The Chambers were technical experts in the craft and their skill and revolutionary patented stamp design earned them the honor of sole supplier in the industry.
Benjamin Chambers, Sr. was a self-taught engraver, inventor, and artist. He utilized all of these skills when he founded the stamp company in Washington D.C. in the 1930s. His steel stamp design was a two-part mechanism operated by one handle. The stamp displayed the name of the individual town from which the letter was being mailed and a mark of cancelation for the postage stamp.
After the passing of Benjamin Chambers, Sr. in 1871, the family business and legacy was passed along to Benjamin Chambers Jr. Not long after taking the helm of the operation, Chambers Jr. began seeking a new location in a more secluded area. The property he purchased on Tucker’s Point proved an ideal location with its close proximity to the major Wharves and waterways of the area. Each neighboring Wharf had it’s own post office which made it easy to receive production materials and effectively ship and distribute the finished products.
The stamp factory at Lodge continued production until the early 1930’s but inevitably had to close its doors as new rubber stamp designs proved to be more easily produced and more cost effective. Connecticut company Pitney Bowes was eventually rewarded the government contract and maintains it to this day.
The Chambers Stamp Factory is little more than a memory now as it was torn down shortly after its closure in 1932. A road marker has been placed in remembrance of the once thriving company.
It reads: Two miles northeast, at Lodge, stood the Chambers Stamp Factory, owned by the same family for our generations. Founded in Washington, D.C., about 1830 by Benjamin Chambers, Sr., an engraver and inventor of a breech-loading cannon, the company specialized in postmark and cancellation stamps. From 1867 to 1931 the company was the sole supplier for the U.S. Post Office Department. Benjamin Chambers, Jr., moved the factory to Lodge in 1877. After his death in 1908, his son Henry B. Chambers, Sr., assumed direction of the company until he died in 1927. Henry B. Chambers, Jr., succeeded him. In July 1931 the postal department awarded the contract to Pitney Bowes and the Chambers Stamp Company closed the next year.
This marker is located in Callao, in Northumberland County on Richmond Road (U.S. 360) just west of Hampton Hall Road (Virginia Route 202), on the right when traveling east.
