Friday, June 7, 2013

Old envelope that was mailed to Covell, Illinois



This envelope (which seems to be from the 19th century) is addressed to:

Mr. Joseph Shade
Covel
McLean County
Ill.

I couldn't find anything of substance about Joseph Shade. (That would make a great name for a paranormal investigator, though.)

Covel is actually Covell, an unincorporated community located in Dale Township, McLean County, Illinois. It's about seven miles east of the city of Bloomington, Illinois.

Perhaps Covell's biggest claim to fame is that it was the site of a mail-plane crash involving historic aviator Charles Lindbergh's in 1926 — about six months before his historic flight from New York to Paris. According to RoadsideAmerica.com:
"On the night of November 3, 1926, with his gas gauge on 'E,' Lindbergh flew as far as he could out over the country near Covell and bailed out at 13,000 feet. The plane crashed only a hundred yards behind a farm house, but the weather was so bad that no one realized it until the next morning. Lindbergh landed on a barbed-wire fence. ... The crash sight was marked by a tower built by the farmer, Charles Thompson, but it was eventually torn down. Then in 1977 a local stamp club, The Corn Belt Philatelic Society, put up a small brick cairn with a bronze plaque at the site."
Read more about Lindbergh and the Covell marker (including how to find it) on RoadSideAmerica. You can also read more about the incident and the Thompson family's part in it on CharlesLindbergh.com.

Meanwhile, are there any philately experts out there who can tell us more about the pre-printed, embossed three-cent stamp on this small envelope? What does it tell us about when this letter was originally mailed?

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