Owney: Star Pup of the US Railway Mail Service

In the late 1800s, US postal workers and the public fell in love with a pup from upstate New York. This episode of Footnoting History is all about the adored dog named Owney. Hey everyone, Christine here! As you just heard, today we’re going to talk about Owney, the most popular and beloved dog in the history of the US Postal Service. If you were here with me in January for the Mignonette episode, I fully admit that was a very, very dark topic.

This one, while you’ll see it was inspired by the same trip that sparked that topic, is much lighter and sweeter–I promise. I first learned of Owney’s existence when I was in Washington, DC last December. I paid a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum–which is fabulous, by the way–and came across a statue of a dog on the landing near the escalator. The statue was of a diminutive pup wearing a much-adorned harness.

Its placard read Owney, Mascot of the US Postal Service, Bronze Sculpture by Daniel C. Brown. Then I learned Owney had his own display. Of course I was intrigued, and by the time I left the museum that day I knew Owney would be given the Footnoting History treatment. However, before we jump in, I want to remind you all that a captioned version of this episode can be found on FootnotingHistory.com, and YouTube.com/FootnotingHistory.

I must, of course, tip my hat to the Smithsonian because–exactly as you’d expect–most of the information out there on Owney comes from them. You can find a listing of many of the sources used for this episode on FootnotingHistory.com. And, as always, thank you to everyone who buys our merch and supports us through Patreon. You are the absolute best. Now, then, let’s get to Owney because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that people love dog stories and who am I to keep you from one any longer?

In 1888, the dog we know as Owney found his way into the Post Office in Albany, New York. For a time it was the common tale that Owney was a stray pup who wandered in on his own. However in the last decade or so it has become accepted that Owney probably belonged to a postal clerk who allowed the dog to walk to work with him. Although Owney’s owner eventually abandoned him there (or, hey, maybe Owney wanted to stay) he was never kicked out.

Regardless of how he ended up ownerless in the Albany Post Office, the fact remains that he became a much-beloved darling to the employees…and pictures of Owney make it easy to understand why. Although no one knew his exact age or what exactly made up his breed lineage–he was almost certainly part terrier though–to me, Owney was adorable. He was small, with white dominating his underbelly, front legs, and around his snout while the rest of his body was varying shades of brown.

In most photographs he looks plaintive and shaggy in that kind of way that makes you want to give him a snuggle. As for his name, even that has questionable history. One possible explanation is that it was given to him by the clerk who originally led him to the post office. Another is that Owney received his name as the result of people regularly asking him, “who owns you?” Owney became, essentially, every clerks’ dog. They embraced him as one of their own and loved him.

Meanwhile Owney, well, he REALLY loved mail and in particular, mail bags. He slept on them, he guarded them, and he followed them wherever they went…even if that meant leaving the post office. It was his love of following the mail that turned Owney into a traveler who would capture widespread attention. Since Owney’s main interest was following his beloved mail bags wherever they were headed, this often meant leaving Albany. In this period mail made its way around the country mostly by train.

As such, Owney began riding the mail trains regularly, going wherever the mood struck him, on both short trips like from Albany to New York City, and increasingly long ones. It might not have been all joy riding, though, if he was unlucky. The folks who worked on those trains knew it was a dangerous job. There was always a risk of being robbed or in some sort of horrible accident…and tragedy was more common than you’d like to think.

The National Archives reports that from 1877 to 1896, “94 clerks were killed in the line of duty, and 821 were seriously injured on the job through derailments, falls, drownings, fires, and other work-related accidents.” The robberies are part of that ‘other work-related accidents’ category. Owney, however, was not worried about such things. He seems to have loved travel and the postal workers who rode on these trains.

For many his presence was like that of a guardian angel, because there are no records of any form of major incident occurring when he was present on a train. One of the most interesting things, to me, about Owney’s travels, is that people always took care of him. This was helped, certainly, by the fact that the postal clerks from the Albany Post Office provided him with a collar that declared his name and home.

Owney guarded the mail, he guarded the postal workers, and he was a welcome sight to people far and wide as his reputation began to grow. It grew so much that two things happened: newspapers took note and people started to give him souvenirs. Reading newspaper articles about Owney can be downright delightful. He’s often given far more space than you’d think. This is perhaps a tribute to the concept of dogs being a human's best friend–everyone seemed to have interest in his comings and goings.

Stories about him became heartwarming page fillers. For example, one typical write up of Owney’s exploits can be found in the April 9, 1893 edition of the Omaha Daily Bee, from Nebraska. The headline is incredibly respectful, calling our hero Mr. Owney and telling us that the “Noted Canine Tourist Paid a Visit to Omaha Yesterday.”

It goes on to call Owney “One of the most distinguished travelers and unique individuals in the United States” but also to let us know that “He is not a handsome dog, by any means, but is of a philosophic, happy disposition.” On this trip Owney apparently inspected the Omaha Post Office as if he was an official, devoured the food provided by the local clerks, and abandoned Omaha in favor of heading for the Black Hills after only one night in the city.

It’s easy to see how people would find this sort of article a charming break from real life’s troubles. Another fun article dates to February 7, 1895 and appeared in the Marble Hill Press, out of Missouri. This article was called “A Dog on the Road” and it let readers know that Owney was following his apparently customary practice of traveling the postal rail routes in the southern states during the cold, wintry months up north.

It tells us with an amusingly authoritative tone that “It is Owney’s present intention not to return to brave the rigors of northern climate before June” and, further, that he “has the postal car habit so thoroughly developed that he can rest in no other places, and sleep only comes to his tired eyes when he lies curled up on a mail sack.” Accompanying the article is an illustration of a very shaggy Owney for extra cute points.

As for the souvenirs, those usually took the form of tags, most likely made of metal. Over the course of the near decade he traveled, Owney amassed hundreds of these tags, maybe even 1000. Initially the tags were attached to his collar but, as you can imagine, that began to weigh him down. Thankfully, Postmaster General John Wanamaker had a plan.

When he learned about all the tags being given to Owney, he provided an alternative method for Owney to carry them–a harness that allowed for the tags to be more evenly distributed over the trunk of Owney’s body and relieve him of aches and pains. Additionally, whenever a postal worker noticed that the harness was getting too full, they would remove some of the tags and send them back to Albany or, in some cases, Washington, DC.

The result of this is that the Smithsonian has a massive collection of Owney’s tags. I chose some to feature on the blog post for this entry, so if you want to see them definitely head over to FootnotingHistory.com while you listen. The tags c0me from all sorts of places and events. Some were special and personalized, featuring Owney’s name and the date of his visit to a particular location while some were a little less exciting–doing things like advertising for a company.

Some of my favorites among his collection include: A horseshoe shaped tag that said ‘presented to His Dogship by F.M.Parker’ marking the date as April 20, 1892, and indicating its connection to the Baltimore and Grafton Railway Post Office An advertisement tag that said ‘presented to Owney by Ketchum’s Pharmacy, Lawrence, Massachusetts, April 25, 1896’ An undated tag in the shape of a Maltese cross with Owney’s name emblazoned across the

middle, given to the pup by a postmarking and stamping company A rectangular tag that said ‘Be Good to Owney’ presented to the dog by the postal clerks from Rock Island, Illinois in 1895. I also chose two tags that had ties to the dog-loving community. One, from the Southern California Kennel Club, was presented to Owney in April 1893, and called him “special for best traveling dog.”

Not to be outdone, the Butterfly Bench Show of Grand Rapids, Michigan, gave Owney a similar tag that said “Awarded to Owney, the Globe Trotter, December 8-11, 1896.”

You don’t need to be a historian of material culture–that is, physical items–to appreciate how every tag tells a story and these tags are a literal bounty of information about who knew who Owney was, who paid attention to where he traveled, and who wanted to either pay tribute to him or promote themselves through connection with the famous, beloved wandering dog.

While the majority of Owney’s life was spent crossing the Continental United States and dipping into Canada on rail trains, his most remarkable trip was one around the world. Now, don’t think that this was something Owney decided to do of his own accord. While, generally speaking, he wandered wherever his heart desired, his globetrotting adventure in 1895 was carefully orchestrated.

Likely inspired in part by Jules Vernes’ Around the World in 80 Days and the Tacoma, Washington started and ended worldwide travels of businessman George Francis Train, a collection of businessmen from Tacoma worked with the postal clerks who loved Owney to launch a publicity stunt where the dog was shepherded around the globe. It took him (and the clerk that accompanied him) just over four months, but he managed to visit places like Japan, Singapore, Shanghai, and Algiers.

Newspaper coverage by the Roanoke Daily Times noted that in Japan, he was given a Passport that allowed him to travel freely in the country and that when he made a stop in Hong Kong he visited the consulate and many shops and merchants, with some people adding small pieces of money to his collar. It is believed that hundreds of people turned out to see him on his grand return. He was truly a pup of public interest.

All glorious adventures, however, must come to an end and Owney’s time as a traveling dog couldn’t last forever. By 1897 all the hustling and bustling around took its toll on him. He was getting up there in age (though no one knew exactly what his age was) and he stopped traveling regularly, even taking respite with a postal worker in Missouri. His disappearance from the rails did not go unnoticed.

Rumors swirled (and some newspaper articles claimed) that he’d been shot for attempting to bite someone. It was deemed newsworthy enough that on May 2nd, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a three-column article titled OWNEY IS NOT DEAD. It assured people that he was living in retirement in Missouri but also chronicled his importance to the railway postal workers.

It said that he could always tell a postal worker from another kind of human, shared stories about his travels around the world, commented on his change in disposition with age, and proposed that the pinnacle of his fame was when he was given the Freedom of San Francisco by the mayor. However, Owney wasn’t fully down and out, yet. He still occasionally traveled but, unfortunately, one of his trips would be his undoing.

In June of that year he was in Toledo, Ohio doing what he always did, following the mail bags and being appreciated by those he encountered. Owney’s advanced age and changed temperament caused him to be less friendly than he used to be, especially when it came to having his tags admired. So it came to be that, in Toledo, he bit a postal clerk (identified in multiple newspapers as Clerk Blankertz). This turn of events proved fatal for Owney.

The Postmaster declared that Owney was a danger, called for the local sheriff, and had the dog put down quickly. It is perhaps not surprising that newspapers around the country carried this news. The Houston Daily Post declared that “his years of travel all over the United States and around the world have made him the most famous dog of his time” while other papers carried similar sentiments. Owney’s death was a gut punch to the postal workers who loved him.

He’d been their friend and companion for nearly a decade. He was, for all intents and purposes, the pet of railway postal workers across the country, as well as their unofficial mascot. Mail clerks didn’t want Owney to be forgotten so they contributed to a fund to preserve him through taxidermy. Owney was given the full preservation treatment, then put on display in a place of honor–at the Washington, DC headquarters of the US Postal Department.

He largely remained there until the 1910s when he was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution and, when the National Postal Museum opened in 1993, Owney was a part of the collection. In fact, Owney still remains embedded into the history and identity of the US Postal Service. In 2011, Owney had a popularity renaissance. As part of it, he underwent a spa treatment of sorts. Taxidermist Paul Rhymer was tasked with performing a restoration of the little guy.

According to Smithsonian features by Erin Blasco and MJ Meredith, the restoration included