From Stray Dog to Post Office Mascot
In June of this year, the Smithsonian Institution began placing some of its collection of 13 million images on Flickr, joining a movement to make publicly held images more accessible to the people.
They initially posted 800 photographs and said 1,200 more would be made availabe in the coming months. As of today, a quick search on Flickr shows that there are 1,114 images uploaded by the Smithsonian Institution - and the range of subjects is as broad as you would expect from the venerable institution. Everything from historical moments to dozens of species of fish captured on film - and I’m only a couple of hundred images in.
Since this is the Smithsonian Channel blog, I thought this would be a great opportunity to highlight some of the ones I find interesting and include a little context since that’s what makes them so much fun. You’ll see more posts like this in the coming weeks (and months…there are 1,100 photos after all). So here we go, let’s dig into the archives and see what we can uncover.
(Image uploaded to Flickr by Smithsonian Institution)
One rainy night in 1888, postal workers in Albany, NY discovered a stray dog outside the post office. The next morning, he was found asleep on a pile of mail pouches. The dog seemed to like the post office and the smell of the mailbags so when no one came to claim him, they named him Owney and he became the unofficial Railway Post Office mascot.
It soon became clear that Owney was no average mutt. During the next nine years, Owney became known as “Globe-trotter,” traveling over 140,000 miles in his lifetime, once even circling the globe, as he accompanied postal professionals. He was even outfitted with a vest to which mail clerks would pin baggage tags to show all the places he’d been.
On June 11, 1897, Owney, who was now quite old, bit a postal worker in Toledo, Ohio on the hand. The postmaster, believing Owney had become uncontrollable and dangerous in his old age, summoned a police officer who put the dog down.
Owney’s last encounter with postal workers was an unpleasent one but that didn’t dampen their love for him. Mail clerks raised money to have him stuffed and put on display in a glass case. After being exhibited at a number of different locations, he was moved to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington DC in 1993 where visitors can still see him today.
Tags: Dogs, Flickr, National Postal Museum
November 24th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
After 30 years in Postal Service I am not surprised that Postal Mismanagement killed the dog as a matter of first choice, rather than having an employee, who was sympathetic to Owney, adopt and let him live out his natural life.