Postcrossing Blog

Some months ago, we received a message from Janna (aka revode) who told us about her visit to a wonderful postcard exhibition at the Porter County Museum in Indiana! Sadly, we couldn’t go there ourselves… but the cheeky Little Mail Carriers were happy to jump in and volunteer for a guided tour. 😍 Here is the report from their latest adventure!

Hello everyone! We have arrived at the Porter County Museum in Valparaiso, Indiana! We heard that the PoCo Muse has an exhibit with hundreds of postcards on display until January 7, 2024 so we decided to come check it out!

The Porter County Museum was founded in 1916 and has over 20,000 objects in their collection related to the history and culture of Porter County, Indiana. With so many objects in the collection they rotate through what is on display frequently in order to tell as many stories as possible. When we visited, the Robert Cain Gallery was featuring art from the museum’s collection, the Eunice Slagle Gallery had the exhibit “Connections: Take a Closer Look”, and the Montague/Urshel Gallery featured (the exhibit that we traveled here for) “Ever Yours: Postcards from the Golden Age”.

Before searching out the postcards, we explored the Robert Cain Gallery, admiring the work of many Porter County artists who worked to capture scenes from the area. The art in the Cain Gallery rotates out every three months, so that there are always new things to see.

Walking through the museum to get to the postcards, we had to journey through the “Connections” exhibit where seemingly different objects from the museum’s collection are paired together with a variety of connections between them. This concept allows for a wide range of objects to be on display. Did you know that there has been a Popcorn Festival in Valparaiso every September since 1979?

One of the first objects we came across in “Connections” was just our size! It is a scale model of the Maxwell/Remster Dairy Barn which was made by John Remster Sr. for his son John Remster Jr. in the 1950s. The barn can be opened up and played with and has been played with by every generation of the Remster family since its creation! Unfortunately, the barn it is modeled after no longer exists, though the milk house that was connected still stands.

These two pieces are connected by being not the final product. The linocut block (right) shows the artist, Hazel Hannell’s home that was in Furnessville, IN. No prints made from this block are known to exist, though you never know what might be in someone’s attic. The “Brenda Starr Reporter” comic strip was written and illustrated by Dale Messick who lived in Ogden Dunes, IN and inserted many local and personal references into her strip. The comic is in the final stage when it comes to the artist but not for the reader who ultimately would have seen this in the newspaper.

I swear that dog is watching us… 🤨

Check out this postmark stamp! It is from a town that no longer exists! The Tassinong Post office was founded the year after Porter County was founded in 1836, making it one of the earliest European settlements in the region. By 1884, almost all of the Porter County post offices were receiving their mail by rail, Tassinong was one of two still serviced by horseback. At the turn of the 20th century, when the Kankakee Marsh was being drained, the people of Tassinong refused to allow a proposed rail line to come to their town. The railroad, instead, bypassed the village and promoted a new town called Kouts. In 1903 the Tassinong post office was discontinued with all of the people relocating to somewhere serviced by rail.

Can you imagine checking someone out on this cash register? This is a nickel plate brass National Cash Register manufactured in 1914 sold to Wark’s Hardware in Valparaiso. The register worked perfectly at Wark’s until the early 1990s when someone broke into the store and broke the machine. Mr. Wark was not one to throw things away just because they didn’t work, so he disconnected one of the cash drawers from the machine and then it became a very large cash drawer until the store closed in the early 2000s.

Turns out she WAS watching us! This is Daisy the taxidermied dog and her eyes follow you! She is 90 years young and belonged to Helen Slanger of Portage, IN. She has been in the museum’s collection since the 1970s and has become an unofficial icon of the museum.

After journeying through ‘Connections’, we finally made it to “Ever Yours: Postcards from the Golden Age” — the exhibition we had been looking for! I don’t think that that postcard will fit in a regular mail slot…

Did you know that the first postcard was created in 1869!?

The PoCo Muse has over 2000 postcards in their collection. How did they narrow it down to the couple hundred on display? The wall of postcards that are behind us here were all received by one man, John Griffin, from Valparaiso, IN!

Did you know that approximately 1 billion penny postcards were sent every year between 1907 and 1915?

All of these flip books have both sides of a historic postcard with transcriptions! This one is a real photo postcard showing Lila and Thaddeus Whitlock posing with their dog Maxie. Lila sent this to her daughter Olive who was studying Nursing in Iowa in 1912. It is nice to see that people have felt conflicted about their selfies from the beginning; “I was so engaged in trying to keep Maxie still, I forgot to look pleasant.”

The exhibit makes the comparison of postcards to social media of today. The message is public since there is no envelope, the amount of text is limited to the space available on the card, and it is accompanied by an image which might be compared to today’s use of memes. Just like social media today there was pushback to the use of postcards with detractors saying that postcards symbolize “the triumph of the commonplace.”

This binder of postcards shows an individual’s collection of historic postcards that they loaned for the exhibit. In the early 20th century it was common to invite guests over and flip through your postcard collection. Similar to showing friends vacation photos.

After reading all of those postcards it was nice to color some for ourselves. Plus once we are done coloring the booklet, it can be turned into a postcard — just tape it shut and add a stamp on the back! On the wall above, the many postcards sent to the museum are on display, which helps to show that postcards are still thriving today! Hurray! 🎉

Thank you to the wonderful team at the Porter County Museum, and especially Visitor Experience Manager Quinn, for opening their arms to the Little Mail Carriers and showing them around. If you’re in the area, the exhibition will be there until January 7th, so don’t miss it!

The little ones are back on their envelope and on their way to their next adventure… who knows where they’ll pop up!

Hurray! The German Postcrossing stamp is out and about, and the first postcards sent with it must already be arriving to the nearest mailboxes this week, and making its way around the world to many others out there. It’s been a long while since we attended a stamp launch event, so we wanted to show you a little bit of what happened in this latest one, which took place in Berlin on October 7.

The Museum of Communications Berlin very generously offered to host the day’s events, which were organized in two parts: one formal event, and the more informal meetup of postcrossers.

For the formal part, representatives of the Ministry of Finance, Deutsche Post, the Bundesdruckerei (the company responsible for printing ID cards, money and stamps in Germany), as well as philatelic associations and Postcrossing gathered in a room of the museum. Some nice speeches were made by the different parts, including an introduction to the history of postcards by the Museum Director Mrs Anja Schaluschke, as well as a speech by state secretary Dr Carsten Pillath, who also distributed special stamp albums. Although designer Greta Gröttrup couldn’t attend the event, she prepared this cute video which sheds some light on her creative process:

After some pictures, it was time for the meetup to begin!

The Lichthof (the circular hall of the Museum of Communications) was set up with tables and chairs, and postcrossers started pouring in. Some took a guided tour of the museum, while others sat down to chat and write some postcards together. We had the chance to talk with most participants for a bit, and it was just lovely to meet different people and hear their Postcrossing stories.

There was even time for a group picture, taken by Sabine (aka kroete68)!

You can see more nice pictures of the event at the Museum’s Twitter page or on the respective meetup forum topic.

It was such a fun afternoon, with so many postcards being written and sent! Deutsche Post’s special post office was super busy stamping our cards and even ran out of the new stamps. 😅

A big thanks to the group of postcrossers who put such a nice event together, to those who came and made it brilliant, and to the Museum of Communications Berlin as well, for hosting all of us on this lovely day. Hurray!

We got some special commemorative folded cards featuring the new stamp, its cancellation marks and two detachable postcards created by the stamp designer — and have a few to give away! For a chance to win one, leave a comment below with some ideas for fun meetings and stamp celebrations. The giveaway will run for a week, and Paulo’s random number generator will select ten winners by this time next Sunday. Good luck!

Did you know that there is such a thing as a Pony Express Museum? The Little Mail Carriers heard about it and wouldn’t stop badgering us to go… so when Duane (aka DuaneThePhilatelist) offered to take them for a visit, they jumped on an envelope and off they went. Here they are, to tell you all the story of that adventure.

Hello from a sunny St. Joseph, Missouri! We’re super excited to be taking a special tour of the Pony Express Museum today, and hopefully will learn a lot about this unique way mail was delivered back in 1860. The museum is actually inside a part of the Pike’s Peak Stables, from which westbound Pony Express riders set out on their journey — how cool!

The Pony Express was a short-lived mail service that delivered newspapers, letters, telegrams as well as government and commercial mail using riders on horses across the United States, between St. Joseph in Missouri and Sacramento in California. Here is a superb map of their route, which you can see in great detail on Wikipedia:

Why was there a need for this service though? Well, back in 1848, gold was found in California, and a lot of people rushed there in search of the opportunities it brought. California was a new state at the time, and its population was growing fast, so there was a lot of demand to connect the west coast with the rest of the country.

At the time, the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company ran a stagecoach service between Kansas and Missouri, and they thought that starting an express service could perhaps earn them a more lucrative contract with the United States government. So the Pony Express was launched on April 3, 1860, when two riders left from the opposite ends of the route, and completed their journeys of 1800 miles (or 2896 kms) in 10 days — an amazing feat that many thought would not be possible!

The Pony Express recruitment announcements were infamous for asking for young, skinny men, and stating that orphans were preferred. Although the payment was high for the time, the journey through the country was perilous, as there were often ambushes and raids. Some riders were killed and many horses stolen or driven off in the Pauite War with the Pauite Indian tribe, whose territory the route crossed. The Pony Express was forced to temporarily suspend its services due to the conflict, and some mail was lost.

Because this was an express service and the journey had to be super fast, riders could not carry a lot of mail with them. To make changing horses quick at relay stations, a special saddle cover (called a mochila) was crafted, which had four mail pouches (or cantinas) on each corner. Mail had to fit in these small pouches, so that the riders could be quick!

One of the most famous Pony Express riders was William Cody… aka Buffalo Bill! He began working for the Pony Express at age 15 and is said to have completed the longest ride, covering 322 miles (518 km) in 21 hours and 40 minutes, using 21 horses. His adventures were immortalised (and are said to have been greatly exaggerated) in a novel that launched him into the spotlight. Many more books and movies were made about his adventures, in which he often wore a “cowboy” hat.

Mail carried by the Pony Express riders had its own cancellation mark, and in the museum you get the opportunity to sort the mail yourself. Postal work is hard, and we were exhausted…

The Pony Express never managed to secure that government contract their founders had hoped for, and became bankrupt after 18 months, closing on October 26, 1861 — just 2 days after the first transcontinental telegraph started its operations. Despite having run for only a short period of time, the service is immortalised in the tales of the American West, and the original route is even a national historical trail that crosses 8 states.

And that’s it for our wonderful visit to the Pony Express Museum — we are off to explore a bit more, and hope you all have the opportunity to visit someday!

And a big thank you to Duane, for hosting the Little Mail Carriers and showing them around the museum! 😀 Who knows where the little ones are off to next… keep an eye on the blog for their future adventures!

Back in 2017, we were in London to visit friends and took the Little Mail Carriers along for the ride. At the time, the newly revamped Postal Museum had just re-opened, and so we were super excited to check it out! Now that the museum has a new temporary exhibition all about postcards, this seems like a good time to fish those photos from the archives and show you a bit of what you can see there as part of their permanent exhibition. Here are the little guys, to tell you all about it! 🙂

Hi everyone! We’re back in London, the city of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace… though we don’t much care for those — we were promised a tour of the fantastic Postal Museum, and we’re super excited to discover the treasures and stories hiding inside.

From cryptic Victorian Valentine cards, to pirates or a mischievous lioness that attacked a mail coach, the whole visit was lots of fun… but let’s start at the beginning.

Check out these really old letters in their permanent exhibition! Through them, you can learn more about how there came to be a need for the uniform penny postage. Before the postal reform that Sir Rowland Hill brought about, postage was paid by the recipient according to the number of sheets in it, and the distance it traveled… which wasn’t very practical!

To save space, some letters were written in a particular style called “crossed writing”, which makes them extra hard to read.

You know how sometimes big ships sometimes have the prefix RMS on their name, like the RMS Titanic or RMS Queen Mary? RMS stands for “Royal Mail Ship”, as these vessels were used to transport not just passengers but also mail. This wasn’t always an easy task though, and there are stories of captains fighting pirates to defend the mail, or ships torpedoed in wars. This was the case of the SS Gairsoppa, sunk in 1941 and found only in 2011. Some 700 pieces of mail from this ship have been recovered, and they offer a unique insight into the lives of ordinary people, living in extraordinary circumstances during the Second World War.

This green pillar box is from 1853, from the Channel islands — the first place where postboxes were trialed before being brought over to the UK. This first trial was a success, so postboxes started appearing around the British mainland soon after. Although these boxes were first painted red, their color was later standardised as green… but it was quickly discovered that the green color blended too much with the background, so, after many complaints by people who couldn’t seem to find mailboxes anywhere, their color was changed back to red again, to make them more conspicuous!

Having heard so much about them, we were super excited to check out the only full sheet of the most famous stamp in the world, the Penny Black, which the museum shows in their exhibition! Before looking at them like this, we hadn’t realized that all the stamps in a single sheet are different — for extra security, they all bear a combination of two letters, with one changing from stamp to stamp. There are 240 stamps in each sheet, to make a total of £1 per sheet.

One of our favourite parts of the exhibition is that it is interactive! You can dress up and be like James Moses Nobbs, who was the longest serving (55 years!) and the last of the Mail Coach Guards in the Royal Mail. Or, you can don the postwoman uniform and try to deliver some secret pneumatic messages on their tube system! We were obviously a little too small for the clothes, but the real Paulo and Ana had fun instead. 😀

There are also lots of posters and other printed materials to peruse in the permanent exhibition, and we couldn’t help but admire the graphic design on them. The posters came about when Stephen Tallents was appointed Public Relations Officer to the General Post Office in 1933. He had extensive experience in PR, and set out on a radical programme to change the way in which the General Post Office communicated with its customers. One of these changes was to start using posters made by talented designers for marketing, and also to display in schools and post offices. Reproductions of many of these are available as postcards in the gift shop!

There’s even a 1983 Post Bus on display! These cute vehicles could once be seen throughout rural Britain, and they were a convenient hybrid between a normal bus for ferrying passengers and a mail van to deliver mail to those areas.

One of our favourite parts of the exhibition was looking through the Tolhurst envelopes — a collection of correspondence from Frederick Charles Tolhurst to his children. Each letter was posted in a carefully decorated envelope with hand-drawn images – some happy, some sad, but all gorgeous. It’s mailart from the early 20th century, and an illustrated slice of the events that were taking place at the time.

The Mail Rail has opened to visitors since the last time we were in London, and so, as part of the museum tour, now you can discover the tunnels below London that used to carry the mail swiftly across the city. It was the first electric railway with driverless trains in the world, and it worked from 1927 until 2003, carrying 4 million letters every day at its peak. If you’re a little bit claustrophobic like big Ana, you can take a peek at the Mail Rail experience on this virtual tour.

Right now, the Museum has a brand new exhibition titled Wish You Were Here: 151 Years of the British Postcard, which looks amazing and right up our alley! Here’s a sneak peak:

You can explore postcards throughout history, reflect on their future and even mail one of four unique postcards by artist Peter Liversidge, especially created for the Postal Museum. Bonus points if you spot Postcrossing in the exhibition and send us a photo of the display! 😍

PS – If you’re planning to check out the museum, let other postcrossers know on the forum (maybe you can go as a group and get a discount!).

We have a super special treat for you today! The Little Mail Carriers have visited the Postal History Foundation in Arizona (USA), and are here to show the important work they do there, bringing stamps (and excitement!) to classrooms. Let’s go!

The Postal History Foundation (PHF for short) is located just west of the University of Arizona, in a residential neighborhood in central Tucson. It’s a non-profit organization with a dual mission of research and education: they provide stamps and lessons to students across the country and the world! We were excited to hear about this cool initiative… so we invited ourselves over for a visit. 😊

The building was a church many decades ago but now holds a workroom, a contract US Postal Service station, a museum area, the philatelic sales area, and the education department… as well as millions of postage stamps! We were going to deliver some mail to the postmaster, but were immediately distracted by the beautiful old post office in their museum section of the building, which is located just straight ahead across the lobby.

This old post office is from the town of Naco, Arizona, which is on the southern border of Arizona and Mexico. It was originally ordered as a kit and set up in a building in Naco in the 1890s. All the wood, glass, and metal parts are the original ones! Normally, the Old Naco Post Office is very popular during tours and also with the students in their field trips, but sadly these are suspended because of the pandemic.

We got to see their old hand cancelling machines, self-serve stamp dispensers and even an old letter sorting box (the wooden structure that looks like a grid) from the town of Casa Grande. Above in the mail sorting box are some scales for weighing mail. Below you can see a collection of hand stamps from around the state, such as “Special Delivery” or “Return to Sender.”

After looking at all of the cool machines in the Old Naco Post Office we decided to go to the current USPS contract station, which is in a little room off of the lobby. When going into the post office, we walked past more post office boxes from Naco that were preserved for viewing in the lobby. Here, you’ll also find a vintage pedestal USPS postal box — we put a donation in there to help with the kids educational program. We delivered our mail and looked at all the current US stamps for sale. The colorful stamps at our feet are the new Lunar New Year stamps. Did you know that 2021 is the year of the ox?

The kids program at the PHF is called Stamp Discovery. Every year it supports over 13,000 students and teachers across the United States and other countries with stamps, and lessons using stamps. Of course, this year has been a little different because of the pandemic, but it was still interesting to see the variety of lessons that teachers and parents can order for their students. In the education file room, they are stacked on top of the files, in shelves at the left and the right of us. These boxes contain lessons and stamp packets for students. If a teacher orders a lesson, for example, “Three Branches of US Government”, the teacher receives a worksheet that they can copy for their students, and stamp packets for each student to use with the lesson.

Above you can see the filing cabinets that line the room and continue into another room. They contain US stamps filed by Scott number and also foreign stamps sorted by topics. If a child wants “dogs” to add to their stamp collection, they can write a letter or fill out the order form online, and the people who work and/or volunteer here will send her/him some dogs on stamps. The volunteers who work here are super heroes — they are what enables the education program to function and support so many children and teachers! During a normal year, students would visit the museum for field trips and the director of Stamp Discovery would visit classrooms in the city and suburbs of Tucson. Several of the libraries in Tucson have stamp treasure chests, which inspire kids that visit the library to learn about stamps and the topics on them by checking out books connected with stamp topics.

We walked into the big room off of the lobby and saw all the desks where the sorting and processing of donations happen. The PHF receives philatelic donations almost daily in the mail or by people who drop them off. Volunteers sort through and distribute stamps to the education department for the kids and some of the higher value stamps are put in the sales department for collectors to buy.

Proceeds from the sale of stamps in our philatelic sales department are used to pay for the running of the facility and the education program. Stamps, postcards, and collectible covers are sold there. People donate to PHF because it is a non-profit that inspires kids to learn with stamps and start a collection, thus growing the hobby of stamp collecting, called philately.

Also, we were allowed to go into a display case and visit Owney the famous Mail Dog in US history. There are special pictures, statues, and covers about Owney in the case. It is near the Old Naco Post office so that when the kids tour the old post office they can say hello to Owney, the stuffed dog, and learn about his history from the 1890s. Many books have been written about Owney and the education program has lessons about him. His books are also in the library, which is our next stop!

After talking to volunteers and looking at the processing room, we went out the side door to the patio. The PHF also includes a second building which is the Slusser Memorial Library. This is a modern building dedicated to Peggy Slusser, a lady who lived and worked in Tucson. This building contains a basement full of archives, a reading room, and the stacks of books. Behind the doors to the right are over 30,000 books and journals about philatelic history and the US Civil War. This library is used by researchers, collectors, authors, and of course, school children during field trips. On the walls of the library are paintings commissioned for the library about western adventures in postal history and an exhibit case. You can learn more about the library exhibits and paintings on the museum section of their website.

Well, our visit has come to an end. We were amazed at all of the stamps, donations, and the children’s program. The Old Naco PO is a little unique gem of postal history and the library is first class. Exploring around the world is fun, and if you can’t physically travel, you can explore the world through stamp collecting. We’re glad the Postal History Foundation is around to help children everywhere do just that!

Our huge thank you to Lisa Dembowski, PHF’s Director of Education who graciously took the time to show the Little Mail Carriers around. That was a really cool trip, and we can’t wait to see where they’ll go next!