This was not terribly practical before we had the automobile readily available. It all tied into roads, telephone service and ultimately power delivery.
to give you a sense of just how recent this all really was, My father bought a farm back in 1950, then abandoned for around twenty years or to the onset of the Great Depression in 1930. we went several years without adding services including power, let alone running water. I was the running water delivery service from the pump in the barn to the house. we did get power when we converted the barn over to chickens and this electrified the pump and the house which was then at least one hundred years old. i ultimately dug the ditch to lay the water line when i was 13 with the help of my brother who was 11.
My point though is that rural delivery had to be then living memory and allowed the advent of catalog buying for forty percent if not even most of the urban population.
Todays restoration of a robust mail order business is noteworthy.
In the event, before full on rural delivery everyone lived about six miles from town and under two miles from a crossroads. my farm had access to two crossroads, one of which had a church and the other with a pure nineteenth century general store including a cracker barrel and a supply of Levi blue jeans. and straw hats.
Understand that the twentieth century came slowly to the farm.
Rural Free Delivery Changes American Society
Rural families overcame strong opposition to have their mail delivered to them.
Rural carrier in an early electric vehicle, circa 1910. Rural Free Delivery changed for the better for families. Smithsonian Institution. Public Domain
9/18/2024Updated:9/19/2024
https://www.theepochtimes.com/bright/rural-free-delivery-changes-american-society-5724053?
Americans have grown accustomed to having just about anything they need delivered to them regardless of where they live. However, this wasn’t always the case.
The United States Postal Service (USPS) experimented with their first trial of Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in West Virginia in 1890. Before RFD, only those who lived within a town proper got mail delivered to their house. The other, roughly 65 percent, of the country’s population who lived in rural areas weren’t as fortunate.
Farmers and other rural dwellers were forced to take sometimes long journeys on dangerous and difficult roads to reach the closest post office to pick up their mail. If the weather was bad, the farmers couldn’t make the trek into town for weeks. Even so, they paid the same postage rates as those who lived in towns.
OppositionAs early as the 1880s, some postmasters suggested postal delivery to rural areas, but Congress opposed this because of the expense. Private mail carriers that served rural areas protested that RFD would put them out of business.
Merchants in cities thought RFD would reduce the number of trips farmers made into town to purchase goods. They were right. The passage of RFD led to rural families buying more items from mail order companies, like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company.
“There was definitely pushback for both rural free delivery and the introduction of parcel post from these general stores because they really set their own prices,” said Alison Bazylinski a curator at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.
“They were small businesses and they were providing a wide variety of goods to the community. The introduction of mail order catalogs and mail order firms did undercut that because they offered things at much lower prices. They could offer just an astonishing array of goods because they had these massive warehouses and more capacity.”
Even with this, farm families continued to ask for a rural mail delivery service. Eventually, they were supported by national organizations, like the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, a farming organization, to help them advocate for RFD.
After years of debate and lobbying for RFD from Postmaster General John Wanamaker, Congress eventually agreed to provide the funds for an RFD experiment in rural West Virginia. The RFD experiment consisted of five routes covering 10 miles. On Oct. 1, 1890, mail carrier Harry Gibson was credited for delivering the first rural mail in the United States.
RFD steadily grew across the country over the next few years, and many say it was due to the hardworking spirit of dedicated mail carriers. By 1901, mail carriers were delivering mail to over 100,000 miles of rural areas at a cost of over $1.7 million per year.
Rural Free Delivery vehicle. Popular Mechanics, September 1905. Public Domain
Permanent ServiceThen in 1902, after receiving over 10,000 petitions from postal customers, the U.S. Post Office established RFD as a permanent service. In its early days, many government officials disliked RFD because it was costly and ran a deficit. However, RFD continued because of its positive impact on society.
“Because of this rural free delivery, you get more people getting jobs as rural free delivery carriers versus maybe working in a post office,” Bazylinski said. “And you see the advent of mail order really spread across the country. Once people in rural areas had access to these avenues of mass consumption, that really changed things for people and their standards of living.”
Bazylinski noted that many historians have suggested that if RFD was not introduced when it was, the country’s road systems might not be as good as they are today. Since mail carriers had to travel further out, roads were improved to accommodate them.
However, with RFD came the closure of several small town post offices. Trips to the town post office, formerly an important social event, dwindled.
The arrival of RFD also changed how the mail was carried. Since carriers now had to travel further distances, they started to use horse-drawn sleds before switching to motorized vehicles.
Some mail carriers still use unique methods to get the job done. In Alabama, a 17-foot mail boat delivers to 191 dock-side mailboxes along the Magnolia River. In Arizona, a mule train hauls over 40,000 pounds of mail and other goods every week down an nine-mile trail to the Havasupai Indians at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
As of 2022, the RFD government mail service is still going strong with approximately 133,000 mail carriers serving about 80,000 rural mail routes.
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