Over the last 6 months I have purchased a very large amount of material from Bruce Baryla’s gold medal winning exhibit, The Civil War Sun Tax as he’s been breaking it down on eBay. I’m slowly but surely now making my way through processing and imaging the material.

One of the lots I bought was a pair of Civil War CDVs containing two different stencil designs used by R.E. Merrifield of Shelby, Ohio. It goes perfectly along with a 3rd stamp that I bought from Bruce several years ago.

The first image below shows a straight-line stencil showing part of the last name, but without any attribution marks on either the front or back of the CDV.

The second CDV shows the same cancel, but only the first 3 letters, which wouldn’t be enough to attribute it by itself, but the other stencil cancel design used by Merrifield, a more ornate ‘wavy’ design is used here as a back mark or “backstamp” on the CDV.

This same ornate stencil was also used by Merrifield to cancel stamps, as shown in the third picture.

All 3 items tie together nicely!