Rocking Horse Farm, Purgatory Post end 2024 with new stamps

My first post office box checking of 2025 brought with it the last couple of new local post stamps of 2024.

First is a Christmas stamp issued by Minnesota’s Rocking Horse Farm Local Post. The $1 stamp picturing a snow-covered Christmas tree was issued December 23.

I previously mentioned this local post in a January 2024 blog post, but I didn’t know much about it at the time; however, the local post’s operator included some additional information with his most recent stamp.

Rocking Horse Farm is a historic farmstead in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, and in addition to an 1850s log building hosts a music school and craft and sewing shops among other things. Rocking Horse Farm Local Post was established in 1999 and has released more than 130 different stamps since then, but over the past 15 years, the local post has issued only Christmas stamps.

The other local post stamp I received is from a more familiar issuer, New Hampshire’s Purgatory Post. The latest in Purgatory Post’s series of stamps commemorating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, this 6-sola stamp celebrates the semiquincentennial of the Yorktown Tea Party of 1774. Purgatory Post issued the stamp December 27.

While I, like many other kids in the United States, learned about the Boston Tea Party, the Yorktown Tea Party didn’t sound familiar. It turns out it was a very similar event that took place in Virginia in November 1774 when a group of patriots boarded the ship Virginia and dumped two half chests of tea into the York River. From this stamp, I learned something new!

Published 2025-01-07