1898 Revenues: Cancels: Tobacco Companies

Showing posts with label Cancels: Tobacco Companies. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Cigar and Tobacco Cancels: Joseph Whitcomb & Company of Springfield, Massachusetts

JOSEPH WHITCOMB & CO.

OCT

1899

Springfield, Mass.

from The Pnyx, the Springfield High School Yearbook of 1901

Nothing like advertising tobacco to high school kids, and, to those same kids as they grow older and reminisce, look through their yeabook, and think about the good times. I wonder if the Sacklers ever placed ocycontin ads in yearbooks. The Pnyx, by the way, is a hill in Athens where the ancient Athenians would gather for public assemblies.

Sunday, February 16, 2025

Cigar and Liquor Merchants: Walker Brothers & Company of New Orleans

Walker Bros. & Co.

OCT 11 1898

New Orleans, La.

Sunday, January 5, 2025

R155 & Tobacco Company Cancels: N. R. Bowman & Company of Lynchburg, Virginia

N. R. BOWMAN

JUL 23 1898

& COMPANY

As of 2024, N. R. Bowman & Company does not have much of a trail on the internet, especially regarding the business of the firm and any sort of collateral material that might accompany this post. However, the company is reported to have experienced prosperity in the tobacco business, and Mr. Bowman himself was president of the Lynchburg City Council and on the board of a leading town bank.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Another R155 Bullseye

THE FAR. & SHIP. L. TOB. WH. CO.

JUL

1898

CINCINNATI.O.

Dave Thompson sent in this cancel this morning that he found hiding behind another stamp in a recent Ebay lot he acquired. I've been trying to figure out the meaning of this cancel, as I am certain he has been doing too, but with no luck so far.

Can anybody help identify this company?

Editors note 6:00 PM Nairobi time: Tim Kohler ID'd the L. TOB. WH. CO. portion as Leaf Tobacco Warehouse Company. A quick search yielded Farmers and Shippers Leaf Tobacco Warehouse Company.

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.