Historedia
Episode 2 of 2

First Stamp Issue

When
1 July 1847
Where
New York City
Part of
The United States issues its first postage stamps

Official US stamps were sold in New York City on July 1, 1847, in five and ten cent denominations.

The first stamp issue was offered for sale on July 1, 1847, in New York City. Boston received stamps the following day. The denominations were five and ten cents, reflecting the uniform rates established by the 1845 Act. No 2-cent value was issued for drop letters.

Sources

  1. Postage stamps and postal history of the United States Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-26

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.