Forwarding Agent
Hunter & Hay
- Marks
- 1
- Covers
- 2
About Hunter & Hay Hunter's Road, Vepery, formerly called Hunter Street, is named after Mr. John Hunter, who owned Hunter House in that street, a building long since demolished. Hunter arrived at Madras as a free merchant in 1787, served as Cashier of the Carnatic Bank, and about 1795 became Secretary of the British Bank and one of its Directors. In 1796 he received a grant of an acre of land in Vepery (No. 171 of 2200 April), and in 1803 was head of the firm of Hunter & Hay, whose offices were in Fort St. George. As a long-established Fort St George mercantile house, Hunter & Hay was among the Madras firms whose shipping links and commercial correspondence made it a natural conduit for private mail. In the decades before the uniform postal reforms of 1854, letters commonly passed through such agents, who endorsed or forwarded covers between the presidency port and correspondents at home and abroad — and it is in that role, as a forwarding agent handling pre-1854 mail, that the firm is recorded here. Surviving covers connected with Hunter & Hay are scarce, and each one adds to the thin documentary record of how correspondence moved through Madras’s mercantile network.
Census
Census records
2 covers recorded
Submit a cover from Hunter & Hay
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