Two events, one day apart and both involving mail... I was in. The first was Sealed Secrets: Renaissance Spies and Europe's Postal Services.

We also learned about invisible ink, also known as security ink or sympathetic ink, a substance used for writing, which is invisible either on application or soon thereafter, and can later be made visible by some means. Invisible ink is one form of steganography.

Oh man, I remember that as a kid (we used lemon juice). One of the earliest writers to mention an invisible ink is Aeneas Tacticus, in the 4th century BC. He mentions it in discussing how to survive under siege. One of the techniques that involved steganography involved puncturing a tiny hole above or below letters in a document to spell out a secret message. This did not include an invisible ink but the Germans improved on the method during World War I and World War II. They used invisible ink and microdots instead of pinpricks. So dang interesting!

At the end of the lecture, we were taught the proper way to make our own envelope seals (crayons work best).

What an informative way to spend an afternoon!

The second intriguing presentation was To Bind the Nation Together: The 1910 Santa Rosa Post Office and the USPS.

"The story of the old Santa Rosa Post Office- a building that has had several different lives- is often centered on major events: the 1906 earthquake, the building's construction, the 1911 airmail delivery, the rescue of the post office from the wrecking ball and relocation across two city blocks - but we don't spend enough time thinking about the day-to-day importance of the post office itself. In focusing on those milestones, we lose sight of how important post offices were to rural and growing communities in the early 20th century."

"Join the Museum of Sonoma County’s Associate Director and Curator of History, Eric Stanley and Smithsonian's National Postal Museum’s Assistant Curator Dr. Alison R. Bazylinski, for a discussion on the brief history of how the U.S. Post Office Department Post expanded into the West, and how post offices, such as the Grand Old Post Office in Santa Rosa, played a vital community role, particularly in rural and growing communities, where it connected residents to local, national, and international issues."

I heard Dr. Bazylinski cover some of this topic at the last Wine & Design lecture.

I was extra interested in the Santa Rosa component, as I have delighted in its Federal Style/California Classic post office before. I loved that mail was so important that the local newspaper would publish the names of people who had letters waiting for them. Before 1863, postage paid only for the delivery of mail from Post Office to Post Office – citizens picked up their mail at the Post Office, although in some cities they could pay an extra two-cent fee for letter delivery or use private delivery firms. In 1879, eligibility for free city delivery was extended to include any town with at least 20,000 residents within its corporate limits or any Post Office with at least $20,000 in annual revenue, and in 1887 to include any town with at least 10,000 residents within its corporate limits or any Post Office with at least $10,000 in annual revenue. In 1910, when Santa Rosa's beautiful P.O. was built, there were only 7,817 residents so they had to pick up their mail (hence the notices).

We were introduced to Louise Morelli, who after being expelled from high school for not snitching on friends who were drinking, became one of the youngest postmasters in California, at the age of 19.

As the town grew, people were increasingly impressed with the well equipped, large Santa Rosa post office, "a fact quickly noted by most visitors".

With the eventual mailing rate decrease for catalogs and the creation of the very affordable Parcel Post, Santa Rosa's post office got incredible busy thanks to Luther Burbank. Cousin to the East Coast Seed King, W. Atlee Burpee. For many rural postal customers, these catalogs were their only reading material, with quite a few people learning to read while looking at tomato images. Wild.

W. Atlee Burpee died in 1915, by which time his company was sending out a million catalogs a year, and his 22-year-old son David became head of the firm. David Burpee maintained the close relationship with Luther Burbank. Before Burbank died in 1926, he had started a small seed company (mailing out 65,000 catalogs annually), and after his death Burpee acquired the rights to the seeds as well as Burbank's experimental work, including the breeding records, or "stud book". As a result, a number of Burbank's splendid flowers and vegetables were added to the Burpee line.

We also learned of pilot Fred J. Wiseman, who in 1911 embarked on a historic flight in his spindly biplane: delivering mail and newspapers from Petaluma to Santa Rosa, about 15 miles to the north. It has been declared as the world's earliest "air mail" flight, and according to a monument honoring him, it was the "first recorded airplane flight sanctioned by a local post office and available to the public." What a lot of history in a small Northern California town, all tied to the United States Postal Service.