Postman’s best friend
Norwich seeks canine companion for August walking tour
As the “dog days of August” approach, Norwich Plummer City Historian hopes to celebrate the postal career of a special dog named Owney.
It’s nothing new that Norwich City Historian Dale Plummer will lead another walking tour of downtown Norwich in August. But this tour will be different, and he needs help.
To mark the “dog days of August,” Plummer wants to reenact visits to Norwich in the 1890s by Owney, the famous world traveling postal dog.
Plummer is looking for an “Owney clone” to accompany him on two walking tours of downtown Norwich Aug. 10 and 17 starting at 10 a.m. Plummer is working with local animal control officers and shelters and is asking friends and dog lovers if they know of an Owney lookalike— a medium-sized scruffy tan and white wire fox terrier type.
“A lot of these buildings were here at the time,” Plummer said. “My plan is to translate what Owney is thinking as we go along. He was here several times in the 1890s. We may not have our Owney clone with us the entire time, depending on how hot it is.”
The Norwich Post Office at the time was located on lower Main Street, but Plummer plans to start the tour at the current Norwich Post Office at 340 Main St.
Owney the postal dog apparently made several trips to Norwich, along with stops in New London, Putnam and Jewett City during his travels across the country in the 1890s. Owney would ride in mail cars on trains and get off at whatever stops seemed to interest him at the time. He would follow postal clerks to the local post office, visit businesses and hotels and always paid special attention to the mailbags.
“He only rides in mail cars,” said Nancy Pope, curator/historian of the National Postal Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “He was fiercely protective of the mail. If a mailbag dropped on the ground, he wouldn’t let anyone touch it until a uniformed mail clerk came.”
A New York Sun newspaper story on Jan. 7, 1891, described Owney’s first visit to Norwich the day before. He hopped off the train as bags were tossed from the mail car to an “amazed and slightly frightened clerk, Henry Kelly.” The clerk aboard the train reassured Kelly and told him to just take Owney to the post office and see to his needs. “Postmaster Caruthers and all the postal clerks as soon as they heard the dog’s history made much of him,” the news story said, “petted and fed him and he was taken about town to places of interest. He manifested extreme reluctance to go far from the Post Office, however, and was back there in time to escort the next mail to the depot of the Norwich & Worcester Railroad. He went north on the 2 o’clock train in the postal car sitting on a pile of pouches and there was plenty of applause for him from people on the station platform.”
Owney’s fame grew so rapidly that it has become difficult for today’s historians to separate the real dog from the legend, Pope said. By some newspaper accounts, the dog was an improbable 17 years old when he started his international tours, while the many popular children’s stories of the time called him “a pup.”
A New York Sun story on Dec. 3, 1894, on Owney’s Thanksgiving night visit to New London from Providence described how Owney had lost an eye in Canada a couple years earlier. Not true, Pope said.
“That is a good example of the journalistic fun that reporters were having,” Pope said of the myth. “It was a story that was