It is amazing what you can do with the right tools. I love the look of the intricate hand carved stamps that you see in letterboxes. I could never figure out how to do it. Then I found the right tools. I found a site selling a variety pack of stamp materials to carve and I bought a small set of carving tools. Suddenly I can carve! Who’d have thunk it?

I replaced the sorry stamp in my letterbox today with a semi-fancy one. Then I went hunting for some new boxes in the area. The thing I love about letterboxing is that you find out things that you’d have never known. For example, who knew that P.T. Barnum’s Wild Men of Borneo, actually strong dwarfs from Connecticut, were buried near me? Why are they buried here? I have no idea. None of the articles I read gave any idea of how they ended up here. But now I know because there is a letterbox in their honor.

In the spirit of historical literacy I made a box today about Victoria Woodhull. She was born in a small town near here. She didn’t stay here long but it earned her a historical marker. She was a stockbroker, a newspaper publisher, a free love advocate, and the first woman to run for president of the U.S. This was in 1872 so it was quite illegal since women couldn’t vote. That didn’t really matter since she was in jail at the time anyway for sending obscene material through the mail – specifically a newspaper story alleging that famous pastor (and anti-free love crusader) Henry Ward Beecher was having an affair. She’s fascinating and hopefully her fame will spread because of the box.