From Blood’s Despatch to Private Die Proprietary Stamps: It’s All in a Cover
- Michael Wilson
- Sep 18
- 6 min read
[This blog was published in the August 2025 issue of the Pennsylvania Postal Historian.]
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I’ve had the pleasure of living all over the United States. Like in America the Beautiful. I’ve been from “sea to shining sea” with multiple sojourns into “amber waves of grain.”
Every place I lived has been wonderful, but I am especially fond of the East Coast for a simple reason: I’m a history buff, and you can’t beat cities like Boston, Washington, DC and Philadelphia for their long and rich histories.
Philadelphia is among my favorites. (It helps that there is vibrant group of stamp collectors and societies in the area.) It is one of the oldest cities in the United States and is rightfully considered the “Birthplace of the Nation.”
Philadelphia’s other claim to fame is that one of the first local mail carriers in the country was organized in the city in 1843. That is when the “Philadelphia Despatch Post” began business. The Despatch Post, the direct predecessor to D.O. Blood & Company and Blood’s Penny Post, transported mail in Philadelphia for 18 years until the U.S. Congress legislated it and most other local carriers out of existence in 1861.
During that time, D.O. Blood & Co. (the umbrella label used in the Scott Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps & Covers) issued 18 different stamps and ten stamped envelopes. I have a few covers with Blood’s Despatch stamps in my collection, including the one depicted in Figure 1 that I recently bought.
While it has a few stains, it is an attractive cover. The Blood’s Despatch stamp is a 1-cent variety first issued in 1854. The stamp is acid tied to the cover, but it also tied by a Philadelphia “April 19” circular date stamp. Just to the left of the stamp is a Blood’s Despatch postmark dated April 19, 1856, and time stamped 8:00 a.m. That is when this cover would have been picked up from one of Blood’s “box stations” in the city and dispatched to the U.S. Post Office for its journey to Canton, Pennsylvania, a town in Bradford County about 200 miles northwest of Philadelphia. So, in addition to paying a penny to have the letter delivered to the post office, the sender paid 3-cents to have it delivered to Canton. That rate was satisfied by affixing a 3-cent imperforated George Washington stamp from the 1851-57 series.
A highlight of this cover is the lithograph Mansion House advertisement. There’s an interesting story about the Mansion House and its owner that leads to another stamp topic, but let me digress a moment about the cover’s recipient, “Asa Pratt, Esq.,” and James London, the Mansion House’s proprietor.
There were two Asa Pratt’s in Canton in 1856, a father and son. Asa Senior (Figure 2) was born in 1792 and died at age 67 in 1860. He had an interesting dual career working as both a farmer and clothier. He also was politically active in Canton, spearheading the opposition in 1855 to creating a new county out of parts of Bradford and Tioga counties.
Asa Junior was born in 1825 and would die by suicide at age 39 in 1865. Asa Junior worked in a grist mill and was known in Canton as a troubled soul who, according to his obituary, showed “symptoms of insanity and frequently talked of killing himself.”
With all due respect to poor Asa Junior, Asa Senior sounds like someone who deserved the honorific of “Esquire,” so my guess is that the letter was addressed to Asa Senior.
As for James London, he was born in England in 1804 and arrived in Philadelphia onboard the Cambria in 1827. On the ship’s manifest, he listed his profession as “Butcher,” but based on U.S. census information and his death certificate, he worked as an inn or hotel keeper for most of his life. He would die in 1867 and was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery.
Who wrote to Asa Senior and for what purpose are unknown. There was no enclosure with the cover. James London could have been the letter writer, but the Mansion House was a boarding house at the time, so any number of residents could have penned a note to Asa Senior.
The Mansion House was located at the southeast corner of 11th and Market Streets. It was built in 1812 and was known as the New Mansion House Hotel. At the time, that corner was on the western edge of Philadelphia and was not heavily traveled. That may account for why the hotel closed in 1816.
Over the next 50 years, the building served several purposes, including the boarding house managed by Mr. London, a school for the deaf, and a railroad depot. In 1867, it became the Bingham House Hotel and underwent a significant renovation with a mansard roof added (Figure 3). The building was demolished in 1922 to make way for the Earle Theater, which itself was torn down in 1953.
As I was looking for information about the Mansion House, I came across this story in the August 20, 1855, Public Ledger and Daily Transcript:
About twelve o’clock on Saturday night, a fire was discovered in the roof of the Mansion House…kept by Mr. James London and owned by Dr. David Jayne. By prompt action of the firemen the flames were confined to the roof of the rear portion of the house. … The damage to the building was not heavy. … The boarders in the house were much frightened…though none left.
That got me wondering, “Who was Dr. David Jayne?” Born in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania in 1799, Dr. Jayne studied medicine for four years, and at the ripe old age of 22(!), he began practice as a rural doctor (Figure 4). He supposedly introduced his own medicines around 1830 and sold such wonder cures as “Dr. Jayne’s Hair Tonic,” “Dr. D. Janye’s Sanative Pills” (used for “liver complaints, jaundice, dyspepsia, fevers, nervousness, impurity of the blood, inflammation, costiveness, pains in the head, breast, side of the back and the limbs”), and my favorite, “Jayne’s Vermifuge” for the expulsion of intestinal worms. An ad for that substance claimed “Children like Jayne’s Vermifuge – ‘It Tastes Good.’”
Like many makers of patent medicines, Dr. Jayne was a marketing guru. He is regarded as the first patent medicine manufacturer to publish an almanac to advertise his concoctions. First published in 1843, Dr. Jayne’s almanac would be printed for the next 90 years, far outlasting the life of its namesake.
In 1846, one of his sons and another family member joined the business, which was renamed “Dr. D Jayne & Son.” Patent medicines were selling so well that in 1850, Dr. Jayne built an eight-story building to house his business (Figure 5). Located at Second and Chestnut Streets, the Jayne Building was the tallest business building in Philadelphia. It would stand for more than 100 years until its demolition in early 1958.
As stamp collectors know, when the Civil War started, Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1862 to fund the federal government. That act imposed a tax on proprietary medicines, matches, playing cards, and perfume. Manufactures could use government-issued revenue stamps to show proof of payment, or they could print their own stamps, what are referred to as “Private Die Proprietary Stamps” in the Scott Catalogue.
Being able to advertise your business on your own stamp was too good of a deal for patent medicine makers to pass up. Dr. D. Jayne & Son joined the crowd and produced eight revenue stamps between 1863 and 1883 in denominations of one-cent (blue), two-cents (black), and four-cents (green) with the Jayne Building as the centerpiece. An example of a one-cent Dr. Jayne proprietary revenue stamp is shown in Figure 6. It’s a die-cut version on old paper. Just under 7.5 million of this stamp were printed, and it is by far the most common available today (meaning I didn’t break the bank to buy this copy). Imperforate and combination die-cut/perforated stamps on old, silk, pink, and watermarked paper were also produced but in much smaller quantities.
Dr. Jayne made a fortune from his patent medicines and invested heavily in real estate. When he died in 1866, he left an estate in excess of $3 million that included several commercial properties in the city, like the Mansion House, and two homes. The Philadelphia Inquirer of March 6, 1866, said he “was a man who took especial interest in beautifying and adorning the thoroughfares of Philadelphia” by building “many of the finest and most substantial structures” in the city.
I really enjoy finding these sorts of connections in historic covers. It adds an entirely new dimension to philately and stamp collecting.
But what I would really like to know but never will is, did Asa Senior partake of Dr. Jayne’s sanative pills or tonic vermifuge? From the look in his face in the surviving photo of him, I’d put odds on the vermifuge!
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