The Spellman Museum of Stamps & Postal History

Tucked onto the campus of Regis College in Weston is a museum unlike almost any other: the Spellman Museum of Stamps & Postal History. Founded in 1960, the museum is devoted to stamps, postal history, and the many stories that can be discovered through something as small as a postage stamp.

My connection to the museum goes back to when my girls were young. We joined the Ben Franklin Stamp Club, which met here once a month. There would be bins filled with stamps to explore, and part of the fun was simply searching through them to see what we might discover. A stamp from a country we had never heard of could send us looking for it on a map. Another might introduce a president, artist, scientist, historic event, animal, national monument, or work of art.

The museum itself grew from the collection of Cardinal Francis Spellman, the Massachusetts-born archbishop of New York, who was an enthusiastic stamp collector. Its holdings eventually expanded far beyond his personal collection to encompass stamps and postal materials from around the world. Postal history adds another dimension because envelopes, postmarks, routes, rates, and methods of carrying the mail can tell us how people communicated across distances long before email and instant messaging.

I have visited countless museums over the years, but I do not know of another museum quite like this one. There are certainly major philatelic collections elsewhere, including at the Smithsonian, but having an entire museum devoted to stamps and postal history makes the Spellman Museum unusual.