For over 20 years, I have had a fascination with the operation of the original Post Office Department in the 18th & 19th century, and have accumulated a variety of papers used at many post office during those times.

I started to post this in another ongoing thread,

https://stamporama.com/discboard/disc_ma ...

but realized it needed to be in its own thread.

I have often hoped I would find an old post office with an archive of old forms (even from the mid 20th century would be great), and have come close. One newly appointed postmaster at a small PO in West Texas told me how he and his son had hauled several pickup truck loads of old post office papers to the city dump the previous year after taking over from the previous postmaster who had been there for 30 years (and apparently never cleaned out anything!).

The one time I did hit paydirt was with this group of papers from the post office at Newburgh, Maine. Virtually everything was dated between 1840 to 1860. It turned out that the building which housed the post office had been a General Store, and was owned by the same family from 1820 until 2020! The post office closed about 1910, but was kept as an informal museum which retained everything, until a new generation inherited it in 2020, and they wanted to sell it, so they had to clear it out, and there was one heck of an auction.

I missed the original auction, but picked these up in a Chicago based auction. Unfortunately, the guy in Chicago had only bought one small group, which was this and one other less interesting lot (I bought both) Since, I have bought other remnants of these PO papers from Newburgh, Maine from three different eBay sellers who apparently were at the original sale. Amazing how these things work out.



The bulk of these papers were the postmaster's retained copy of his Quarterly Report to POD headquarters, reporting mails received and handled. Here is one example. There were over 80 of these.



During this time period, when the post office generated funds in excess of the postmasters compensation, he did not send the surplus to Post Office Dept headquarters in Washington, DC, but actually paid them to the mail contractor who delivered and picked up mail at that post office. The contractor had to give a receipt for the funds received. Here is an example of the receipt for the previous document. There was a matching receipt for almost every one of the report. They were carefully folded inside each report, all of which had apparently been tied together with string until the auction, when everything was untied for display. That action from about 1860 preserved these in a marvelous manner. This is one of the largest accumulations of these type reports that I have ever encountered.



I spent several days carefully unfolding and pressing the creases out with a steam iron and distilled water on low heat. They are now carefully archived in archival book dust jackets (they are each about 15" by 8" in size) and then housed in an artist portfolio.

The mail contractor collected these surplus funds from all post offices on his mail route, then submitted a report to the postmaster at the head (starting point) of the Mail Route. If he collected more than his contact amount, he paid it to the postmaster who managed the mail route there. If he received less, the postmaster would arrange to pay him the outstanding balance he was owed. All financial activity took place at the lowest level of authority practical. A very efficient system.

During this 1840-1860 period, the Postmaster was Jabez Knowlton. His son, Amos Knowlton, became postmaster in 1866. I found his Postmaster Commissison on eBay from another seller who had acquired it at the auction.



Edited to add that the commission was signed by Alexander W Randall, who was an assistant Postmaster General at the time. He succeeded Dennison as Postmaster General several years later.

As you might imagine, I really get into this stuff. e

MikeL