page_title: Postage stamps and postal history of Mexico
section_title: District overprints
hierarchical_section_title: Postage stamps and postal history of Mexico / Classic stamp period 1856–1874 / District overprints
caption_attribution_description: English: Mexico 1856 un real Scott 2 District Oajaca.Русский: Почтовая марка номиналом 1 реал 1856&#160;г. с надпечаткой «Оахака» и гашением Теуантепека
context_page_description: The Mexican postal system has its roots in the Aztec system of messengers which the Spanish adopted after the Conquest. A postal service was established in 1580, mainly to communicate between the viceroyalty of New Spain with the motherland Spain. During the 18th century, Spain established a formal postal system with regular routes. In 1856, Mexico issued its first adhesive postage stamps, with "district overprints", a unique feature among postal systems worldwide, employed to protect from theft of postage stamps.
  In 1891, the postal and stamp issuing authority was created as an administrative division of the Secretaría de Comunicaciones. It was called Servicio Postal Mexicano. In 1901, the Dirección General de Correos was made a separate government agency. The Palacio de Correos de Mexico is used since 1907 as main post office.
  The Mexican Revolution and ensuing Civil Wars resulted in numerous provisional and local stamps issued by the factions in control of different areas of the country.
context_section_description: Virtually all the early stamps of Mexico have district overprints, which were added as an anti-theft device. These overprints came into use in 1856, with the first stamps of Mexico, and continued officially until the end of 1883.
  The Mexican postal system divided the country into about 50 "districts", each of which had a main office and a number of suboffices. The district office ordered stamps from Mexico City, they would be shipped by stagecoach unoverprinted, and then the district office would handstamp each stamp with the name of the district. The overprinted stamps would then both be sold directly to postal customers, and shipped to suboffices.
  In theory, only overprinted stamps were valid for postage, but given the error potential of applying the marking to each individual stamp, a small number of unoverprinted uses are known. Also, some offices failed to comply with orders and simply sold their stamps unoverprinted.
  In 1864, the system was refined by shipping the stamps from Mexico City with an invoice number and year already overprinted.
  Sometimes the district office's overprint included a number designating the suboffice for which the stamps were intended, and occasionally suboffices applied their own handstamps. Larger offices had several different designs of handstamp in use; Mexico City used five different devices to handstamp the stamps of 1856, each with a different appearance, while the districts of Guadalajara, Guanajuato, Puebla, Querétaro, and San Luis Potosí each had three devices.
  The color of the district name was almost always black, but red, blue, and violet overprints are known. For a period in 1858, the postmaster of Zacatecas, who had fled the city for Aguascalientes to escape the fighting during the Reform War, but had left his handstamp, wrote in "Zacatecas" by hand.
  For many years, philatelists were mystified by the overprints, until Samuel Chapman, a British businessman living in Mexico, took an interest and researched the postal archives. His 1926 book, since reprinted, includes extensive detail on the shipments to the various districts.
  Many of the overprints are rare, and command high prices among specialists in Mexican stamps. They have also been forged.
caption: One real stamp, 1856, with "Oajaca" overprint and Tehuantepec cancellation
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