Post Office Department mail wagon in Washington, D.C., 1916
Letter Carrier Delivering Mail, 1908
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If video killed the radio star; the Internet may have buried the Post Office.
It’s hard to believe that U.S. Mail carriers, about as American as apple pie and baseball are in danger of having their jobs slashed (by 220,000 people, from its current 653,000);, facilities closed (more than 3,600), while customers may receive mail less often as the U.S. Post Office deals with a crippling $5.5 billion deficit, putting in danger workers’ health care benefits for the next 75 years.
The reason for the Department’s financial woes isn’t hard to understand: junk advertisement that used to be placed in home mail boxes, now floods inboxes on our home computers, while letter writing, a lost art in the age of twittering and texting has become as obsolete as reading your morning newspaper with a bowl of Corn Flakes. The bulk of consumers now paying bills electronically while conducting their shopping online, eliminating the need for department store catalogues, are two other major reasons most often cited for the high reduction of mail being processed.
This year alone, the Department has processed 167 billion pieces of mail, down 22 percent from 2006 with some predicting the volume of mail could plunge to as low as 118 billion pieces by 2020.
So as the Postal Service tries ways to desperately get its fiscal house in order, this might be a fitting time to look back at the evolution of mail delivery, which started at a Boston tavern in 1639, while reviewing significant dates and milestones in the Post Office’s history as we recall how our neighborhood letter carriers trudged through the slush and pounding rain, navigated choppy waters, faced mountains of snow drifts and fended off a brigade of Pit Bulls, German Shepherds, and Doberman Pinschers with long sharp teeth all in order to provide first rate service to their customers.
• In 1639 Richard Fairbanks’ tavern in Boston is named repository for overseas mail.
• Governor William Penn creates Pennsylvania’s first Post Office in 1683.
• In the colonial era, overseas mail often was brought to taverns and coffee houses.
• Central postal organization came to the colonies after 1692, when Thomas Neale received a 21-year grant from the British Crown, whose settlements dominated the Atlantic seaboard, for a North American postal system.
• Benjamin Franklin served as the first Postmaster General (1775-76) after being appointed by the Continental Congress.
• Two postmasters became U.S. Presidents later in their careers— Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman.
• Other famous postmaster's include: John Brown (Abolitionist), postmaster, Randolph, PA, Bing Crosby (Singer and actor), clerk, Spokane, WA, Walt Disney (Producer), substitute carrier, Chicago, IL.; Rock Hudson (Actor), letter carrier, Winnetka, IL, Charles Lindbergh (Aviator), contract airmail pilot, Adlai E. Stevenson (Vice President)t, First Assistant Postmaster General.
• In June 1788, the ninth state ratified the Constitution, which gave Congress the power “To establish Post Offices and post Roads” in Article I, Section 8. A year later, the Act of September 22, 1789 (1 Stat. 70), continued the Post Office and made the Postmaster General subject to the direction of the President.
• The Post Office moved from Philadelphia in 1800 when Washington, D.C., became the nation’s capital.
• From 1802 to 1859, postal laws required carriers to be free white persons.
• From 1799 to 1815, a letter was based on the number of sheets; so, for example, a letter would cost 20 cents a sheet if traveled 301 to 500 miles and 25 cents a sheet if traveled more than 500 miles.
• By the end of 1819, the Post Office served citizens in 22 states, including the newest states of Illinois (1818) and Alabama (1819).
• In 1823, Congress declared waterways to be post roads
• In 1828, there were 7,530 Post Offices and 29,956 postal employees, mail contractors, and carriers, making the Department the largest employer in the executive branch.
• By 1840, private mail delivery systems were set up in several cities, including Philadelphia and New York in which they competed head-to-head with government sponsored penny posts.
• The Post Office Department issued its first postage stamps on July 1, 1847.
• Alexander M. Greig’s City Despatch Post, a private New York City carrier, issued the first adhesive stamps in the United States on February 1, 1842. The Post Office Department later bought Greig’s business and continued the use of adhesive stamps to prepay postage.
• The number of letters carried each year by the U.S. Post Office increased from about 27 million in 1840 to 161 million in 1860.
• On March 3, 1847, Congress authorized United States postage stamps with the first ones going on sale le in New York City, July 1, 1847. One stamp, priced at five cents, depicted Benjamin Franklin. The other, a ten-cent stamp, featured George Washington.
NOTE: George Washington has appeared on more U.S. postage stamps than any other person.
• In 1858, Albert Potts received a patent for a mailbox built into a lamppost; and within a year, more than 300 boxes were attached to lampposts throughout the city of Philadelphia; while 574 lampposts were in place in New York, below 55th Street by 1860.
• On April 3, 1860, the Pony Express began its run through parts of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California; and ended October 26, 1861, after the transcontinental telegraph line was completed.
• Prior to 1863, mail was delivered only from Post Office to Post Office. Citizens were required to pick up their own mail, although in a few cities, they could pay an extra two-cent fee for letter delivery or use from private delivery firms.
• An Act of Congress of March 3, 1863, and made effective on July 1, 1863, provided that free city delivery be established at Post Offices, requiring Americans for the first time to write their home address on all mail.
• The Act of March 3, 1863 (12 Stat. 704), additionally determined the postage for a letter on its weight and eliminated all differences based on distance and the number of sheets in a letter.
• Joseph William Briggs, a Cleveland, Ohio postal clerk, is credited with conceiving the idea of free city delivery while regularly noticing long lines of customers trying to keep warm as they waited patiently in line in the winter of 1862 to pick up their mail.
• By June 30, 1864, free city delivery had been launched in 65 cities nationwide, with 685 carriers delivering mail in such major cities like Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. By 1880, 104 cities were served by 2,628 letter carriers, and by 1900, 15,322 carriers provided service to 796 cities.
• Beginning in 1868, city letter carriers were required to wear a uniform; the uniform was blue-gray with black trim.
• Austria issued the first post card in 1869. The United States followed in May 1873.
• On September 16, 1875, the first exclusive mail-train is put in service leaving New York and arriving in Chicago the following day after a journey of 26 hours.
• Prior to 1888, letter carriers worked 52 weeks a year, usually 9 to 11 hours a day from Monday through Saturday, and if necessary, part of Sunday.
NOTE: In 1888, Congress declared that 8 hours was a full day’s work and that carriers would be paid for additional hours worked per day. The 40-hour work week began in 1935.
• Carriers walked as many as 22 miles a day, carrying up to 50 pounds of mail with delivery twice a day to homes and up to four times a day to businesses. The second residential delivery was discontinued on April 17, 1950, in most cities; and the weight limit of a carrier’s load was reduced to 35 pounds by the mid-1950s and remains the same today.
• In 1893, the first U.S. commemorative stamps, honoring that year’s World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, were issued. The first stamp honoring an American woman was the eight cent Martha Washington stamp of 1902; the first to honor a Hispanic American was the one-dollar Admiral David Farragut stamp in 1903; the first Native American honored with a commemorative stamp was Pocahontas in 1907; and in 1940, Booker T. Washington became the first African American to be honored with a 10 cent stamp.
• On October 1, 1896, rural free delivery service began in Charles Town, Halltown, and Uvilla in West Virginia. Within a year, 44 routes were underway in 29 states.
• The Parcel Post began on January 1, 1913, spurring the growth of the marketing and merchandising mail-order houses. Sears, Roebuck and Company, for example, handled five times as many orders as it did the year before and doubled it five years later.
• The Post Office Department originally painted its motor vehicles red, white, and blue but changed the color to vermilion red beginning in February 1913; switching to green, red, and black in October of that year. By 1915 the Department returned to a red, white, and blue color scheme for its vehicles. The color scheme reverted to red, white, and blue in 1954, and then to white in 1979.
• On May 15, 1918, the Post Office Department began scheduling airmail service between New York and Washington, D.C.; while the first commercial airmail flight in the United States took place February 15, 1926.
• As of March 1, 1923, customers were required to provide mail slots or receptacles, eliminating the need for the carrier to knock on a citizen’s door to hand them the mail personally.
• In 1930, more than 10,000 trains transported mail.
• Rewards for postal offenders (sparked by a rash of train robberies) were offered as early as 1877; the largest $2.5 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual(s) who mailed anthrax in 2001 — still stands.
• In 1954, the title “postal inspector” was first officially used.
• Due to the explosion of suburban growth, the Post Office Department begins to motorize city delivery routes by the 1950’s.
• Postmaster General J. Edward Day announced that the ZIP Code would begin on July 1, 1963.
• By 1965, only 190 trains carried mail, by 1970, the railroads carried virtually no First-Class; and on April 30, 1971, the Post Office Department terminated seven of the eight remaining routes. The last railway post office, which operated between New York and Washington, D.C., on Penn Central/Conrail, made its final run on June 30, 1977.
NOTE: Although Amtrak stopped carrying mail in October 2004, the nation’s freight railroads continue to carry mail through their intermodal service.
• Curbside cluster boxes were introduced by the Post Office in 1967.
• On August 12, 1970, President Nixon signed into law Public Law 91-375, the Postal Reorganization Act.
• Effective July 1, 1971, the Post Office Department was changed into the United States Postal Service, an independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States.
• In 1994, the Postal Service launched its public Internet site
• In 1998, the Paterson, New Jersey, Post Office was designated the “Larry Doby Post Office,” honoring the Hall of Fame outfielder who was the first African American to play baseball in the American League.
NOTE: Approximately, one in six public laws passed by the 108th Congress (2003-2004) concerned the naming of a postal facility in honor of an individual.
• In 1991, overall mail volume dropped for the first time in 15 years. Total mail volume began to grow again and, from 1992 through 2000, it reached record levels. Beginning in 2001, however, the Postal Service again saw a slight reduction in total mail volume compared to the previous year. In 2002, total mail volume dropped to 202.8 billion pieces, down nearly five billion pieces from the previous year.
• In 2001, the Postal Service formed a business alliance with FedEx, using FedEx’s air network for the domestic air transportation of U.S. Mail and allowing the company to place self-service collection boxes on postal property.
• In 2006, 224,400 letter carriers delivered mail in the nation’s, while an estimated 37 million homes and businesses were served by the Postal Service’s rural letter carriers.
• Dog sleds were used to transport mail in Alaska until 1963. Today, mail is deposited by parachute on some Alaskan routes. During the winter, snowmobiles carry mail in the highlands of Utah, Colorado, and Montana.
• The first triangular postage stamp was issued in 1997 and the first round stamp in 2000.
• By 2008, the Post Office began to reduce its workforce with mail flow controller positions eliminated and supervisory positions downsized.
• According to Postmaster General/CEO Patrick R. Donahoe, speaking before Congress on September 6, 2011, the Postal Service ended Quarter III of fiscal year 2011 (April 1 – June 30) with a net loss of $3.1 billion; net losses for the nine months which ended June 30 amount to $5.7 billion and the Department is currently projecting a net loss of up to $10 billion by the end of this fiscal year, depending on interest rates.
Did You Know That….?
• The oldest Post Office still in its original building (since 1816) is located in Hinsdale, NH.
• Clinton is the most common Post Office name. Madison is second, and Franklin and Washington are tied for third.
• The five most common street names in the country are Second, Park, Main, Maple and Oak.
• The longest Main Street in America is located in Island Park, ID (83429) — it's 33 miles long.
• There are more than 42,000 ZIP codes in the country.
• The easiest ZIP Code to remember is 12345, belonging to General Electric in Schenectady, NY.
• The longest regular rural route is Route 2 in Gridley, KS. The carrier travels 182.8 miles daily and delivers to 258 boxes.
• The shortest rural delivery route is Route 42 in Henderson, NV. The carrier travels 2.9 miles daily and delivers to 952 boxes.
• The Postal Service moves mail using planes, trains, trucks, cars, boats, ferries, helicopters, subways, float planes, hovercrafts, T-3s, street cars, mules, snowmobiles, bicycles and feet.
Daily Averages for the U.S. Post Office
• 563 million — number of mail pieces processed and delivered.
• 136 million — dollars paid to postal employees in salaries and benefits daily
• 22,112 — number of passport applications accepted
• 407,267 — number of money orders issued
• 7 million — customers served at more than 36,000 retail locations.
U.S. Post Office by the Numbers
• 67 billion — revenue in 2010, in dollars
• 171 billion — total number of mail pieces processed in 2010; 167 billion pieces for 2011
• 23 million — average number of mail pieces processed each hour
• 391,000 — average number of mail pieces processed each minute
• 1.9 billion — dollar amount paid every 2 weeks in salaries and benefits.
• 574,000 — number of career employees
• 41.5 million — number of address changes processed in 2010
-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
September 29, 2011
Source: Historian, United States Postal Service; ``The Postal Age’’ By David M. Henkin; ``Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse’’ By Richard R. John; ``Sorting Letters, Sorting Lives’’ By Linda B. Benbow.
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Web Sites to Keep in Mind:
The Railway Mail Service Library
Pony Express Timeline (Pony Express Museum)
One important benefit of this approach is that it preserves universal service, which is what we were discussing in the first place. If the NYC post office goes out of business it will create no disruption at all, because UPS will gladly provide service to every address there. Not true in Alaska which is an outlier, in every sense, and may need special consideration and a more tailored solution.
Posted by: Brand Bags Outlet | 10/12/2011 at 10:26 PM
Does anyone know what the Postal dept does with mail that is not picked up by the person that it is addressed to ? My ancestor had a letter in 1842 that he had not picked up at the Lincolnton , NC post office per the newspaper article :
Mecklenburg Jeffersonian
Charlotte, North Carolina
Tue, Jul 12, 1842 – Page 3
Any ideas ?
Thanks
Posted by: Marianne Caruso | 09/14/2017 at 08:33 PM