How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  even Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: See Richard F. Burton, The City of the Saints (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862).

  “I now know what Hell is like”: Waterman L. Ormsby, The Butterfield Overland Mail: Only Through Passenger on the First Westbound Stage, eds. Lyle H. Wright and Josephine M. Bynum (San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2007; orig. publ. 1942), pp. viii, 167, 173.

  “Here I lay me down to sleep”: Quoted in Frederick Nolan, The Wild West: History, Myth & the Making of America (London: Arcturus, 2003), p. 131.

  9: THE MAIL MUST GO THROUGH

  The Pony’s most important tools: The horse played a role in America’s rural life—and in the popular mind and heart—well into the modern age. Just as Henry Ford’s Model T’s were rolling off the assembly line in Detroit, Bud and Temple Abernathy, ages nine and five, rode their horses from their home in Oklahoma to New York City. During their month-long trip, Orville Wright offered them a plane ride, and President William Howard Taft greeted them at the White House. Parading alongside Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, they were cheered by more than a million New Yorkers. In the summer of 1911, the Abernathys broke their own record, riding nearly four thousand miles, from New York to San Francisco, in sixty-two days.

  “Wanted: Young, skinny fellows”: Laura Ruttum, “The Pony Express: History and Myth,” http://www.nypl.org/blog/2010/02/01/pony-express-history-and-myth.

  “a little bit of a man”: Twain, Roughing It, p. 70.

  “I . . . do hereby swear”: http://www.xphomestation.com/facts.html#J.

  “setting aside the chance of death”: Burton, The City of the Saints, pp. 5, 460.

  “The mail must go through!”: Quoted in Ralph Moody, Riders of the Pony Express (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 24.

  “‘HERE HE COMES!’ Every neck”: Twain, Roughing It, p. 184.

  10: WAR CLOUDS, SILVER LININGS

  “should deem their letters safe”: Timothy Pickering to John Hargrove, August 8, 1794, Letters Sent by the Postmaster General, roll 3, pp. 372−73. Quoted in Boyd and Chen, “The History and Experience of African Americans in America’s Postal Service,” http://postalmuseum.si.edu/AfricanAmericanhistory/p1.html.

  “especially as it came within my knowledge”: Joseph Habersham to Isaac E. Gano, postmaster of Frankfort, Kentucky, April 1801, ibid., roll 10, p. 321.

  “most active and intelligent” slaves: The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events, vol. 4 (New York: D. Appleton, 1865), p. 236. Quoted in ibid.

  “no other than a free white person”: The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America from the Organization of the Government in 1780 to March 3, 1845, vol. 2 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850), p. 191. Quoted in ibid.

  After he escaped from bondage: “True Tale of Slavery,” The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation, February 1861, p. 85.

  “The mails, unless repelled, will continue”: Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp.

  the Confederacy censored the mail: For more information, see Diane DeBlois and Robert Dalton Harris, “Newspapers and the Postal Business of the Confederacy,” Postal History Journal, No. 156, October 2013.

  “If I owned four millions of slaves”: Quoted in Robert M. Poole, On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery (New York: Walker & Company, 2009), p. 15.

  the quiet county seat of Elmira: Alan Parsons, “How the Post Office in Elmira, NY Met the Challenges of the American Civil War,” presentation, 7th Annual Postal History Symposium, American Philatelic Society, November 2−3, 2012. http://stamps.org/2012-Papers-and-Presentations.

  Writing to the folks back home: The American Philatelic Society’s 2012 symposium, titled “The Blue & Gray,” featured a handsome exhibition of Confederate generals’ letters and covers from 1861 to 1865. Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart were represented, of course, but so were many of their less familiar peers. Among them was Adam “Stovepipe” Johnson, who got his nickname when he tricked a Union town into surrendering by threatening them with his impressive artillery, which closer inspection revealed to be a faux cannon cobbled together from two pieces of stovepipe and some wheels. Admiral and General Raphael Semmes was the only officer in either army to hold both ranks. Stand Watie, a Cherokee chief born in Georgia, had the double distinction of being the war’s only Indian general, North or South, as well as the last general to surrender to the Yankees. That so many of these officers met untimely deaths on the battlefield adds poignancy to the messages addressed to their mothers, wives, and sweethearts.

  “a tall, lean man”: Quoted in William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001; orig. publ. 1863), p. 43.

  “I knew nothing of the postal service”: Quoted in Dorothy Fowler, The Cabinet Politician (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), p. 107.

  They successfully redirected a letter: James H. Bruns, “Remembering the Dead,” EnRoute 1, no. 3 (July–September 1992). http://postalmuseum.si.edu/research/articles-from-enroute/remembering-the-dead.html.

  “more faithful in the performance”: United States Postal Service, “A Brief History of Women at Postal Service Headquarters,” 2008, quoted in Abbey Teller and Christina Park, “Women in the U.S. Postal System,” http://postalmuseum.si.edu/womenhistory/women_history/history_19century.html.

  “immoral things are sometimes found”: Letter to the Editor, “Women as Government Clerks,” New York Times, February 18, 1869, p. 2.

  In 1881, the obituary: United States Postal Service, “African-American Postal Workers in the 19th Century,” https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/african-american-workers-19thc-2011.pdf.

  Isaac Myers, the first known: African Methodist Episcopal Church Review 7, no. 4 (April 1891), pp. 354−55, quoted in ibid.

  A position as a clerk: William Cooper Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010; orig. publ. 1855).

  “Boys, the old flag”: Ronald S. Coddington, “The Old Flag Never Touched the Ground,” New York Times, July 19, 2013.

  11: FULL STEAM AHEAD

  One such train, traveling: Carl H. Scheele, A Short History of the Mail Service (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970), p. 104.

  Most correspondence traveled within a radius of fifty miles: The English novelist Anthony Trollope, who had a long career with the Royal Mail, traces the complicated journey of a letter during the heyday of railway mail, in both the U.S. and Great Britain, in a charming passage from Framley Parsonage that also refers to the etiquette of Sabbath mail: “And now, with my reader’s consent, I will follow the postman with that letter to Framley; not by its own circuitous route indeed, or by the same mode of conveyance; for that letter went into Barchester by the Courcy night mail-cart, which, on its road, passed through the villages of Uffey and Chaldicotes, reaching Barchester in time for the up-mail from London. By that train, the letter was sent towards the metropolis as far as the junction of the Barset branch line, but there it was turned in its course, and came down again by the main line as far as Silverbridge; at which place, between six and seven in the morning, it was shouldered by the Framley footpost messenger, and in due course delivered at the Framley Parsonage exactly as Mrs Robarts had finished reading prayers to the four servants. Or, I should say rather, that such would in its usual course have been that letter’s destiny. As it was, however, it reached Silverbridge on Sunday, and lay there till the Monday, as the Framley people have declined their Sunday post. And then again, when the letter was delivered at the parsonage, on that wet Monday morning, Mrs Robarts was not at home.” (Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage, chapter 5, pp. 58–59, http://www.online-literature.com/anthony-trollope/framley-parsonage/5/.)

  “The midnight train is whi
ning low”: Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” 1949.

  “On his memory, accuracy, and integrity”: Quoted in Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, p. 173.

  “Any indications of derangement”: Ibid., p. 83.

  “of all existing departments”: Quoted in Fuller, American Mail, p. 2.

  “The public be damned”: “Vanderbilt in the West; The Railroad Millionaire Expresses Himself Freely,” New York Times, October 9, 1882.

  A carrier recorded only as “Stringer”: Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, p. 40.

  “As soon as the ice begins to form”: Quoted in United States Postal Service, “Star Routes,” November 2012. https://about.usps.com/publications/pub100/pub100_017.htm.

  In 1900, the economist H. T. Newcomb: Quoted in Richard John, History of Universal Service and the Postal Monopoly, http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/system/documents/704/original/Appendix_D.pdf.

  The history of communications in Yellowstone National Park: Each year, the world’s first national park postmarks roughly one piece of mail for each of its four million visitors. Yellowstone’s main post office, in the village of Mammoth Hot Springs, was constructed in 1937 and has a certain modernist elegance in a part of the country better known for rustic log cabins. The two large Art Deco bear sculptures that flank its entrance might have been inspired by the jeweler Cartier. In summer, when many vacationers as well as personnel receive letters and parcels, five postal employees sort the mail into old-fashioned pigeonhole racks behind the well-appointed lobby’s service windows and wall of postal boxes. In winter, the park’s population shrinks to mostly rangers and other employees, and the perks of its two postal workers include cozy apartments over the shop.

  a feast that was “a beaut”: Letter from Edwin Kelsey, December 3, 1898, in Fort Yellowstone Historic District Tour Guide: The Army Years, 1886−1918 (Yellowstone National Park, WY: Yellowstone Association, 2010).

  “$1.25 a day above horsefeed”: Unpublished material from files of the USPS Historian. Records indicate that Wyeth was a mail carrier on a “special” supply route that served post offices that were too new and remote to be served by regular routes.

  Wyeth’s pictures later appeared in Century, Harper’s Monthly, Ladies’ Home Journal, McClure’s, Outing, and Scribner’s magazines. He also illustrated Western novels, such as Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White and the original Hopalong Cassidy tales by Clarence E. Mulford. On February 1, 2001, the U.S. Postal Service issued a sheet of stamps commemorating twenty American illustrators and selected Wyeth’s illustration of Captain Billy Bones from Treasure Island to represent his life’s work.

  12: THE GOLDEN AGE

  “our whole economic and political system”: Quoted in John Joseph Lalor, ed., Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States, vol. 3 (New York: C. E. Merrill & Company, 1893), p. 310.

  “enormous, resistless, inconceivable”; “we beat the world”: Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, pp. 17, 18.

  “is for the transmission of intelligence”: Quoted in Henry Martyn Field, The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), p. 100.

  “that most subtle and universal”: U.S. Congress, House Executive Documents for 1873, “Report of the Postmaster-General,” vol. 3 (43rd Cong., 1st sess.), (Washington, 1874), quoted in “Republican Mass Meeting—Speech of Mr. Creswell,” Baltimore American, October 18, 1873.

  “There must be a limit”: Quoted in Fuller, American Mail, pp. 180–81.

  “Let us adhere, as closely”: Leonidas Trousdale, “The Postal Telegraph System” (1869), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 4, p. 42.

  “It is not contended”: Gardiner Hubbard, “The Proposed Changes in the Telegraphic System,” North American Review 117, no. 240 (July 1873), pp. 80–107.

  “the greatest business organization”: Charles Emory Smith, “Greatest Business Organization in the World: The United States Postal Service” (1899), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 1, p. 393.

  “I do not think it essential”: Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, p. 898.

  “See if each one does not commend itself”: Ibid., p. 1001.

  Most drove their own horse-drawn wagons: Since 1987, Michael Schragg, the founder and curator of the U.S. Postal Museum, in Marshall, Michigan, where he long served as postmaster, has assembled its more than two thousand postal artifacts that offer an enchanting, educational window into the lost world of turn-of-the-century rural America and the great improvements wrought by RFD and Parcel Post. Along with an array of mail buggies, postal ledgers, and hand-stamps, the collection includes a photograph of a carrier from Stella, Kentucky, grinning widely atop his horse and wearing a peculiar apron equipped with numbered pockets. The man was illiterate, but the district was desperate for a carrier during World War II, so the postal clerks sorted the mail for him and put it in the pouches, whose numbers he could read.

  The museum is housed in Marshall’s splendid copper-roofed Greek Revival post office, which befits a prosperous town founded in 1830 and auspiciously named for John Marshall, the Supreme Court’s second Chief Justice, while he still lived. Rumor had it that the town would become the new state’s capital, but tiny Lansing got that honor. By the 1840s, Marshall was a bustling, politically progressive postal and railroad hub, which later helped it achieve notoriety as the capital of wildly popular if bogus patent medicines of the sort described as “snake oil” or “pink pills for pale people.” The nearby clinic of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes and the modern cereal industry, drew devotees eager to follow his regimen of vegetarianism, sexual abstinence, exercise, and enemas.

  “insanity is on the decrease”: “Meyer’s Postal Plans: Radical Changes Advocated by Postmaster General,” Washington Post, October 13, 1907, p. 3, cited in United States Postal Service, “Universal Service and the Postal Monopoly: A Brief History,” October 2008. https://about.usps.com/universal-postal-service/universal-service-and-postal-monopoly-history.pdf.

  “financial ruin, general demoralization”: Abraham D. Hazen, “The Post Office Before and Since 1860, Under Democratic and Republican Administrations” (1880), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 1, p. 342.

  “Though modest in manner”: Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, p. 449.

  Of the country’s some 67,000 postmasters: Ibid., p. 443.

  “unlike any other feminine artist”: Ibid., p. 453.

  “And yet while there are no monuments”: George B. Cortelyou, “The Postmistress,” The Delineator 67 (January 1906), p. 71. Quoted in Teller and Park, “Women in the U.S. Postal System,” http://postalmuseum.si.edu/WomenHistory/women_history/history_reconstruction.html.

  Viola Bennett, of Suwanee, Georgia: “Resolute Georgia Girl Is Rural Mail Carrier,” [Atlanta] Constitution, September 13, 1904. “Woman Mail Carrier Hurt. Horse Throws Miss Viola Bennett from Her Buggy,” ibid., April 29, 1906. Quoted in “Women Mail Carriers,” June 2007. https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/women-carriers.pdf.

  As Cushing put it, they “fill places”: Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, p. 681.

  “a Scotchman, a bachelor”: Quoted in ibid., p. 715.

  “Every time a woman is appointed”: “Women Not Wanted,” New York Times, November 9, 1902, p. 3. Quoted in United States Postal Service, “Women of Postal Headquarters,” https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/women-at-headquarters.pdf.

  wives should “stay at home”: Quoted in “Women Clerks Who Wed,” Washington Post, November 25, 1902, p. 2. Quoted in ibid.

  This official bias against married women: Will Hays’s tenure as postmaster general lasted just one year before he left in 1922 to become the first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (later the Motion Picture Association of America). The organization was founded to sanitize Hollywood’s i
mage after the trial of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, in which he was accused, and later found not guilty, of raping and murdering a woman in his home. In 1930, the Presbyterian deacon and former chairman of the Republican Party implemented the “Hays Code,” which forced studios to remove any potentially offensive material from their movies and seriously dampened artistic expression in film until 1960, when the current age-based movie rating system was created.

  “Mrs. Minnie Cox, Postmistress”: Cleveland Gazette, February 7, 1903, cited in Boyd and Chen, “The History and Experience of African Americans in America’s Postal Service.”

  13: REDEFINING “POSTAL”

  The elegant Palladian structure: After the Post Office Department moved to new quarters in 1897, the beautiful marble building was used by various government agencies. It gradually fell into such a state of disrepair that even a rescue by the Smithsonian Institution was judged to be too expensive. The building was eventually bought by the Kimpton Hotels chain and opened in 2002 as a chic boutique hotel.

  “We doubt if there is a building”: Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1859.

  “Express companies extend their business”: Harper’s Weekly, December 7, 1889.

  “The effect of such a law”: C. A. Hutsinpillar, “The Parcels Post” (1904), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 4, p. 262.

  “our great cooperative express company”: James L. Cowles, “A United States Parcels Post,” in ibid., p. 236.

  “educating energy augmented by cheapness”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1870), p. 26.

  “so trashy and wishy-washy”: James Britt, “Second Class Mail Matter: Its Uses and Abuses” (1911), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 4, p. 470.

  “As long as the people”: Wilmer Atkinson, “Guessing and Figuring Having Failed, Try a Few Ounces of Common Sense” (1911), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 4, p. 455.