For nearly as long as there have been postage stamps in the United States, there have been stamp collectors. Northeast Ohio has a long tradition of philately – the study and collection of postage stamps – dating back more than a century to the forming of the Garfield-Perry Stamp Club in Cleveland.
The club today includes about 100 members, mostly from around Ohio. They welcome every March collectors, exhibitors and dealers from across the country to share a mutual love for preserving postal history.
Origins of the club
In July 1847, the first general issue postage stamps went on sale in the United States. One, with a price tag of five cents, featured an engraved image of Benjamin Franklin, the nation’s first postmaster general. The other depicted the first U.S. president, George Washington, and cost double the amount.
In the years that followed, the stamp collecting hobby emerged.
By the late 19th century, a national organization of stamp collectors was formed, then called the American Philatelic Association, along with branches in Chicago and New York City. A handful of collectors in Cleveland considered joining the ranks.
Inspiration soon followed. In early 1890, new U.S. postage stamps were released featuring Ohio-born President James A. Garfield and Oliver Hazard Perry, the U.S. naval officer who defeated the British at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812.
On March 17, 1890, the first meeting of the Garfield-Perry Stamp Club was held on what is now East 55th Street in Cleveland. The group now meets on the first Thursday of the month from September to June at the Wyndham Hotel in Independence.
The March Party
For 135 consecutive years since that first meeting, the Garfield-Perry Stamp Club has held its annual March Party, a gathering of philatelists from across the U.S. and even overseas.
Garfield-Perry is a chapter of the American Philatelic Society, said current club president Howard Chapman.
“We’re a three-day show, with the dealer bourse, which are dealers that sell philatelic material, and the exhibit, which is displays of stamp material,” Chapman said.
The exhibit area of the show is comprised of rows of easels holding displays of stamps and much more: postcards, letters, envelopes with special postmarks or other ephemera.
“The exhibits, when you go through, you learn a lot of history,” Chapman said. “Some people may exhibit a particular stamp, and they go for all the variations and the postmarks and the varieties on the stamp.”
Exhibiting Cleveland
Exhibitors like Jay Stotts have extensive displays that outline a historical period or event.
Though Stotts has lived in Houston, Texas, for more than 30 years, he is a native of Mansfield and lived in Cleveland prior to relocating for his job.
A lifelong philatelist, Stotts has exhibited nationally for decades, is an accredited judge with the American Philatelic Society and former president of the United States Stamp Society.
The exhibit he brought to Garfield-Perry’s March Party this year centered around Cleveland history.
“This is a unique exhibit in terms of combining picture postcards and advertising mail to tell the story of Downtown Cleveland at the turn of the century,” Stotts said. “All the material is from 1890 to 1910, and the exhibit is structured to take you to each area of Cleveland based on what the businesses were at the time.”
The postcards and other items in Stotts’s exhibit are just a small sampling of his entire Cleveland collection, which he’s been building for more than 40 years.
“The collection consists of over 800 different Cleveland businesses that were around in that 20-year period, and the postcard collection exceeds 8,000 cards,” Stotts said. “But obviously in an exhibit like this, you can’t put everything.”
With each of this year’s 32 exhibits providing a detailed look into various periods of history, Chapman said these collections are a way to preserve those records well into the future.
“We are really just caretakers, preserving it for a period of time, and then it goes on to the next collector,” Chapman said. “Hopefully we've taken care of it, so it'll go for generations to come.”
