Fearing viruses and infectious diseases – particularly during outbreaks and epidemics – authorities have been disinfecting mail since at least the 15th century. Everything from smoke and cuts to cyanide gas and vinegar – not to mention the practice of letting mail sit for months before moving it – have been used with the intent to keep people safe from the dangers their mail may hold.
With that in mind, the auction sale of the William A. Sandrik collection of disinfected mails in October 2021 by H.R. Harmer brought to light a very unusual cover. The Figure 1 cover has a 3-cent green Washington stamp canceled with a purple “Council Bluffs Iowa Dec 12 1879” in all capitals. The cover is addressed to Dr. A.S. Oberly, of the U.S. Navy in Pensacola, Florida. After its arrival in Florida, the letter was forwarded to Newport, Rhode Island.
Figure 1. An envelope with a cornercard of D.C. Bloomer sent in 1879 to Florida and forwarded to Newport, Rhode Island, tells an interesting story. On the reverse, there are two rows of puncture holes made by a fumigating device.
However, one unusual feature is the blue-green straight line “DISINIFECTED” (a misspelled attempt at “disinfected”) with a matching Dec. 17 cancel for Warrington, Florida, a town five miles fr..om the navy yard. This is the earliest known American handstamp reading “disinfected” (or its misspelling). In later years, quite a few versions of such handstamps were used in Pennsylvania during a tuberculosis outbreak, and the word “fumigated” was used at other locations for different diseases, according to a 1992 article in La Posta by William A. Sandrik.
Finally, there are two straight lines of 20 punctures measuring 85 millimeters each in length. These are better seen on the reverse of the envelope, which shows that they extended through the envelope and must have pierced the original letter, too.
Before infectious diseases became more widely understood, they were considered spreadable by objects, including letters. So this is a cover showing signs of an attempt to eradicate some disease which was thought could be transmitted by letters. This is by no means the earliest such cover we have seen.
Several methods used to disinfect U.S. mail
The reverse of an 1835 letter (Figure 2) to Captain Hiram Pauling on the Shark shows some interesting markings. The letter was forwarded from New York via the library at the New York Naval Yard by another vessel that carried the letter to the Shark. There is a rare large oval that states, “Forwarded by the U.S. Naval Lyceum” with the image of a sailing ship, a marking of which only two examples are known, which author James noted in 1977 in an article published in this journal.
Figure 2. The reverse of a stampless cover carried out of the mails in 1835 addressed to Hiram Pauling on board the USS Shark. It shows a large black oval, a forwarding handstamp that includes an image of a sailing ship, punctured by two strikes of a six-bladed fumigation device.
The cover also shows two strikes of a sharp, six-bladed device used to pierce the full cover so as to allow fumes from an outside source to enter the letter and prevent whatever illness might be harbored within this letter. This was also the intent in the handling of the cover shown in Figure 1. Punctures or cutting the corners was a practice that started in Europe to curb the spread of infectious diseases, which at the time had unknown methods of spread and effects on the human body. In 1992, William Sandrik wrote a very informative article on disinfected mail, especially in the Americas, in La Posta.
Sandrik showed that fumigation was attempted in many locales in this country, particularly after 1900. He showed an 1835 letter from Woodville, Mississippi, traveling 130 miles northeast to Jackson with slits struck twice for yellow fever eradication. He also showed a cover from New Orleans (Figure 3) bearing the mark of the same type of device as the cover in Figure 1, though a year earlier. It, too, shows two rows of penetrating holes. The contents, which are also shown in the published article, included a newspaper clipping about yellow fever cases in New Orleans, also punctured by the same row of nails.
Figure 3. A cover sent from New Orleans in 1878 that shows two rows of multiple puncture holes similar to those found on the cover in Figure 1.
A German rastel from the 1830s (Figure 4) is a similar device used to puncture holes into a letter for fumigation, although the device used on the covers in Figures 1 and 3 was likely a piece of wood into which 20 nails were driven. The fumigation treatment, so to speak, was applied by striking the rod with a mallet, pushing the spikes through whatever piece of paper it was against. Sandrik, in his article, shows two additional covers from Florida in 1888 with a device of eight parallel slits in a line.
Figure 4. A rastel, used in the 1830s, was a device used to puncture holes in letters for fumigation.
There are a group of covers from Boston in the late 1820s and early 1830s with strikes of the word “quarantine” (in capital letters, of course), with five recorded types applied on incoming ship letters. There is no evidence that such letters were fumigated. Instead they were held at the quarantine facility for a period of time. One of them contains a letter written at the quarantine station after the ship had docked (Figure 5). In Europe, quarantine stations were known as lazarettos. Many letters were fumigated at lazarettos.
Figure 5. The cover has “BOSTON MS JUL 3” postmark with “SHIP” in red and 14½ rating, 12½ cents postage plus a 2-cent ship fee to Portland, Maine. Also seen is a red straight line “QUARANTINE” postmark. The writer mentions a long voyage of 44 days but does not say from where they came. The letter has a sentence, “We shall have to keep here till the day after tomorrow before we go to town ...”
Here, we turn our attention to one particular infectious disease, yellow fever. Today, we know yellow fever is a viral disease of short duration that can attack the liver and kidneys, causing possible death in about 15 percent of the persons affected. It is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, so it is mostly a tropical disease. Evidence shows that the disease originated in Africa and was spread to the Americas by the institution of the slave trade and slavery in the 1500s. It is still a dangerous disease, killing about 50,000 persons a year, even after a vaccine was created in 1937.
The authors have in their collection the correspondence of an Englishman who migrated to New Orleans and Baton Rouge in 1804. Many of his letters concern outbreaks of yellow fever and how the Europeans left New Orleans during the summer months. He evidently died of the disease a few years later.
There are many reports of outbreaks of the disease in Louisiana on different dates. In 1878, about 20,000 people died in an epidemic in the Mississippi River Valley. There was a severe outbreak of cases at Jacksonville, Florida, in 1888. While the disease was finally attributed to mosquito bites in 1881 by Carlos Finlay, a Cuban physician, it was 19 years before his work was accepted. Dr. Walter Reed, before and during the building of the Panama Canal, received credit for his knowledge about how the disease spreads, but Reed always gave credit to Finlay.
A few words more on the Figure 1 cover
An important book on yellow fever (Figure 6) was published in 1879, the same year as the letter in Figure 1. It describes cases and gives statistics of outbreaks of the disease. A contemporary broadside concerning yellow fever in Pensacola (Figure 7) was released just a few months before the letter was mailed. The text reads: “Whereas, the Board of Health has rescinded the order suspending quarantine against New Orleans, notice is hereby given to all concerned that no freight or passengers will be permitted to enter this city, without special authority from the Board of Health, and city Physician. By order of the board of Health, S.C. Cobb, Mayor, Pensacola, August 25th, 1879.”
Figure 6. Yellow Fever, a book by J.P. Dromgoole published in 1879.
Figure 7. Broadside from 1879 concerning yellow fever in Pensacola, Florida.
This brings us to the persons connected with the Figure 1 cover. The addressee – Aaron S. Oberly (Figure 8) – was in the U.S. Naval service as a surgeon, then inspector, and finally, commandant, until 1889. From 1875 to 1879 he was stationed at the Pensacola Naval Yard and then was transferred to Torpedo Station, Newport, for a year. This explains why the letter was forwarded to Rhode Island. Oberly was the person who inspected and wrote the report on the disastrous outbreak of the disease on the U.S.S. Plymouth.
Figure 8. Photograph of Aaron S. Oberly.
The sender of the letter – Dexter Chamberlain Bloomer (Figure 9) – also was an illustrious person, an early citizen of Council Bluffs, Iowa. He wore many hats, besides those of being an attorney and real estate agent, as shown by the cornercard on the cover in Figure 1. He was a journalist, postmaster, mayor, member of the town’s first school board, receiver of the U.S. Land Office, president of the county bar association, historian and senior warden of the vestry of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. It was in the early part of 1850 that President Millard Fillmore chose Bloomer to be postmaster of Seneca Falls, New York. Bloomer made his wife deputy postmaster and she actually ran the post office.
Figure 9. Photograph of Dexter C. Bloomer.
Bloomer’s wife – Amelia Jenks Bloomer (Figure 10) – was maybe more prominent than her husband. She was fiercely independent. Seneca Falls is known as the birthplace of women’s rights in the U.S. and was the site of the first women’s rights convention in 1848. Amelia Bloomer had her own newspaper, adopted a temperance stance and was an advocate for women’s suffrage.
Figure 10. Photograph of Amelia J. Bloomer.
It was in Mrs. Bloomer’s newspaper – The Lily, the nation’s first newspaper for women, according to the Women’s Rights National Park in Seneca Falls – that she first proposed a change in women’s garments and suggested women’s pants. The pants became nicknamed as “bloomers” in her honor.
Final comments
Besides Sandrik’s excellent articles, the definitive resource on the disinfected mail is by Dr. Karl F. Meyer, who graciously gave the authors a copy of his book when James was still in medical school. Meyer was a specialist in infectious diseases who found this subject one of great interest to himself. He built a wonderful collection of covers, mostly European handstamps and slit devices.
Resources
Meyer, Karl F. Disinfected Mail (Gossip Printery, 1962).
Milgram, James W. “U.S. Naval Lyceum Usages,” The American Philatelist no. 91 (1977): 626-9.
Sandrik, William A. “Disinfection Markings from Pennsylvania,” La Posta (May 13, 1992).
Sandrik, William A. “Disinfected Mail,” The American Philatelist no. 100 (1986): 334-348.
The Author
Dr. James W. Milgram is a retired orthopaedic surgeon with an interest in American postal history. He has authored 66 articles in The American Philatelist over the years with his first article “Estill & Co., Express” appearing in 1959 (this was also his first article of 662 to date to be written). He collects a wide range of subjects and has exhibited some of them, including Civil War patriotic covers and U.S. registered mail. He is the author of eight philatelic books.
Carol S. Milgram is the devoted non-collecting wife, who selflessly allows her husband to devote his time to the hobby. Does that sound familiar?
For Further Learning
Recommendations from the APRL research staff:
“Disinfected Mail” by D.S. Patton. The American Philatelist, February 1953.
“Disinfected Mail” by Jozef Kuderewicz. Postal History Journal, June 1987.
“Disinfected Mail in the U.S.” by Emmet F. Pearson. Pratique: Quarterly Newsletter of the Disinfected Mail Study Circle, 1976.
“Introduction to Disinfected Mail” by Denis Vanderveld. Pratique: Quarterly Newsletter of the Disinfected Mail Study Circle, 1974.
“Malta Disinfected Mail” by V. Denis Vandervelde. Pratique: Quarterly Newsletter of the Disinfected Mail Study Circle, Winter 1979.
“Twentieth-Century U.S. Disinfected Mail” by E.J. Guerrant, Jr. The American Philatelist, August 1986.
Disinfected Mail by K.F. Meyer and C. Ravasini. (Holton, KS: Gossip Printery, 1962.) [HE61 84 .D61 1 M612d]
The Disinfected Mail of Spain by Sidney Nathan. (Surrey, England: Postal History Society 1972.) [G6561 .D611 N274d]