Owney, the Railway Mail Dog

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

Owney, the tags of his travels hung on his harness. Smithsonian Institution, via Wikimedia Commons.

A stray terrier fell asleep on a pile of mailbags in the Albany post office around 1888, and spent the next nine years riding the trains. Railway Mail Service clerks decided Owney was luck, on the grounds that no train he rode was ever wrecked. They began fastening a tag to his collar at every stop he made, and in the end he carried so much metal that he needed a jacket to hold it. Something like a thousand tags were given to him over his life; the National Postal Museum still holds three hundred and seventy-two. He covered more than a hundred and forty thousand miles across the states, and in 1895 he went round the world in four months, leaving Tacoma in August and reaching New York two days before Christmas. In June 1897, in Toledo, Owney was shot on the orders of the local postmaster after an incident with a clerk. Accounts from the time say he had been chained in a basement beforehand, which was not how he had ever been handled anywhere else. The Chicago Tribune called it an execution. The clerks raised the money to have him preserved. He is still at the Smithsonian, and the Postal Service put him on a stamp in 2011. If your family worked the railway mail, add what you know below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.