# 2780 - 1993 29c National Postal Museum: Expanding Nation

U.S. #2780
1993 Expanding Nation – National Postal Museum

• Pictures a Civil War drummer boy writing a letter home and other images from those days of the US mail system
• One of four stamps honoring the opening of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum with historic items, images, and themes from US stamp and mail history

Stamp Category:  Commemorative
Set:  National Postal Museum
Value:  29¢, First Class Mail Rate
First Day of Issue:  July 30, 1993
First Day City:  Washington, DC
Quantity Issued:  150,000,000
Printed by:  American Bank Note Company
Printing Method:  Offset, Intaglio
Format:  Pane of 20 (Horizontal 4 across, 5 down)
Perforations:  11 x 10.9 (Bickel reciprocating stroke perforator)
Tagging:  Prephosphored paper (taggant added to tan offset ink)

Why the stamp was issued:  To commemorate the opening of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum with images of subjects related to Civil War-era mail service.

About the stamp design:  The main subject of this design is a portrait of a Civil War soldier writing a letter home using a drumhead as a desk.  Behind him is a woman’s portrait (representing his wife or sweetheart).  The upper left corner of the stamp design pictures a Pony Express rider, and an engraved vignette of an 1851 Concord stagecoach can be seen at the lower right.

Special design details:  The image of the Civil War soldier was created using a photograph taken by Lou Nolan of 14-year-old Michael Christopher Harris of Woodbury, New Jersey.  Harris was attending a Civil War reenactment event in Winchester, Virginia with his father in spring 1992 when Nolan saw them:  “…he was dressed as a Union drummer boy… I asked him and his father whether they would mind letting me take a few pictures of him sitting and writing at his drum.  They were tickled to death for me to do that.”  Harris’s costume went on to earn him first place at the uniform competition for being the most authentic.  Both Harris and his father also took part in battle re-enactments along with hundred of extras who appeared in battle scenes in the 1993 motion picture Gettysburg.

The stagecoach on the stamp was taken from a National Postal Museum poster while the Pony Express rider and horse were created using paintings by Western artist Frederic Remington as reference.  Schlecht expecially was inspired by Remington’s 1909 oil painting, The Stampede.  Schlecht said “Nobody ever did a better running horse than that.”

First Day City:  This stamp, along with the rest of the National Postal Museum set, was issued in Washington, DC, at the opening of the museum.  Four First Day of Issue cancellations were available:  two standard handstamps, one pictorial cancellation labeled “National Postal Museum Station” picturing a boy dropping a letter in a mailbox, and the fourth labeled “Ice Cream Station” picturing a bitten ice cream bar surrounded by ice and the words “Good Humor Ice Cream.”  While the ice cream cancellation may seem strange, Good Humor Ice Cream was at the National Postal Museum opening and has been an avid supporter of the Smithsonian Institution, including donating to its archives in 1992.

About the National Postal Museum set:  Due to its subject matter, this set of stamps went through an extensive design process before the final versions were chosen.  They also went through two different designers, beginning with Lou Nolan and ending with Richard Schlecht.  After many rounds of back and forth with the postal service, Nolan said “I had worked on it for a long time… I had submitted quite a few designs to them, and they would come back with more ideas, try this, try that, and I don’t know – I just didn’t think I was satisfying them… I’ve enjoyed doing what I’ve done; let somebody else have a try at it.”  When Schlecht was chosen as his successor, Nolan said, “There were no hard feelings at all.  I’ve known Dick (Schlect) for years.  He’s a wonderful artist, and I have all the respect in the world for him.  He has a different technique.  I was tickled to death at how the stamps turned out.”

Schlecht himself said of the designs, “It was the most complicated set of stamps I’ve done… Everybody was kind of out of breath by the time it was over.  The hard part was just nailing down all those concepts and making sure we covered everything, and then having to satisfy the Postal Service and the museum people and other folks involved.  It just took a while to work all that out and run it by everybody and let everybody have their input.”

History the stamp represents:  The method of sorting mail on a moving train was a great innovation that developed just as railroads were connecting every corner of the country.  In 1838, Congress approved an act designating all United States railroad routes as postal routes.  A significant improvement over the traditional method of delivering mail by horse-drawn coaches, the railway service signaled the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Like many of the other changes the Post Office Department instituted, the railway service was created out of adesire to provide a faster and more reliable service to its patrons.  Originally, trains merely transported mail from one destination to another.  However, by 1862, “Railway Post Offices” or RPOs had been created.  As trains sped across the countryside, postal clerks sorted and dispatched mail on specially designed railroad cars.

Catcher arms at railway platforms enabled clerks to pick up mail sacks from towns as the train whizzed by.  Sacks of letters destined for a town were tossed onto a platform from the moving train.  The clerks took great pride in their work and could sort up to 600 pieces of mail an hour, and up until the mid-1900s, Railway Mail Service dominated the movement of mail.