Owney, the dog who rode the mail trains
A stray dog wandered into the Albany post office in 1888 and became the unofficial mascot of the railway mail clerks.
Owney was a scruffy stray who became a regular at the post office in Albany, New York, in 1888. The National Postal Museum thinks his first owner was probably a postal clerk, a man the dog liked to walk to work. When that clerk moved away, Owney stayed behind with the friends he had made among the mail clerks.
A dog who followed the mailbags
The clerks let him spend the night in the building, and he slept on a heap of empty mailbags. Something about the bags held him, perhaps their texture, perhaps their scent. Where the bags went, Owney went. He rode with them on mail wagons first, then on mail trains, and before long he was traveling in Railway Post Office cars across New York State and then across the country.
The railway mail clerks made him their unofficial mascot, and many came to think of him as a good luck charm. Train wrecks were all too common in those years, and the museum notes that no train Owney rode was ever in one.
Tags, tokens and a harness
People along his routes marked each visit by fastening something to his collar. The museum sorts the keepsakes that survive into groups, among them
baggage checks and hotel room key tokens
dog license tokens
coins and medals
tokens from fire departments, fraternal groups and political campaigns
The collection grew heavy enough to weigh the dog down. Postmaster General John Wanamaker heard about it and had a harness made so the tags could be spread more evenly across Owney's body. Now and then a postal worker would take a few off and mail them to the Albany post office or to the Post Office Department in Washington, DC, and each time Owney came home to Albany the clerks there saved the tags. In 1894 a writer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, quoted by the museum, said the tags would "jingle like the bells on a junk wagon."
Around the world, and after
In 1895 Owney went around the world, riding with mailbags on trains and steamships to Asia and across Europe before returning to Albany. The museum dates both of its photographs of him to about that time. The cover of this post is the second of them, with Owney in the doorway of a mail car and four unidentified clerks standing outside. Who took either picture is not known.
In June 1897 he boarded a mail train for Toledo, Ohio. There a postal clerk showed him to a newspaper reporter, and Owney became ill tempered. The museum says the exact circumstances were never satisfactorily reported, but he died in Toledo of a bullet wound on June 11, 1897.
The mail clerks raised money to have him preserved, and he was given to the Post Office Department's headquarters in Washington. In 1911 the department transferred him to the Smithsonian Institution, which has kept him ever since. He is on display in the National Postal Museum's atrium, wearing his harness, with several of his tags around him.
From the National Postal Museum collection, records A.2008-41 and A.2006-47.
