Hackmann has passion for post office history

A letter sent to a Mr. A.B. Smith of Fulton, Mo. shows a hand-cancelled stamp.
A letter sent to a Mr. A.B. Smith of Fulton, Mo. shows a hand-cancelled stamp.

With a collection of what he calls "real photo postcards" numbering in the hundreds, and a fascination with history, Fulton native Bruce Hackmann has established himself as a collector of postal memorabilia.

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NWA Media/MICHAEL WOODS --12/14/2012-- Huntsville Mayor Kevin Hatfield Friday afternoon in Huntsville. Hatfield began his term as mayor in January of 2011 replacing former mayor Larry Bates.


His talk about the U.S. Postal Service in Missouri, and how town names came to be, drew forth a lot of "I didn't know that" comments and "wows" from members of the Fulton Rotary Club, to whom he spoke Wednesday at the Fulton Country Club.

Real photo postcards, popular between 1805 and 1920, had photographs of towns and their people on the front, and messages on the back.

"That's how people communicated," Hackmann said. "There were 677 million of these sent in 1908 - that's not in Fulton, that's the whole country."

Some postcards showed people standing on top of derailed train cars. Others showed postal workers carrying heavy bags of mail.

"I've just got hundreds of these things," Hackmann said. "It's a picture of what a community was like.

Hackmann, president of the Fulton Area Development Corp., said he also collects postmarks and is trying to get one from every post office, past and present, in Missouri. Once upon a time in the early 1800s, there were 6,461 post offices in the state.

"The first one was in St. Louis," he said. "Now there are 955 post offices. It's hard to believe there were more than 6,000 of them. Many were only open a year or two."

Hackmann has a letter folded up as an envelope that was sent to Cote Sans Dessein in 1824. It was a "stampless letter," he said, because stamps didn't appear until 1847.

"It cost 12 1/2 cents to send the letter," he said. "The rate was based on how far you sent it. You paid for it in advance."

The letter was sent to Pascal Cerre', the first attorney in Callaway County, asking him to appear at a deposition. It was signed by Edward Bates (1793-1869), Missouri's first attorney general who went on to work for Abraham Lincoln's administration in the same capacity.

Hackmann also talked about place names, many of which came about by small-town postmasters asking their bosses to approve their names.

"A lot of communities were named for early settlers," he said.

Many old timers were inventive in their naming techniques, he said. One town in Perry County was named Seventy Six, maybe for the date of America's Declaration of Independence. But another rumor says the town had 76 Democrats for every Republican, Hackmann added.

Emma, a town in Saline County, was named for Paul Revere's horse, commemorating the famous midnight ride.

"But that night, he rode Brown Beauty," Hackmann said. "Emma was one of his horses, so they got that much right."

There was a town named Ink in Shannon County. The post office there was founded in 1885, Hackmann said.

"They were having trouble coming up with a name," he added. "Someone spilled a bottle of ink on the post office counter and said, 'Well, we'll name ourselves Ink.'"

Another postmaster in Shannon County submitted the names of his three daughters as the name of his "town," but authorities rejected each name. He submitted the name "Rat," and it was approved.

"There's stories about many of them you wouldn't believe," he said.