The Early History of Rural Free Delivery

good morning everyone good to see a good crowd this morning we never know what the day will bring maybe the rain and the fog is a blessing it brought a few of you in so my pleasure to introduce our Collections and Exhibits manager Noah burus and he's going to talk to us this morning about rural free delivery and I know you guys have already been asking questions and he says you'll find out so let's get to the answers to those questions thanks Noah thank you thanks for coming everybody so yes I will be talking about rur free delivery or RFD today so the reason I kind of landed on this topic is when we set up our post office exhibit here on the first floor last year one of the topics we covered was RFD so I thought I'd dive into it a little bit deeper and present it here at a coffee talk so just to start a little timeline of the post office so in 1775 the post office of the United States was founded by the Second Continental Congress so they started pretty early with that in 1 1792 the Postal Service Act created the post office Department in 1863 free City Delivery began so if you lived in a city you got your mail delivered free and it didn't become free for Rural residents until 1896 so they had a 33-year gap there where they were not getting free mail delivery even though City residents were so the beginnings of it were it was first proposed in 1891 and in 1890 65% of the US population lived in rural areas and Rural residents still had to go into town to pick up their mail so you know they wouldn't get it as often as City residents they'd probably wait you know maybe once a week they'd go in they wouldn't even know if there'd be mail waiting for them when they went in they probably try and time it up you know with going in to buy supplies and stuff like that but they paid the same postage as City residents so they weren't very happy you know that they didn't get the free delivery City residents did but they paid the exact same postage so there were multiple organizations that um were proponents of real free delivery so the National Grange the national Farmers Congress and the State farmers Alliance as well as numerous newspaper Publishers tried to get rural free delivery enacted because they thought it would benefit Farmers rural people to be able to stay up to date on the news and get their mail more often and sooner than they were previously some concerns of other people that thought it wouldn't be able to enact it was that it would be too expensive uh some senators were even concerned that it would bankrupt the entire country to implement real free delivery postmasters in small areas feared they would lose their jobs because they'd get kind of rolled in to bigger post offices and you'd have rural routes then so you wouldn't need the smaller postmasters and also merchants in towns feared that they would lose business because Farmers would be coming in less often to get their mail not to mention a lot of the small town postmasters ran the post office out of say their General Store so they had the farmer come in to get their mail they'd buy something while they're at the general store so those were some big concerns as to why people didn't want real free delivery enacted but in 1891 Postmaster General John Wanamaker who was a supporter of it proposed free uh rural delivery to customers he said that it made business Logic for the post office to do it that way and also he believed as a social philosophy it was a benefit to the country to get rural residents their mail sooner and connect them with news and the country and friends and relatives opponents of his said that he was just looking to build a customer base for a mail order service for his family's department store wakers that the main headquarters was in Philadelphia big department store back then so some people kind of had a cynical view of his support that he was just using it for his family's own benefit in 1892 a bill to extend the free delivery system of males to rural communities was uh introduced in Congress the house committee on post office and post roads rejected it based on the $6 million price tag so they thought it was too expensive didn't um recommend it to move forward in the house they uh also rejected an amendment lowering it to $100,000 cost they still thought that was too high so Grover Cleveland then became president well excuse me and actually in 1893 a bill was passed to approximate appropriate 10,000 for experimental rural delivery and the postmaster at that point General Wilson s billis did not move forward with it because he wanted to focus on other concerns he also claimed it would cost $20 million to enact that was later determined that he just threw that out as a guest and he really wasn't basing it on anything and he said that they could solve the problem of rural delivery by just uh creating new post offices in rural areas and that was kind of his fix so Grover Cleveland was president at that time and he also thought that uh he believed it was a crazy scheme to try and enact ryal free delivery so it kind of went by the wayside for a little bit there but soon after that a new postmaster was um put in charge and he viewed it as possible but didn't necessarily think it was the most practical but he was willing to try it if Congress appropriated money again to try the experiment and that was postmaster William Wilson so in 1895 Congress did appropriate $20,000 and in 1896 they appropriated another 10,000 to begin an experiment of real free delivery so on October 1st 1896 service fin began and it started in West Virginia in charl toown West Virginia Halltown and uvilla West Virginia and what I think is probably not a coincidence that was Postmaster General Wilson's home state so they in the first year it expanded to 44 routes in 29 States and actually within about 6 months April 1st 1897 they had already expanded it to Hope Indiana Clarksville Arkansas China Grove North Carolina Tempe Arizona and Brunswick Maine as well as North yaka Washington so they kind of pick different spots throughout the country to experiment in other locations to see how plausible it was in 1899 they went to a countywide uh experiment in Carol County Maryland so that is a map from the national postal Museum of Carol County and Maryland and they tried doing real free delivery for an entire County before that it was just you know they picked the town couple small towns and did a outout there so they did a six-year experiment to see if it would be successful the department spent that time evaluating how successful it was in the first or in that six-year period they got 10,000 ped petitions for Rural routes so it was very popular with the general public wanting to get rural free delivery and the department evaluated multiple things in that six-year period the extent to which RFD could replace fourth class post off offices and contracted routes where they had hired people to deliver mail whether it could be used to offer services such as money orders so if they could combine other things involved so they weren't just delivering mail but also doing other services and also what national RFD would cost so I wasn't able to find how well they answered those questions but they did deem it as a success and it became a permanent service on July 1st 1902 in 1906 they dropped free off the name because they thought by then enough people realized that it was just like City Delivery that it came to them free so postal inspectors is kind of how uh routes were formed so initially local people would get petitions of 100 local residents signatures and they would forward that petition to their representative in Congress the congressmen would then have to move it approve it and move it to the post office department where they would then send a Postal Inspector or what they gave them temporary Duty special agents and they would go out to all these rural areas and determine how practical it was to uh design a rural route so they used numerous factors in making their decision so they tried to create routes that you only you did not use the same road twice in a day the real carrier it could serve a 100 families over 25 miles and it had pass had to have passible roads all year long so that was a big one for the Post Office you had to be able to have their real carrier get down the road Road and out of there so they would then the Postal Inspector would send their notes and the Route M map back to Washington DC in the post office and the headquarters of the post office would make the final decision on where routes were made so they were often popular visits when postal inspectors came into areas you'd see a lot of towns people um even from other area towns that would come and meet with the postmaster you'd see Community leaders would come and meet with the or excuse me inspector would come and meet with the inspector to try and get them to uh convince them that their Town should be included or their area should be included on the rural route and you would also see the newspapers would often report when postal spectors were in town so in the 19th and early 20th centuries when this was all happening the post office Department had a lot of political patronage so part of the problem they ran into is that the party in power would often put in place friends of theirs into positions of power in the post office and so superiors in DC would often push for certain routes that would benefit their political friends so it was like a thank you to them for supporting them in their political career so they would give them the rural route the inspectors would then um inspect the route two times a year once it was approved and put in place so they would make sure they would inspect the carriers uh the mailboxes and make sure the roads met specifications and so there is a US Post Office inspector badge from around 1900 and that is also from the national postal Museum rural carriers so when they went out to try and hire these real carriers after they implemented all these routes they told um local post offices to look for people of the highest moral quality neat and tidy and not prone to bouts of drinking they wanted them to be reliable and trustworthy by the people that they would be delivering their mail to they were not required to wear uniforms but many of them would purchase badges or other patches to put on their hat or their jacket and that is one there on the page there also from the national postal Museum of real free delivery route five so someone would have purchased that patch to put on their hat or jacket so people could see what route they served and that they were the rural carrier they um were required to purchase and operate and maintain their own transportation so one of the problems when Ral routes first came into existence is they had to have a form of transportation right so maybe you had a horse and a wagon a lot of people use that to begin with you started to see other companies start to make wagons specifically designed for real carriers to deliver the mail then you had other companies start making wagons that met specifications that the post office Department put out to recommend for wagons so you kind of saw some new businesses creep up from real carriers so not only did you have to buy and require your own transportation but then think if you had the horse you had to buy the feed for the horse supplies vet cost repairs so it was kind of an expensive Endeavor for people to get into the rural carrier profession so in 1897 the annual salary for a rural carrier was $300 which was actually $500 less than City carriers so if you think of all the upfront costs they had to start too wasn't the most lucrative career for them a lot of them in the early days would supplement their income by selling other goods or services on their route and that was actually initially encouraged by the post office that hey you can you know sell this item while you're going on your route you can offer to bring them certain supplies from town for money just to make extra money eventually though it was banned by the post office and they said it was to keep routes moving quickly and efficiently because people were getting bogged down doing all these side jobs for extra money also in the early days a lot of times not even for money but they would show up at a farm and you know the resident would ask them for help with an animal or a piece of equipment or something just because they often don't see people out at their house so now that I've got somebody here hey can you help me with this they served as traveling post offices so like I mentioned earlier when they were trying to evaluate what else they could do then besides just delivering the mail they also sold stamps and money orders and registered letters so they could kind of be your One-Stop post office out in the country so you didn't have to go into town for really anything to do with the post office they served Rural and Suburban areas so you had some Suburban spots that hadn't been annexed by city post offices yet that they would serve on their route and in 1902 there were 8,500 rural carriers in the United States so originally the post office by law could only deliver packages up to4 pounds so that included City deliverers and Rural deliverers and anything over that was uh delivered shipped by private Express companies so Cong or the post office um in the early mid1 1900s started asking Congress if they could experiment with delivering heavier packages they allowed them to and in January on January 1st 1913 parcel post service began and that allowed them first to uh deliver up to 13 pounds then that increased from 13 PBS to 20 PB and then shortly after that increased from 20 PBS to 50 PBS so they still couldn't do super heavy stuff but it did kind of grow the amount the weight of packages they could deliver and in the first 6 months they delivered 300 million packages so very successful people were happy with the service it was popular in cities as well I know in one city I believe it was Chicago there was a business that they actually delivered business people their lunch through the mail so they capitalized on that and it also led to the man manufacturing of special packaging a number of different shipment boxes were created by various companies for to ship farmer products including eggs butter and vegetables and so that is a metal egg crate that would have been used to ship eggs through the mail so in Minnesota rural free delivery the first route was established out of the Farmington post office on January 1st 1897 in Pipestone County Woodstock on September 1st 1900 established a rural route Pipestone on November 1st 1902 ederton on February 1st 1904 and ruthton on August 15th 1904 and so those are the towns that the post office had records of of when they established Royal routes out of their post office here in Pipestone County so I looked at we have a little bit of information on a few rural carriers from Pipestone County so we didn't have much information on him but here's Mr Fink in his car that he delivered mailing and he was a ro carrier out of ederton then we had Henry petow he was a rural Mar mail carrier for 30 years he operated Route Six out of Pipestone he served as the Director of the royal M male carriers Association and also the president of the Federation of rural letter carriers so he was very involved in different organizations he could join as a rural carrier and there he is standing in front of his horse and wagon says RFD route number six there US mail and here we have a picture of him actually delivering mail to his wife Anna and children Herbert Herbert Lewis and Margaret at their home and you can see the mailbox there that he is delivering on cuz in a little bit I will discuss the changes in mailbox that resulted from rural free delivery then we have Frank sendelbach so in 1914 he started working for the Postal Service he was a rural and City carrier and he also worked as a dispatch and window Clerk and eventually was assistant postmaster here in Pipestone for seven years and there he is in the photo and so the they were both involved with the Minnesota ryal letter carriers Association and in 1917 they held their convention in Pipestone here so it was held July 13th and 14th and the officers arrived the 12th and held their executive board meeting that night at the Calumet they op the convention the next day 75 carriers were present at the opening session and about 50 were delegates from throughout the state and both Frank sendelbach and Henry Peta attend Ed and so there's a couple County Star newspaper articles State Convention of carriers is opened right the day it opened and then the week after they ran another article about how they had a successful meeting here so the first general meeting was held at the courthouse at 8:00 a.m. there was a reception by the southwestern Minnesota rural letter carriers Association and Henry Peta who was on the executive board and chairman of the committee of arrangements called to order the meeting and gave the presentation speech where a Pipestone gavel was presented to the association State President George Rose of Mano and after the first meeting they all gathered out in front of the courthouse and took a group photo there which is the photo on the board and the star reported since it was held on Friday uh July 13th that the doings of the convention have been running like clockwork today in spite of the fact that it is Friday the 13th so I thought that was just a little funny that they commented on that so I'll finish up here with the impacts of rural free delivery so it helped Drive Road improvements there was a good roads movement going on at that time already but this really spurred it as the post office was big on having passable roads like I mentioned so um from 1896 to 1908 it was estimated that $70 million was spent on Rural Road repair and building so rural residents Farmers really jumped on board and improved their road so that they could get rural free delivery and so that was a benefit throughout the entire country it also led to standardized mailboxes when Royal delivery first started you would see Farmers residents use everything from lard pales syrup cans Apple soap and cigar boxes and the carriers didn't really like that because some of them weren't big enough for the mail they were too big they were also all at different height so you know they'd have to get off the horse to put the mail in Whatever item they were using some um I read somewhere that some of the syrup pales weren't cleaned out so they' put the mail in there and get syrup on the mail so the post office and the carriers wanted mailboxes standardized so they put that out there they got a bunch of submissions into the post office and the one they landed on was a metal 6X 8 by8 in mailbox it was constructed to be fastened on a post at a convenient height for the carrier and the boxes could be square oblong circular or semicircular but had to protect maale from rain snow and dust and the familiar tunnel box design that most people think of with mailboxes was created by Roy jman who was a post office Department engineer one other um thing that happened because of real free delivery was post offices did decrease in 1901 there were 76,976 so just a year later there was already a thousand around a thousand fewer than that and so in 2023 there were 31,1 32 post offices and the most recent numbers I could find on rural carriers today because obviously there are still rural carriers that delivered the mail in 2022 there were 880,000 rural delivery routes in the United States and they had 133,000 rural carriers still in um employment with the post office so that is my talk on Rural free delivery thanks for coming it's interesting yes that picture of um yeah that one yeah I see they have women there what did were they rural carriers too so in the beginning days of I'm not sure specifically what these women were involved with when they first started real carriers it was only a male profession it did kind of expand first it started that usually you would see women be substitute carriers for you you know their husband their father their brother and then it expanded out to there that they did allow women to become carriers so this was 197 so I'm not sure when they started that but it's possible by then they were allowed they also could have worked at the post office you know here in town doing another job and were involved with the convention I saw something interesting on Facebook for what that's worth you can decide if you believe it or not but um um that and I don't remember a year on this that um you could mail kids people yes I did you saw I saw that while I was doing some research I couldn't see how widespread it was because I've seen that on Facebook too that they made it seem like it was kind of a big thing and while I was doing this research they did acknowledge that it happened but they kind of made it seem like it was rarer than you would think I saw one in the early days of real free delivery that they literally just sent the kid like two miles to the grandparents house but I did see another one where they put the kid on the mail train because it was cheaper they put postage on them and it was cheaper than buying a train ticket it said something about that one kid went 700 miles for 15 cents and they they showed a picture of two or three little boys and they had stamps you know big stamps on their chest getting off a train and I I saw you had they they inspected the routes yes so here where we live everybody has a mailbox at the end of their driveway yep but if you go further west especially in Montana and Wyoming you will find a little wide spot in the road that maybe has a store and either in the store they'll have a little Bank of mailboxes or there may be several mailboxes in a row y because those roads out there are not passable so they have rural delivery but not to their house yeah yep that is a a good point yeah those roads are are gumo well having them all the rural and the people in town they had to pay for all their expenses to deliver the meal they got set salary right yes the rural carriers the city carriers back then most of them would have walked but when they started getting vehicles they got post office Department vehicles and the Ral carriers were still Prim arily even today they still primarily use their own personal vehicle they get like a maintenance stien now in the rural yeah yeah they get a mileage fee or something yeah they're compensated that's why you see most most uh mailmen that still deliver rural mail they're not the shiniest Vehicles well you know they know they're going to wear them out they well they want they want a good vehicle but an expensive vehicle doesn't make them any money right thanks for coming have a good day everyone [Applause]