Philately from Kurt A. Sanftleben, LLC

1856 - A letter from one of the most radical abolitionists, Abby Kelley, and her equally radical husband, Stephen Symonds Foster, delineating her meetings with a host of the country's most important abolitionists during a fund-raising trip on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society

by Abby Kelley to Stephen Symonds Foster

1896 - Advertising envelope and dunning letter from the largest tobacco plug manufacturing company in the world

1905 - Letter from the son of a wealthy former Detroit hotel owner informing his family that he had led a pack train through the mountains of New Mexico in hopes of purchasing a sheep ranch

by Walter M. Taber

1888 - A Wyoming pioneer, whose earlier discovery of large fossils spawned the infamous paleontological 'Bone Wars', describes his new homestead near Fort Bridger

by J" [James Van Allen Carter]

1852 - U.S. Navy Department letter informing a 'ships carpenter' that he cannot avoid duty with the East Indies Squadron, an assignment that led to his accompanying Commodore Perry to Japan

by H. Parker to Daniel Jones

1805 - Letter describing the effects of the last Yellow Fever epidemic to strike New York City

by Caleb Hopkins to Jeremiah A Peirson

1833 - Family letter from New Orleans to Scotland describing the Cholera epidemic that ravaged the city

by J N McLauren, Jr.

1879 - Letter from a health officer at Boston's Deer Island Quarantine Station, written on official stationery

1924 - A disinfected letter from a doctor at the Pittsburgh Municipal Hospital who contracted diphtheria while treating patients with infectious diseases

by Dr. D. R. Jacobs

1935 - An airmail envelope sent to Francis Kinsley Hutchinson, who was in quarantine aboard the ship, S.S. Manhattan at Staten Island, from her famous woodland estate, Wychwood

1834 - Letter discussing the effect of the Cholera epidemic that had raged in New York City for over a year

by Edward P Hill

1816 - One of the earliest extant Old China Trade letters regarding a shipment of tea and silk from a merchant who was simultaneously beginning the largest American opium smuggling concern in China

by Philip Ammidon to Benjamin Ives Gilman

1910 - A missionary letter from Peking on impressive, illustrated stationery that was sent home to family in New Jersey inside a vibrant 'red-band envelope' that normally was only used for auspicious domestic Chinese mail

by Debra or Delia Seavens

1809 - Letter from a pioneer steamboat captain requesting approval from the New London Customs House Collector, a former general officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, for a sailor to receive medical care under the Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen

by Moses Rogers and General Jedidiah Huntington

1868 - A mysterious New York-to-London letter discussing the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, opposition to the Radical Republicans, and the upcoming Democratic National Convention

1869 - Letter to a friend back home from an English immigrant expressing doubts that she made the right choice by coming to the United States

by Emily Borchert

1854 - Query sent by a prominent Macon businessman to the postmaster at Santa Luca requesting information about the feasibility of mining copper on properties he owned in Gilmer County Georgia

by Thurston Rowland Bloom

1864 - Letter from a soldier in 126th New York Infantry reporting that companies of sharpshooters were being established in the Union's Second Corps and that the Corp's Washington's Birthday Ball came off without a hitch

by George S. Young

1841 - Letter signed by Winfield Scott forwarding his endorsement of a disabled War of 1812 veteran's request to be appointed as the Military Store Keeper of Detroit

by General Winfield Scott

1854 - Letter from a tea merchant in China reporting details about the first attack by Imperial Chinese forces upon the international community at Shanghai and its decisive defeat by an ad hoc amalgam of Anglo-American military units and Shanghai Volunteers

by Smith, King & Company