In the autumn of 1907 a doctor outside Wilmington needed three hundred dollars, and wrote to his cousin about it.
The doctor was Joseph Wales. He worked at the Brandywine Sanatorium, a small shack of a tuberculosis facility on the Brandywine, and without three hundred dollars it was not going to get through the winter. The cousin was Emily Perkins Bissell, a Wilmington woman in her mid-forties with a long record of getting difficult local things done.
What she did next raised three thousand dollars instead of three hundred, saved the sanatorium, and started a national fundraising institution that ran for the better part of a century.
She did it by selling stamps that did not carry any mail.
Who she already was
Bissell was born in Wilmington on May 31, 1861, and by 1907 she was not a newcomer to civic work.
She had founded the city's first public kindergarten. She worked for child labour legislation. She was active in the campaign for women's suffrage. This is worth stating plainly because the story is often told as though a charming amateur had a nice idea at Christmas. She was, by that point, a practised organiser who knew how to move money and attention in a small city.
What she did not have was a plan for tuberculosis, which in 1907 was among the leading causes of death in the United States and had almost no effective treatment. What existed was rest, air and isolation — which is what a sanatorium was, and why a shack on the Brandywine mattered to the people in it.
The idea came from a magazine
Bissell got the mechanism from an article by Jacob Riis.
Riis — the Danish-American journalist and reformer — had written about a Danish scheme in which special seals were sold at Christmas to fund the fight against tuberculosis. The Danish sale had reportedly raised something on the order of twenty thousand dollars.
The seals were not postage. They had no franking value and paid for nothing in the mail. You bought them for a penny and stuck them on your Christmas letters and parcels beside the real stamp, and the penny went to the cause. It was, in effect, a voluntary tax on holiday post, collected by making the envelope look better.
Bissell designed a seal, borrowed against her own credit to have them printed, and arranged for them to be sold through the Delaware chapter of the American Red Cross.
December 7, 1907
The first American Christmas Seal went on sale in Wilmington on December 7, 1907, at a penny each.
Delawareans may notice the date. December 7 is the anniversary of the state's ratification of the Constitution in 1787 — the reason Delaware calls itself the First State. There is no evidence the timing was deliberate, and it should not be read as anything more than a coincidence. It is simply a good one.
The early sales were slow enough to be discouraging. What turned it was publicity: the campaign got attention in the press, the idea travelled, and people bought seals in numbers nobody had planned for.
By the end of the season the sale had raised roughly three thousand dollars — ten times what Wales had asked for. The Brandywine Sanatorium stayed open.
What happened to the idea
The following year the scheme went national, administered by the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, the organisation that eventually became the American Lung Association.
From there the Christmas Seal became one of the most recognisable fundraising devices in American life. For decades it arrived in the post every winter, in tens of millions of homes, funding tuberculosis work and then broader lung health as TB itself receded. Generations of American children learned what a charitable appeal looked like from a sheet of small perforated stamps at the kitchen table.
Bissell did not treat it as a single stroke of luck and move on. She spent the rest of her life on the campaign, promoting and directing it, until her death in 1948.
In 1957 the Brandywine Sanatorium — the facility she had raised three hundred dollars to keep open for one winter — was renamed the Emily P. Bissell Hospital.
The Delaware part
It is easy to file this under national history and lose what is specifically Delawarean about it, so it is worth being precise.
The scale of the thing is small at the start, and local. One doctor, one struggling facility on the Brandywine, one figure of three hundred dollars, one woman in Wilmington with a printer's bill on her own credit and a table at the post office. The idea was borrowed from Denmark, but the machinery that made it work — the design, the printing, the Red Cross chapter, the press attention, the selling — was assembled in one city by somebody who already knew how that city worked.
National institutions usually look, from a distance, as though they were founded. This one was improvised, in Delaware, to solve a cash-flow problem at a sanatorium that was about to close.
Three hundred dollars was the ask. The answer ran for a hundred years.
Sources: Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Emily Bissell; American Lung Association history of Christmas Seals; the University of Virginia Historical Collections exhibit on Christmas Seals and the anti-tuberculosis movement; The Lancet Respiratory Medicine profile of Emily Perkins Bissell; standard reference accounts of the Brandywine Sanatorium and its 1957 renaming. Figures for the 1907 campaign — the three hundred dollar target and roughly three thousand dollars raised — are the figures given consistently across these accounts; the reported total of the earlier Danish sale that inspired it varies between retellings and is given here as an order of magnitude. Accounts differ in detail on how the printing was financed and on the precise sequence of the early sales, and those details are described here only in outline. No image of Bissell or of the 1907 seal is used because reuse rights for the available reproductions were not established.