‘Owney’ the Mail Service Mascot
A Tribute to a Well-Traveled Terrier BY DAN SAYERS
Photo courtesy National Postal Museum.
I recently met a dead dog with a fascinating life story. While making my way through Washington, D.C.’s Union Station toward the taxicab stand, my extreme lack of patience was met with an extremely long queue. So, through a cold and windy November rain, I ran across the street to seek shelter under an ornate portico where I’d intended to contact Uber for a ride to Dupont Circle. But as I reached for my phone, I noticed that my temporary refuge was actually a rather grand entrance to the National Postal Museum. Having never met a museum I didn’t like, I put away my phone and—with only an hour to spare—took a self-guid- ed tour of America’s curated homage to philately (the study of stamps and postal history). To my surprise, I learned that the museum’s collection contains the remains of a Terrier that once traveled the world and became a folk hero of sorts at the turn of the 20th century. The Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum contains near- ly six million items and approximately 4,000 specimens as part of its National Philatelic Collection. Located on Colum- bus Circle, the Beaux Arts building showcases the largest and most valuable collection of its kind in the world. Among its more notable exhibits are John Lennon’s boyhood stamp album and several surviving letters from the 1860-1861 Pony Express service. But the collection’s most curious specimen sits passively in a grand atrium alongside a Concord-style stage coach and a vintage deHavilland DH-4 airplane. Preserved for posterity under glass, the postal service’s unofficial mascot wears a leather collar adorned with tags bestowed upon him by industrious workers and imperial emperors. The story of “Owney” begins in a post office in Albany, New York. A dog of unknown origin (most accounts iden- tify him variously as a Border or Irish Terrier), Owney simply appeared one day and proceeded to make his bed on a pile of mail bags. The postal clerks quickly adopted him and the little dog soon became their traveling companion. Owney’s attachment to the mail bags led him to the Albany train sta- tion where he boarded mail-sorting trains to New York, Bos- ton and Chicago. Wherever he went, the intrepid Terrier was met with kindness and it was believed no accident would befall a train with Owney on board. In time, Owney’s adven- tures took him to places farther afield, eventually crossing
The National Postal Museum collection currently contains 372 tags that were given to Owney. Photo by Dan Sayers.
A bronze statue of Owney by sculptor Daniel C. Brown greets visitors to the National Postal Museum in Washington D.C. Photo by Dan Sayers.
148 • S how S ight M agazine , D ecember 2018
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