And while George Washington may have been our nation’s first President, he was not the nation’s first famous face to be pictured on a stamp. Or, to be more accurate, he was not the ONLY first face to launch a thousand letters. The honor of being commemorated on those first stamps is shared by first President George Washington and first colonial Postmaster Ben Franklin.
 
U.S. Postmaster General Cave Johnson selected Franklin and Washington to be on the stamps and the firm of Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson to create them.
 
Best known for their work engraving banknotes, they proposed printing engraved stamps in their best style of line engraving in a two-color process. The cost: 25-cents per thousand stamps. Johnson learned that a one-color process would reduce the cost-per-thousand by a nickel, and the frugal Postmaster General authorized the cheaper printing.
 
Government spending stayed low when rather than creating brand new dies for the Franklin and Washington images, the engraving firm used stock dies that were already on the presses for banknotes and engraved frames. After the dies were completed, several trial colors were prepared and submitted to Postmaster General Johnson. He chose brown for the five-cent stamp and black for the ten-cent.
 
On June 26, 1847, the printers advised Postmaster General Johnson that 200,000 Washington ten-cent stamps and 600,000 Franklin five-cent stamps were ready for delivery. On July 1, 1847, the first federal United States postage stamps were issued in New York City.
 
No cover is known to have been posted at New York on July 1. The earliest known cover bearing one of these stamps was postmarked at New York City on July 2, 1847, although the stamps were probably purchased on the first day of issue.