The Lumberyard Letter Heist
A pile of discarded mail containing invoices and payments is discovered in a lumber yard, revealing the messy aftermath of a post office box theft.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Sam P. Weston, the general advertising agent of the MacDougall & Southwick Co., yesterday recovered fifteen more letters that were stolen from their letter box last Tuesday morning. An employee of the Stetson & Post Mill Company noticed a pile of letters near a lumber pile in the yard on lower Commercial Street, and one large envelope was addressed to the MacDougall & Southwick Co. He did not think anything about it until he learned that the mail box had been robbed. The circumstance was reported to Mr. Weston yesterday morning, and he searched the lumber yard, resulting in the recovery of the remnants of fifteen letters. The large envelopes, which undoubtedly contained New York invoices, had been spirited away. Among the fragments recovered was a money order for $5 from Flesham & O'Bar, of Port Townsend. It had been torn into small pieces and stuffed into an envelope. Several letters indicated that small remittances were enclosed, in some instances stamps. The actual cash loss has been figured to last accounts at $50, with the certainty that there were 100 letters in the box.
“It had been torn into small pieces and stuck in an envelope.”
In an era before digital banking, the physical security of the mail was a critical civic issue for local businesses. Today's e-commerce giants face digital fraud, but the frantic search for missing invoices in a 19th-century lumber yard highlights how vulnerable physical infrastructure has always been to urban crime.
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