“Police files bulge with unsolved crimes. Ancient masterminds have devoted a lifetime unraveling puzzles which seemingly have no apparent answer. Authorities believe there is no such thing as a perfect crime…that somewhere, sometime the truth will emerge triumphantly. Apply this theory to the beehive marking and there still remains a distinct possibility that the truth will never be known.”
With an enigmatic title, niche premise, fancy drop caps, underregulated prose and both a preface and a prologue—not to mention a publisher—all for a 30-page booklet whose conclusion echoes its prologue’s above concession that the answer it seeks may never be found, Arthur Warmsley’s The Search For The Truth About The New Haven Beehive (1982) is, like its subject, a puzzling and paradoxical obscurity.
Its subject, however, is a prominent one as far as philatelists (“fi-LAT-uhl-ists”), a.k.a. postal history enthusiasts, are concerned. Warmsley called the New Haven Beehive—an inked beehive design encircled by the words “NEW HAVEN” and “CONN.” and pressed onto a small number of surviving letters between 1838 and 1840—“one of the most interesting, albeit controversial markings ever to appear on a stampless cover.” At the time Warmsley’s investigation was published, only five authentic examples were known, making them quite the collector’s items. Philatelic buzz around the hive had grown loud indeed when, in 1975, a stamp collector purchased one of the five at auction for $3,500—more than $20,000 in today’s money.
For Warmsley, a career Hartford Courant photographer who spent much of his free time philatel-ing, the problem was his opinion that the Beehive wasn’t a postal marking at all. The facts as he understood them simply didn’t add up. The contents of the letters he was able to examine or, alternatively, verify, one of which rather theatrically challenged the editor of the New Haven-based Connecticut Herald to a duel, indicated origin points of Philadelphia and New York, yet none bore the customary marks of having been mailed from those locations. The theory that the mailings may have been “drop letters”—letters “originating and delivered in New Haven,” which could have been subject to fewer markings—also runs afoul of their stated geography.
A competing theory, that the mark was a “fancy cancel”—a vanity design used to mark postage as expended, created perhaps for some local institution—found its strongest candidate in the New Haven Savings Bank, which had not only adopted the industrious beehive as its emblem but had also been founded the year of the first Beehive letters, in 1838. But neither Warmsley nor others he surveyed, including the retired owners of the New Haven collectibles shop through which all the letters had passed, could propel the theory beyond mere coincidence, let alone explain why the bank (or, on its behalf, the postal service) would use the mark on letters having nothing to do with its operations or personnel.
Bereft of any better, let alone good, explanations, Warmsley threw his hands in the air. “An ominous cloud has cast a shadow of doubt around the New Haven beehive marking,” he concluded, before adding, more soberly, “This investigation is obviously not completed, and hopefully more information will surface—perhaps legitimizing the beehive marking as an important piece of philately.”
Like Frodo receiving the One Ring, the task would lie dormant for years, then fall, as if by providence, to Bernard Biales, a Boston-based philately expert. According to an obscure and admittedly near-impenetrable 2002 article adapting a talk he’d given “shortly after [Warmsley’s] death” to the Connecticut Postal History Society, Biales’s “totally unwilling involvement” in the New Haven Beehive investigation began in 1994, when the discovery of a sixth credible Beehive prompted a series of incrementally productive conversations, observations and working theories. One of the latter was catalyzed when Biales stumbled onto a soon-to-be-auctioned cover inked with a different New Haven marking but, as he had learned was true of the Beehive letters, labeled at an incorrectly high postage rate. Wondering if it might harbor some parallel insight, he examined the interior of the letter, whose “contents were zany—reminiscent of the Beehives”—as well as an accompanying lot description, which “included the revelatory phrase Burying Ground Fair.”
For most of us, that phrase is surely confusing, not revealing—a sequence of words so strange and novel that, when I perform an exact-phrase search on Google, it returns exactly two accurate results, both of which link to Biales’s article. But for Biales, with all he had already learned, including, at least marginally, from Warmsley’s booklet, it was the bread crumb that led to the loaf.
Examining contemporaneous New Haven newspapers (including at the New Haven Museum), Biales found notices of women-run local fairs put on to raise money for civic causes, whose timing matched that of the Beehive letters. The relevant fairs in 1838 and 1839 raised money for a planned orphanage, while an 1840 “fundraiser to fix up the cemetery,” as Biales described it, gives far clearer meaning to the phrase “burying ground fair.” But here’s the real kicker: A newspaper item about the 1839 fair described a fundraising method unrecognizable to modern readers, in which organizers would set up their own mock post office and sell comical or melodramatic letters—which may have been pre-addressed to attract certain buyers such as the editor of the Herald, and, to complete the effect, inked with a custom marking upon sale—at an elevated, for-charity ‘postage’ rate. And with this final revelation, Biales considered “the mystery of the Beehive… essentially solved.”
Warmsley, who died in 1998, can’t give us his take on that solution, though we can know his opinion of Biales’s efforts to reach it. “Someday, perhaps a hundred years or more from now,” he wrote in his prologue, “someone will want information on a topic that cannot be recalled simply because it was never properly recorded or delineated. Such information can be obtained only by diligent search, a process requiring both indispensable leg-work and valuable time, and often ending as worthless effort. Yet, if the facts are to be known the effort has to be made.” As it happened, he was writing only 12 years before the right someone wanted the same information he did, and some 16 years before they would properly delineate it, and only 43 years before some rabbitholing non-philatelist would find himself wanting the facts of the New Haven Beehive to be more widely known.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Image features Arthur Warmsley’s booklet.
