Some New Stars

I picked up a few new Vermont stars yesterday at the Crossroads Show in Quechee.

Perhaps the most interesting is this circular date stamp from Hardwick. The star is nice, but the CDS is very unusual. According to Bill Lizotte, another Vermont postal history collector this is called a "pie crust". Similar cancels are known from East Orange and Wolcott.

This star cancel from Randolph has a negative star within a positive star.

Looks like the star is handmade on this cancel from Plainfield. I believe the circular date stamp is a Collins Circle.

The final star is a 3 dimensional star from Newbury Centre in purple. A later use of a star cancel.

County Postmaster Cancel

There are only two Vermont post offices that used BOTH a County Name and the Postmaster name in a cancel: South Wardsboro and Cambridgeport.

In the Doane-Thompson monograph "Catalog of U.S. County and Postmaster Postmarks" edited by Kenneth L. Gilman (David G. Phillips Publishing Co., 1990), there is a reproduction of a sales pamphlet by F. P. Hammond & Co. of Aurora, Illinois from the 1880s. Postmark No. 532 shows the same type of cancel used by South Wardsboro and a few other post offices (less than 40) throughout the country. The postmark included a Wheel of Fortune canceler for the stamp.

According to writer Bill Lizotte in the August 2009 issue of The Vermont Philatelist, South Wardsboro is fairly scarce with only 2 or 3 examples known. Fletcher, Illinois was another post office that used this type of cancel.

If you interested in Vermont Postal History, you should belong to the Vermont Philatelic Society. Its website is http://www.vermontps.org .