp is a rather random stamp that fell out of a packet that has been in storage for over a decade. The cancel is so clean that I figured I needed to feature it here, but it took me a couple of days before I realized that the cancel's date, March 17, was soon approaching and that I could run the first cancel of the day post in at least 7 years.

TRADESMENS NAT'L BANK,

MAR 17 1902

PHILA.

The stamp is on an incomplete document fragment.

I was getting ready to write about Tradesmens National Bank when I took a second look at the copy of R184 above and wondered about the color of this series of stamps. Is this the color gray as Scott tells us it is? I don't even see a gray undertone. More like a light, yellow khaki or tan. As a young collector I was confused by this color designation, and I still am today. Whatever the case, this series of dollar documentary stamps, due to their color and size, are perfect backgrounds for cancels, partially explaining why so many stamps from this series are highlighted on this site.

Back to the point of today's March 17 cancel. Tradesmens National no longer exists as a bank. But it never closed; it became part of a series of mergers that has led to the creation of PNC, the seventh largest bank in the United States, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1958, Tradesmens and Provident Trust merged to form Provident Tradesmens National Bank, thereafter through further mergers becoming today's PNC.

In a post from 2010, Provident Life and Trust Company was highlighted. The focus of the post was on the dating style of the cancels they used, which employed Quaker style dating that did not used the romanized pagan names of the months, and instead used numbered months. The stamp below was included in the post and is a good example of Quaker dating:

THE PROVIDENT LIFE & TRUST COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA

11 Mo

1898

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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.