Object Details
- Description
- Bucket with numerous paper tags attached; per article "Queer Things by Mail" from The Washington Post, February 27, 1896 with sub-heading "Travels of the Oaken Bucket"--article describes reopening of Post Office Department Museum following return of artifacts sent for display at Atlanta Exposition in 1895:
- "Curios of every conceivable shape, in any way connected with the postal service, are on exhibition, the latest addition being an old bucket, which was started from Atlanta in May, 1895, with the request that it be sent around the old world by mail, and returned to Atlanta in time for the opening of the Exposition. It did not complete the trip, owing to the ignorance of some of the postal employees as to where to forward it, but it went from Atlanta to Charlotte, N.C., to Washington, D.C., to St. Louis, to Cincinnati, to Chicago, to Toronto, to New York, to Liverpool, and several cities in England to New York again, and back to Atlanta, where it arrived September 4, 1895.
- The bucket is fairly smothered with shipping tags, bearing all sort of inscriptions penned by the various clerks into whose hands it chanced to fall. Some of them are clever, and other were [sic] supposed to be by those who wrote them. One tag reads: "This bucket represents the state the national Treasury will be in if free silver does not come to the rescue. All gold bugs take notice, and go to the Atlanta Exposition with this bucket." A British postal clerk was evidently in a bad humor when the bucket reached his hands, for he attached this sentiment: "I sincerely hope that the fellow who started this infernal bucket on its trip has kicked it before now."
- Data Source
- National Postal Museum
- Date
- c. 1895
- Medium
- wood; metal; paper
- Dimensions
- Height x Width: 9 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. (24.13 x 29.21 cm)
- Type
- Covers & Associated Letters
