Washington, D.C.
Railway Mail Service Clerk Cap Badge, 1898
Greetings from the Smithsonian National Postal Museum (NPM) in Washington, DC. I’m here researching material culture relating to my dissertation on religion-state relations through the lens of Sunday mail delivery from 1810 through 1912.
Railway Mail Service Clerk Cap Badge, 1898
The Railway Mail Service (RMS) badges from 1898 and 1899 make the postal carriers and clerks that I read about in other archives seem more real.
US Post Office Department Washington, DC, Owney Tag, 1892
Furthermore, NPM houses dozens of “Owney” tags, including this one from Washington, DC, in 1892. Owney was a dog who became an unofficial mascot of the Post Office during the late-nineteenth century.
Although Owney hasn’t found his way into my dissertation yet, he found himself all over the country, and his tags reflect how the Post Office connected the United States through the nineteenth century. You can read more about him and see more of his tags on the Smithsonian Institute’s website.
Owney wearing some of his tags.
An ideal find in the NPM collections would be to uncover mailboxes or stamps that were used for specifically Sunday mail, but none of those so far. Hope you enjoyed this mail about mail!
