February 2018 - Sneak Peek

On August, 18, 1830, Benjamin Dunkan, a dry goods merchant in the hamlet of Mooresville,
Alabama, wrote a letter to the firm of R. Ashhurst & Son of Philadelphia:
Gentlemen, respecting the goods lost on the Oregon you will recollect they were not all mine
as you had put such articles in the invoice as I never ordered viz. …..
The next day, Mr. Dunkan posted his letter at the Stagecoach Inn & Tavern in Mooresville, where it
was postmarked, rated at 25 cents (the rate for a single letter going more than 400 miles), and dispatched
on its way.
Flash forward. In the early 1980s, I became interested in collecting Alabama stampless covers, letters
posted from Alabama towns during the territorial period up until the start of the Civil War. One of the
most difficult Alabama postmarks to find from this period is from Mooresville in Limestone County.
The town – today just off Interstate 565 about 19 miles west of Huntsville – has always been very small
and was off the main commerce routes, so it never generated much mail. Its population was only about
60 when it was incorporated in 1818 by an act of the territorial legislature. Even today, the population
remains in the 50s.
I never expected that I would ever own a Mooresville postmark, given their scarcity. In the early
1990s, a David Phillips postal history auction contained two covers from Mooresville: the first was a
hand-stamped circle-date marking and another was a manuscript postmark. I entered a bid on the
circle-date marking. I bid as much as I was able at that time to pay; and it turned out that my bid was
not even competitive.
Fast forward 20-something years. In a 2012 Daniel F. Kelleher auction, another Mooresville, Alabama
stampless cover was featured [Figure 1]. It may have even been the same one I had bid on two
decades earlier; I can’t remember. It was, however, the first Mooresville cover I had seen offered in the
interim. In more than 30 years of collecting this material, here was only my second chance to acquire a
Mooresville stampless postmark.
I mailed in my bid and anxiously waited for the
auction results to be announced. Eureka! A wave of
excitement washed over me when I learned I had won
this lot. It was followed by a wave of relief when I saw
that the invoice was a few hundred dollars less than
my bid, and safely within my budget. This acquisition
may be the high point of my philatelic career and the
memory of it gratifies me whenever I recall it.
The town of Mooresville still exists today, and in
a condition that a resident from the 1800s might still
recognize. After I received the cover I had won, I decided
to take it back to its point of origin and see the
old town for myself. With my wife and mother-inlaw,
I spent a pleasant Saturday in November walking
the length and breadth of a quaint and picturesque
village that barely encompasses a hundred acres.
Figure 2. The Stagecoach Inn & Tavern, which opened before 1825, served
as Mooresville’s first post office and was the building from which the cover
in this story was mailed. Restored in the 1990s, today it is a museum and
town hall. Photo by Brian Stansberry.
182 Years On, a
Stampless Alabama
Cover Goes Home
BY JOHN YOUNG
Today, Mooresville is a bedroom community hidden
away between Huntsville and Decatur, two of the
main industrial and commercial centers of north Al-
FEBRUARY 2018 / AMERICAN PHILATELIST 141