This stamp honors George Washington.
Probably fairly common knowledge, at least among stamp collectors, is the fact that George Washington is the most often used subject for United States stamp designs.
For the record, Benjamin Franklin is second, primarily since he was the first Postmaster General.
This stamp’s design is one of several based on the portrait work of Gilbert Stuart
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I don’t own a copy of this stamp yet.
Usage of the 1855 Washington 10 Cent
This Washington stamp had three main uses. One was to pay for letter delivery across the country, if your missive weighed less than half an ounce. Another was to pay for domestic travel of letters over half an ounce. The final use was for foreign (mainly British) mail.
Cataloging the Washington 10 Cent
Some catalogs list four imperforate varieties and five perforate varieties of this stamp. All stated differences, or types, as they are usually called, are for small design variations near the border frills. Most of these are so tiny that you’d need a magnifying glass to distinguish between them.
For the imperforate stamps, you can even find all four types on one sheet of stamps! If two catalog listings occur on the same sheet of stamps, why would you call them different stamps?
The Minimalist Catalog takes care of this problem by simply giving one listing to all those variations, calling it USC 6.
| George Washington 10c Statistics | |||
| Date Used | Designer | Printing | Number |
| 7/11/1855 | Joseph I. Pease(?) | Toppan, Carpenter, Casilier & Co. | 500,000,000 |