Local philatelists will want to head down to Edmonton to snag some historic sesquicentennial stamps.
The Edmonton Stamp Club is holding its annual spring show this weekend. This year's theme is St. Albert's 150th anniversary, and the club has commissioned some special stamps to celebrate it.
The stamps feature pictures of the Father Albert Lacombe statue on Mission Hill and a stained-glass window logo that depicts a Grey Nun. Each is pasted to a Rendezvous 2011 envelope and stamped with a customized Canada Post cancel stamp, which depicts the church on Mission Hill.
The club has printed 80 of the stamps and will be selling them as a set at the show, says show co-chair Ed Dykstra, along with a third stamp with the Rendezvous 2011 logo on it, which is already in circulation. The two special stamps will never be printed again. "I'll definitely buy a set myself."
Mail comes to St. Albert
The club does a national show each year, says club director and St. Albert resident Edwin Muxlow, and wanted a theme that showed off Alberta and the Edmonton region. St. Albert, being the oldest non-fortified settlement in the province, seemed to fit.
The show itself will be three days of philatelist (stamp-fan) fun, with rooms full of dealers and displays of rare stamps. Ray Pinco, chair of the St. Albert Historical Society, will speak at the conference on the history of mail in St. Albert.
Stamps are like time capsules, says Muxlow, who has collected stamps since the 1950s, and reflect the history of their time. Canada's first stamps spoke of the "province of Canada," for example, and bore the mug of Queen Victoria or Prince Albert.
St. Albert didn't have a post-office before 1880, Pinco notes — all letters before then came by courier — and that was a big issue. "Once you got a post office, you were on the map." Edmonton got its office in 1878, and St. Albert kicked up a huge fuss — why did Edmonton get its office first, when St. Albert had four times as many people?
Many petitions later, and the government agreed to set up an office on Mission Hill. Father Hippolyte Leduc was the postmaster, getting mail shipments every two weeks.
"When you read through the family stories," Pinco says, "people placed a great deal of value on the post office." It was the first place people visited when they came to town, and it was a mark of pride to be a mail carrier. Telephones were rare, expensive and unreliable back then, he notes, making mail one of the few ways to communicate over long distances.
The post office itself floated from house to house over the years, gradually making its way to Labelle's Butcher Shop near the Perron Street Bridge in 1954. It soon after hopped across the Sturgeon River and paused at the current location of Dryden Insurance before stopping at its current spot across the street.
The city went through 15 postmasters during that time, Pinco says, most of whom hosted the office in their own homes or businesses. Rosanna Lafranchise was the first postmistress, and unofficially held that title for 29 years. (Her husband Joseph was the postmaster from 1921 to 1938, but she did all the work, Pinco said.) Residents had to shuffle to the office for their mail until 1965, which is when mail carriers came to town.
People keep predicting the end of stamps and letters, Muxlow says, but there are more stamps being printed today than ever before. And people keep collecting them, too. "I just like the pretty pictures," he jokes.
The free stamp show runs from March 25 to 27 at the Fantasyland Hotel. Visit www.edmontonstampclub.com for details.
