In 1940, Ann Hind, a Utica, New York resident, owned the most valuable postage stamp in the world. Hind also had a camp at Lake George where she spent many summer days. In 1926, she had married Arthur Hind, a Utica textile industrialist and also a renowned stamp collector.
In 1922, Mr. Hind purchased the 1856 British Guiana One-Cent Magenta stamp at a Paris auction. Reportedly he paid $34,500. He died in 1933 and his widow then owned the precious collectible.
Following Arthur Hind’s death, Ann Hind married Pascal Costa Scala. That marriage lasted nine years. Ann Hind sold the postage stamp in 1940 for a reported $50,000.
The one-of-a-kind stamp was once described as being “ugly.” It had a magenta background with black ink text and a drawing of a schooner. In 2014, the stamp sold at Sotheby’s for $9,480,000. That price was nearly one billion times its original face value. In 2021, the precious stamp sold at auction for $8,307,000.
The history of this philatelic treasure reads like a mystery novel. In 1855, the British government sent several thousand postage stamps to its South American colony, British Guiana, today the nation of Guyana.
This was a small fraction of the number of allotted stamps. To make up the shortage, the colony’s postmaster had stamps, in one-cent and four-cent denominations, printed at a local newspaper. The one-cent stamps were for newspapers and the four-cent for envelopes. The postmaster even initialed the stamps to minimize counterfeiting.
In 1873, a Scottish boy living in the South American colony found an old newspaper with a cancelled stamp affixed. In 1878, a French count acquired the stamp. Upon his death in World War One it was donated to a German museum.
Following that war, France seized the postage stamp and several years later auctioned it. Arthur Hind then acquired it. An Australian engineer later bought the prized stamp. Then an investment group led by a Pennsylvania stamp dealer purchased it.
In 1980, John E. du Pont bought the singular stamp for $935,000. Following du Pont’s death in 2010, he had been in prison for the 1996 murder of Dave Schultz, an Olympic gold medalist wrestler, the 1856 British Guiana One-Cent Magenta stamp was sold in 2014.
Ann Hind certainly knew the fame of her relic. In 1940, she traveled by limousine to escort the stamp, secure in an armored car, to New York City for exhibition at the ongoing 1939 World’s Fair. What Ann Hind could not predict was how the 1-inch x 1 ¼-inches stamp would increase in value.
In 1945, five years after selling the stamp and then divorced from Scala, Ann Hind died at her Utica home of a chronic heart malady. She had just returned from a Lake George visit.
According to the Rome, NY, Daily Sentinel newspaper, Ann Hind left a short and enigmatic deathbed note for her sister. It read, “Have said good-bye to Lake George. Don’t bother.”
A version of this article first appeared on the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
Illustration: The one of world’s rarest and most expensive postage stamps – the 1856 British Guiana One-Cent Magenta; and a map of South America showing the present-day nation of Guyana, formerly British Guiana (Wikimedia Commons).
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