Fridley

I am planning on posting images of covers from Minnesota Discontinued Post Offices. I am new to blogging, so we will see how this goes. If you have questions or anything to add, please do so. I have been known to look at the cancellation more than the stamp itself. I have had friends say things like " yeah Pat, that cancellation is nice , but I think that is a #64". When I say I don't look at the stamps that much it makes some people cringe. Obviously that does not apply to the cover above.

The cover above is the oldest known manuscript cancel from Fridley, Minnesota. I started collecting Minnesota Postal History by searching specifically for a Fridley cancel. This was the town I grew up in. While Fridley had and still does have a post office, it is a branch of the Minneapolis post office. Fridley has not had an independent post office since 1927, which was  22 years before the city incorporated. I now have many Fridley cancels, but it took me many years to find the first one. In the process I saved many covers of small towns and interesting names and eventually a collection was born. This is my prized Fridley cover.

Staying with my Fridley theme the above cover is from Manomin, Minnesota. It later became Fridley. Manomin was in Manomin County which was the smallest county in the U.S.. It's history does go back to territorial Minnesota. It had a ferry crossing which was one of the only ways to cross the Mississippi to the area that would later become Minneapolis. It was on the Great River Road which was the only land route between Fort Snelling and Fort Ripley in the early Minnesota Territorial times. Manomin was roughly halfway between the two. This has a very interesting letter from a man to his nephew describing his journey from Illinois to Minnesota just four years after Minnesota statehood. His journey was full of adventure and hardship. The letter is written in pencil. After I received this I questioned the letter being in pencil as most of my 19th century stuff is done in pen that in time has faded. A quick internet search quickly informed me that the pencil has been around for almost 200 years.
The population in 1870 was 212. That is the closest year that I have census data for.