Well, at least I got to have a haircut in the Penny Lane barber shop. 25 Jun 2017 01:56:11pm
A Post Office-looking round cancellation on this old envelope reads "ADVERTISED / MAR 6 1894." It's in a small, hand-addressed envelope with no return address, so it doesn't seem to be any kind of advertising piece. Could it have to to with what looks to be misdirected mail ("Not in Directory" stamp and "opened by mistake" note, plus a third receiving city stamped on the back)? Luckily I have a nice unused 2-cent Columbian or I'd be tempted to soak it off this odd cover.
That's a General Delivery type marking. I don't know how they would advertise that a piece of mail was waiting in those days, but the person wasn't listed in the town directory. It seems it didn't get claimed. Opened by mistake, was probably a curious postal employee seeing if anything valuable was in it once it was considered abandoned.
josh is right; mail at GD would be advertised in local paper. USPOD is indicating that it was advertised and the writer was not in any directory.
typically, in the absence of a return address, they WOULD open the letter to see to whom to return the mail; otherwise it goes into DLO (or maybe i have the order wrong)
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Well, at least I got to have a haircut in the Penny Lane barber shop. 26 Jun 2017 09:47:16am
re: "Advertised" Cancellation?
Thanks to all respondents. That makes sense that the PO would advertise locally. Can you imagine if they had to do that nowadays?!
I still wonder if a postal employee would write "opened by mistake" if he were legitimately trying to find a clue inside. In a hurry, I myself have zipped open a neighbor's mail misdirected to me. Both the "Winooski" and the "mistake" lines are in blue pencil, so whoever wrote those must have suspected that Miss Pierce had moved to the tiny, now-extinct village of Winooski, Wis., 16 miles from Sheboygan.
I got the cover from my uncle, who lives in the house that had the Winooski post office in its parlor! His grandmother was the postmistress. The original Winooski, Wisconsin, settlers, by the way, named their town after Winooski, Vermont, which still exists, almost exactly 1000 miles away.
