Post by littleriverphil on Sept 28, 2014 19:42:59 GMT
I began collecting while in the 3rd grade, worldwide, of course. Quickly outgrew the binder paper "Album" that we made in school, and moved to a Harris 'Ambassador' and by the end of the year I was looking at adding blank pages. During my school years, I stayed with commericial printed albums. Then came college, marriage, and children.
When the kids were older, and we were in our own first home, I started another collection, this time USA mint. Again, new stamp production kept me replacing pages and updating albums.As the kids got older and needed more of everything, my collecting moved back into the back of the closet shelf.
Finally the kids are out of school and are married, and I could begin collecting again. By then the advent of mounts was in full bloom and all of my mint stamps had hinge marks on them.It was about this time when I also began reading more and more philatec press and learning more about the stamps I collected. Bought my first Scott, Specialized at this time. Time for another direction, and I began narrowing my specialities down a bit further. I have always loved the intaglio printed stamps, and used the change from intaglio printing to flatplate prtinting as a end point.
Almost as soon as I decided to limit my collection, I stumbled onto a shoebox full of covers, all US, from the 1880 to 1900. One evening with that box of covers and I was hooked into another collection. I resisted for several years, and just browsed the auction catalogues, just reading the lot descriptions of covers, and bidding on used banknotes stamps. As I slowely filled most of those empty spaces, I could see that I would soon have a complete set of Banknotes, and so I began looking further into each listing at the varieties to further expand my collection.
Then one fine afternoon, a friend and I went over to the County seat to paly golf at the only 18 hole golf course in Mendocino County, but first, he had to take care of some business near the county courthouse. I found a parking space next door to where he needed to go. As he took care of his business, I noticed that I had parked in front of a stamp and coin shop. I went in to take a look. The shop owner was really a coin dealer who had been convinced by a friend to carry some philatic material.
He didn't have much in stamps, but he did have several large boxes of covers. The first box I looked through, I came across some covers with Mendocino County postmarks. That was it, and my Mendocino County postal history collection was born.
These covers are from that little shop.
I returned to that shop and got all of the Mendocino county postmarks that he had, and all of the Wells Fargo covers that were addressed to Eugene Brown the next day. Over the next several years I searched very hard for more covers from my county, but loggers don't write a lot of letters. I subscribed to La Posta and ran an ad for Mendocino County covers. I also bought a copy of the two volume book by John H. Williams California Town Postmarks 1849-1935.
When I got the Williams book I found out that the Fort Bragg cover was pretty early, as the Post office there opened for the 3rd time on Nov. 11, 1885, and that the Circular Date Stamp ( CDS ) used was 63 days earlier than listed in the book. That the Cleone county postmark is highly sought after, and that the ornate triple oval of Westport was almost three months earlier than listed. The real gem however was the steamship carried "out of the mails" Wells Fargo cover. Evidently Mr Dutard didn't care to wait and sent his mistive up north on the first ship out of San Francisco bound for Mendocino.