Owney the Railroad Post Office Dog

In 1895, a globetrotting mixed-breed mutt named Owney the Railroad Post Office Dog paid a brief call on Milwaukee. As was his custom, the dog arrived aboard a mail car on one train and departed a few hours later by another. His home was anywhere U.S. mail traveled by railroad – and in the 1890s that was everywhere.

“A wanderer upon the face of the globe, if ever there was one, appeared in the office of Chief Clerk Frank P. Smith of the Railway Mail Service this morning,” reported the Milwaukee Journal on May 11, 1895. “Post Office Owney is a dog, but he is no ordinary dog. He is the property of 7,000 railway clerks.”

Owney was a scruffy puppy when he appeared at the Albany, N.Y. Post Office in 1888. Adopted by the clerks, the Post Office became his home thanks to a kind-hearted supervisor willing to overlook regulations. Heeding the call of the open road, Owney soon started riding mail wagons and then Railway Mail Service train cars. These specially designed cars were coupled to passenger trains. As the train moved along, postal clerks in the car would sort the mail for destinations along the line. At places where the train didn’t stop for passengers, a clever contraption allowed bags of mail to be taken aboard from trackside hooks “on the fly.” At the same time, clerks would heave sacks of mail destined for that town off the moving train.

It was an efficient operation and mail service could be astoundingly fast. One could walk down the passenger platform at New York’s Grand Central Terminal, drop a letter for someone in Chicago through a slot on the wall of the appropriate mail car and be assured it would be delivered the next day.

The nationwide network of cars became Owney’s home for the remainder of his life. He would hop off one postal car at a station and climb into another and curl up on a pile of empty mailbags knowing wherever he went the clerks would take care of him.

The National Postal Museum notes, “Railway mail clerks considered the dog a good luck charm. At a time when train wrecks were all too common, no train Owney rode was ever in a wreck. The railway mail clerks adopted Owney as their unofficial mascot, marking his travels by placing medals and tags on his collar.”

The tags, usually metal luggage claims stamped with a city name, attracted the attention of the Milwaukee Journal reporter. “A huge collar, from which dangled a half-hundred or more tags from almost every conceivable corner of the country … is fixed firmly around his neck. These tags collect so rapidly that it becomes necessary to remove them at times and clerks along the line take them off and send them to ‘Owney, Albany, N.Y.,’ where they are carefully stored away in a room provided for this purpose in the Albany Post Office.”

Concerned the tags were a burden for the little dog, U.S. Postmaster General John Wanamaker had a custom harness made for Owney – and also named him the official mascot of the Railway Mail Service.

In 1895, Owney made an around-the-world trip. Starting from Tacoma, Wash., in August, he traveled with mail bags throughout Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and across Europe, before returning to New York City on December 23 and, finally, to his Post Office friends in Albany.

Although famous, Owney was not much to look at. The Milwaukee Journal reporter wrote, “He is a scotch terrier, somewhat larger than the ordinary specimen of that kind of dog. He has had many a knock in his time and he looks it. One eye has ceased to serve its original purpose.”

Owney’s death was a sad one. In June 1897, he hopped off a train in Toledo, Ohio. A mail clerk chained Owney to a post while waiting for a newspaper reporter to arrive. Not used to this sort of treatment, ailing, and possibly becoming ill-tempered in his older years, Owney bit the clerk’s hand. The local postmaster ordered Owney put down. A Toledo police officer led the dog into an alley and shot him.

His death sparked nationwide anger. The Chicago Tribune termed Owney’s death “an execution.” Mail clerks around the country donated funds to have the dog’s remains preserved. He was placed on public display in the Post Office Department′s headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 1911, Owney became the property of the Smithsonian Institution.

A century later, in 2011, Owney appeared on a U.S. postage stamp. Today he occupies a central place in the atrium of the National Postal Museum, wearing his famous harness and surrounded by a few of the roughly 1,000 tags he accumulated in his 143,000 miles of mail car travel.