When the US Postal Service Delivered Babies
“Neither Snow nor Rain nor Heat nor Gloom of Night…”
Smoke signals were our first ‘expedited’ method of conveying information rapidly across long distances. Then came The Pony Express followed by telegraph, telephone… and look at us today.
The U.S. Mail was founded in 1775 with Ben Franklin its first Postmaster-General. The postal system is legally obligated to serve all Americans, regardless of geography, at uniform price and quality. And it always did… that and increasing the price of forever stamps, forever.
Initially, most of our ancestors had to venture to the closest postal pick-up designation to get their mail… and for many, it was a lengthy trip over bad roads and sometimes in horrible weather.
In the 19th century, recognizing that our country was largely ‘rural,’ the Post Office decided delivery should be door-to-door.
To go with this new level of delivery, ‘parcel post’ assured many things of different weights and shapes could be mailed at costs below almost any other delivery method at that time. Everything, up to 50 pounds, could be mailed, and this included children.
Yes, the United States Post Office delivered children. Yep, that’s a 12-cent stamp on her forehead in this staged photo, but the early Post Office did, at one time, mail children.
It was felt this was an accepted service to help parents get their children to grandma’s house a few miles down the road, or in one Oregon instance, from Grangeville to Lewistown — 70 miles for 53 cents. And for just 15- cents, a 6-year-old was mailed 725 miles from Florida to Virginia.
The kids were treated like kids, not sacks of mail, often riding in mail cars and being given food and water on the journey. It wasn’t until June 13, 1920, that kids were officially taken out of the ‘mail sack’ for good.
The giant mailers of that day, Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Company, drove the demand for ‘parcel post’ to deliver mail-order goods to rural America.
From 1908 to 1940, Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold and shipped 70,000 mail-order ‘kit-homes’ complete with instructions, nails, wood, glass, toilets, tubs, etc. and everything else needed to assemble and live in.
Customers could select from dozens of different models in Sears’ Modern Homes Catalog, order blueprints, send in a check, and a few weeks later everything they needed would arrive, ready and ready for assembly.
The homes were freighted but so much of everything else in the giant Sears catalogs was borne on the backs of the postmen. Postwomen came much later, of course.
One of the strangest mailings, if you don’t count a severed ear or the slave who escaped by mail, was the shipment of 80,000 bricks from the foundry to a Utah building site 127 miles away.
The bricks were sent in parcel-post-packaging with a weight limit of 50 pounds each. This was deemed the least expensive way to get them from point A to point B.
I did some fact-checking: that would be 3,200 x 50-pound packages if my postal scale is correct. So now I’m out the cost of 80,000 bricks, plus postage.
Know anyone who might need 80,000 bricks ready for ‘parcel posting’ to their mailbox?
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
— Postal motto
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