It may surprise you when I tell you that, in a big way,
the Postal Service built America.
For over 200 years, it has subsidized the transportation and infrastructure
needed to eventually deliver mail
to each resident and business in the United States.
150 years ago, it took more than a month and a half to travel
and deliver the mail to many parts of the frontier from New York City
if you could get there at all.
However, the postal service needed faster routes so it created post roads
long rudimentary overland routes.
With time and traffic, these post roads developed into America's first interstate roads.
Letters, postcards and packages have been delivered
by steamboat and stagecoach
by horseback and hovercraft
by motorcycle and mailster
by railcar and rocket.
There's a lot to talk about. It's the history of mail, Part one.
Next on Marking History!
This is the historical marker for the Pony Express, located here in San Francisco, California.
From April 1860 to Oct 1861, young fearless horseback riders
carried the mail in swift relay teams from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California.
On March 4, 1861, the company's riders set their fastest time
delivering Lincoln's inaugural address to San Francisco by traveling
over 1900 rough and dangerous miles in less than eight days.
Although ultimately short-lived and unprofitable, the Pony Express captivated America's imagination.
It contributed to the economy of the towns on its route
and served the mail-service needs of the American West in the days
before the telegraph or a reliable transcontinental railroad.
In early colonial times, correspondence depended on friends, merchants, and Native Americans
to carry messages among the colonies via foot or horseback.
However, most correspondence ran between the colonists and their families in England.
In 1639, the General Court of Massachusetts designated Richard Fairbanks' tavern in Boston
as the official repository for mail, in line with the European practice of using coffee houses and taverns as mail stations.
On August 10, 1753, our very own Benjamin Franklin became a postmaster general for the Crown.
He made important and lasting improvements to the colonial posts.
New surveys were made, milestones were placed on principal roads, and new and shorter routes were laid out.
Thanks in large part to Franklin's efforts, the colonial posts in North America made their first profit in 1760!
However, he was dismissed from his job in 1774 as joint postmaster general for the Crown
because he was judged too sympathetic to the colonies.
No worries, though. He got a new job a year later!
In July 1775, Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general by the Second Continental Congress
and in charge of the newly created Post Office Department.
He was responsible for all post offices from Massachusetts to Georgia.
In a different version of the Stamp Act, images of Ben Franklin and George Washington
were chosen to be on the first U.S. postage stamps, issued on July 1, 1847.
During the early days of the postal system in the 19th century,
it was common practice to cross-write or cross-hatch letters.
Back then, paper was more expensive and postal delivery was charged per page or by the size of the paper.
Writing sideways on top of the first side of text saved the writer money.
And they turned their letters into envelopes to save even more on postage.
During the Civil War, mail was a treasured link between camps and battlefields and “back home.”
Since soldiers sometimes had trouble getting postage stamps and keeping them dry,
beginning in July 1861, they were allowed to mail letters without stamps
by writing “Soldier's Letter” on the envelope.
Postage was then collected from the recipient.
Due to a coin shortage, beginning in August 1862,
the Treasury Department issued special “postage currency”
reproductions of postage stamps on larger, thicker, un-gummed pieces of paper
in denominations of five, ten, twenty-five, and fifty cents. Stamps became money.
By the 1860s, railroads played a big part in transportation,
not only for the war effort, but also for the mail delivery service.
So it was not surprising someone thought to customize a railcar and turn it into a traveling post office.
The first permanent RPO or Railway Post Office route
was established on August 28, 1864, between Chicago, Illinois, and Clinton, Iowa.
Mail was sorted, processed and distributed en route by postal clerks in specially designed mail cars.
An interesting feature of most RPO cars was a mail hook that could be used
to snatch a leather or canvas pouch of outgoing mail at smaller towns where the train did not stop.
With the train often operating at 70 mph, a postal clerk would have a pouch of mail ready to be dispatched
as the train passed the station.
In a coordinated movement, the clerk kicked the outbound mail pouch out of the car,
while the catcher arm was swung out to catch the incoming mail pouch.
It was a popular technique and the backbone of the United States Postal Service through the 1930s.
Owney was a scruffy mutt who became a regular fixture around the Albany New York post office
in 1888, watching the clerks work.
It seemed that Owney was attracted to the texture or scent of the mailbags
and he soon began to follow mailbags onto the RPO mail trains.
In no time, Owney began riding with the bags on train cars
across the state and then the country and then the world!
Railway mail clerks considered the little terrier a good luck charm.
At a time when train wrecks were all too common, no train Owney rode, was ever in a wreck.
The railway mail clerks adopted Owney as their unofficial mascot,
marking his travels by placing medals and tags on his collar.
Later he got a harness to display his trophies.
For a time, Orney was the most famous dog in the world.
By the time Owney made his last trip with his beloved mailbags in 1897, he had received more than 1,000 medals and trinkets
and had left post offices with hundreds of letters and notes, which verified his travels and experiences.
Luckily, he will last forever.
the U.S. Post Office issued a Forever stamp with Owney,
the globe-trotting canine, surrounded by many of his tags and medals.
On the next Marking History episode, we share more stories on the history of mail- Part Two.
Stories include the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion,
which was an all-black battalion of the Women's Army Corps during World War Two.
Their job overseas was to sort the Army's mail. Their motto was "No mail, no morale".
Another World War Two story will focus on V-Mail, short for “Victory mail.”
V-Mail used standardized microfilm processing to produce lighter, smaller cargo.
Space was made available for other war supplies
and more letters could reach military personnel faster around the globe. Stay tuned.
If history can be taught with stories
they can never be forgotten.
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