Cancel Correction: The Turners of Philadelphia

In the first year of this site, a 2 cent documentary stamp was featured with a prominent cancel "The Turners of Philadelphia".  At the time I figured I was looking at a cancel by the German-American organization called The Turners, whose main purpose was to promote physical fitness.  However, in the intervening years, and with my personal discovery of a 5/8 cent proprietary stamp with the same "The Turners" cancel, it is clear that The Turners of Philadelphia was a very different business that the German-American one.  In fact, Philly Turners can be found in the proprietary focused Battlehsip Desk Reference data base.  So today I will reprise that original post, and make a correction to the identity of the cancel on the R164.

THE TURNERS

OF

PHILADELPHIA

-1898-

The Turners of Philadelphia was a prominent proprietary medicine manufacturer.  The Merck Report of April 1, 1898 featured a full page story regarding the firm that was originally published in the Philadelphian.  

While I got the cancel ID wrong back in 2009, what's become clear is that it is possible to put together an interesting collection of battleship stamps cancelled by firms that used both proprietary and documentary stamps.  Most commonly, the examples come from pharmaceutical companies that required them for the taxes on their products but also for financial and other taxed documentary transactions.  Examples on this site include Johnson & Johnson and McKesson & Robbins, and now, The Turners of Philadelphia.  

Far less common are organizations or firms whose primary business was not pharmaceuticals but might have used proprietaries on occasion.  The Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway evidently used one cent proprietaries in a pinch when they likely couldn't get the documetary versions for their bills of lading.

Looking back, here is a reprise of the original errant The Turners post from 2009:

Cancel for October 25: The Turners of Philadelphia

THE TURNERS

OF

PHILADELPHIA.

-1898-

OCT 25 1898

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Cancelled 50 years after the founding of The Turners organization.




US commemorative postage stamp issued in 1948 for the 100th anniversary of the founding of The Turners. (Scott 979)

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Many Germans immigrated to the United States following the failure of the 1848 revolution designed to introduce democratic reforms into the governments of the German states. Among these immigrants were members of the Turners, an athletic and political organization founded in Germany during the second decade of the 19th century. Turners quickly established societies (known as Turnverein or Turngemeinde) in the American cities in which they settled. These societies served as athletic, political, and social centers for German communities in the United States. The Turners most important contribution to American life in their communities had been the advocacy of physical education and fitness. Turners successfully lobbied local school boards in many cities for the inclusion of physical education classes in the curriculum and Turner instructors served as the directors of physical education programs in many school systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

---from the American Turners Local Societies Collection, 1866-2006. Abstract and full document on this organization can be found here: http://www-lib.iupui.edu/files/u51/mss038.pdf.