Forever: Sending a Letter

 by Susan Zehnder, Education Director

Today “forever” costs fifty-eight cents. At least that’s what sending a one-ounce letter within the United States in 2021 costs. In October this year, the US Postal Service announced that first class mail may take them a little longer to deliver and for us to expect some letters and packages to arrive days later than in the past.

At this time of year, letters and packages keep the Post Office pretty busy. To appreciate how some things have changed, we invite you to view our current exhibit Going Postal. This exhibit is a fun look at mail service in Chemung County. 

Of course, mail was delivered in the colonies before the United States was a country, it was just delivered by anyone you might convince or pressure into carrying a message for you. As the colonies grew, Great Britain set up a mail system modeled after their own public mail service, one which had operated since the time of Henry VIII. The word post refers to the English mail service being carried from post to post. Each post had a master who would sort out and remove his area’s mail and return the rest to a post boy who then resumed delivery.

B. Franklin, Painting by J. Duplessis, 1778

In 1753, the Crown appointed Benjamin Franklin to serve as Joint Postmaster General for the colonies. During his tenure he established new mail routes, and erected sandstone mile markers known as Franklin Markers, to indicate distances. The changes Franklin made resulted in a faster and more reliable mail service. He even worked remotely as he spent much of the late 1750s in England. He audited postal statements and made decisions through the mail. Under his leadership, the postal service in the colonies turned a profit for the first time.

It was all fine until Franklin was implicated in leaking important letters sent between the British Crown and the British Governor of Massachusetts. Franklin, opposed to British rule, was dismissed from his post in 1774. Without his lead, the system began to fail.

In 1775, the Second Continental Congress created the United States Post Office. The drafted constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 gave Congress the power “To establish Post Offices and post Roads” to promote interstate communication and establish a source of revenue. Franklin was appointed its first Postmaster General. He was quick to rebuild his previous postal system, and it soon outperformed the British version. Franklin served in this position for a little over a year before he was appointed ambassador to France.

The Postal Service Act, signed by President George Washington in 1792 established unification, rules and regulations, and gave the Postmaster General greater powers under the United States Post Office Department. One of these was the ability to create postal routes to ensure that mail delivery would serve existing communities and expand as the new nation grew. It also allowed newspapers to be carried by the postal system at low rates. This helped spread information and improve communication throughout the young nation.

The title Postmaster General comes from the British model. For most of its existence in the United States, the position was part of the presidential cabinet. In 1971, the Post Office Department was reorganized into the United States Postal Service (USPS) by President Nixon. Since then, the Postmaster General is appointed by the Board of Governors and can only be removed by the board. Members are nominated to the board by the US President with the advice and consent of the Senate. The current Board of Governors consists of nine members in addition to the Postmaster General and the Deputy Postmaster General.

The USPS is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, both personal and business. It receives no tax dollars for operating costs relying on postage sales and services to pay for funding. For the past few years, USPS has operated at a loss. Much of the blame for this is misunderstood.

In 2006, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was passed to address USPS financial issues. The act requires the USPS to deliver mail six days a week; prohibits increasing postage faster than the rate of inflation; and prepays benefits for all their employees for at least fifty years. The prepaid benefits is something no other organization does, and many think it is to blame for their growing deficit. The Postal Service Reform Act (2021) was introduced last May with bi-partisan support to undo some of the 2006 changes.

The USPS is the nation’s 2^nd largest civilian employer and there are 15 Post Office branches in the county to serve us. Our Going Postal exhibit has uniform patches, photographs, stamps, and more fun facts about Chemung County’s mail service and is on display Monday through Saturday 10 am – 5 pm through the spring. Seeing some of the history behind receiving a personal letter or package makes that first class stamp even more of a bargain.

 

Lost in the Mail

by Erin Doane, Curator

On March 3, 1951, a heavy snowstorm was raging as Erie Railroad Train #7 from New York City sped through Wellsburg at 8:15 in the morning. In those days, mail was delivered by non-stop dispatch to the village. That meant that the train did not stop or even slow down to drop off the mail. The railway postal clerk on the train simply threw the locked canvas mail pouch from the train as it passed by. Train #7 always delivered the heaviest mail of the day, usually around 300 individual pieces of all kinds except for parcel post. On the morning of March 3, because of poor visibility caused by the snowstorm, the clerk threw the pouch a little too soon and it went right into the Chemung River.

The problem of mail thrown from trains being damaged or lost was not new. Less than two years earlier, the Erie Railroad had discontinued direct mail service to the area precisely because of the loss and damage. Earlier in the century, locomotives had run on steam, but by 1949 all of Erie’s engines were diesel. The mechanical change meant that trains ran 15 to 20mph faster than they had before. This was great for the railroad companies but not so good for the communities who had mail delivered by the direct, non-stop method. Pouches that were not thrown clear enough of the tracks sometimes got sucked under the train and the mail was cut up or scattered for miles down the tracks.

On October 1, 1949, direct mail service from the Erie Railroad ended in Wellsburg in favor of a star route. The government contracted out star routes to private companies and individuals who delivered the mail through means other than by steamboat and railroad. Elmer Peck of Lowman got the contract for the new local star route. Peck’s son-in-law Ralph Jilson picked up mail and parcels from a central office at the Waverly railway station and drove them to the post offices in Wellsburg, Lowman, Chemung, and Wilawana early each morning and late each afternoon. 

The new system of mail delivery kept letters safe from being accidentally destroyed by speeding trains, but postal customers almost immediately protested the change. Delivery slowed down considerably, and there was soon a large number of vigorous complaints demanding that the old non-stop service was restored. Customers got their way, and by February 1, 1950 mail pouches were again being launched from trains.

Sarah Wilcox was postmaster in Wellsburg in 1951. When she got word that snowy March morning that the mail pouch had been flung into the river, she sent a team into action. Her husband Lester Wilcox, office clerk Leroy Miller, mail messenger Norman Dallas, and school teacher James Underwood launched a boat and searched the river. They came up empty handed. The river was unusually high at the time with a swift current. The next day, Sunday, volunteers spread out along the river banks, looking for the lost mail. On Monday, auxiliary mail carrier Eldon Hughes and Edward Burt took a boat as far as Nine Mile Point looking for the mail pouch. Ten days later, the postmaster was still appealing to fishermen and people living along the river to help in the search, but it was becoming clear that the mail would never be found.

In 1970, Sarah Wilcox announced her retirement from the Wellsburg post office. She had served as postmaster for 25 years and worked as a postal clerk 6 years before that. A Star-Gazette reporter interviewed her on this momentous occasion, and the story of the mail that went missing in the river came up. At the time of the accident, it must have been distressing for those who never got letters, bills, or cards they were expecting, but, nearly 20 years later, it made for an amusing little story.

You've Got Mail!

By Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

Notice anything funny about this envelope? 

Letter for William Beers, 1862

Let me give you a clue: there’s no street address (and no zip code, but that’s another story). How then, you might ask, was the letter supposed to be delivered? It wasn’t.

When the first Elmira post office opened in January 1801, there was no home delivery. People from all over Chemung County had to visit the small office located at the foot of Fox street in order to pick up their mail. This was actually a pretty big improvement. The village had been founded in 1790, but, until 1801, residents had to go all the way to the post office in Owego or pay someone to pick up their mail for them. Later, in April of that year, Elijah Buck opened the first post office in the Town of Chemung in his general store to serve the eastern half of the county. 

Since coming in from the hinterlands to check if you had mail could be quite a hassle, the Elmira post office notified recipients by posting an ad in the weekly paper. Even with the notices, letters could sit for weeks before it was picked up. By the 1830s, the volume of mail coming into Elmira was so great that the post master could no longer afford to post notices in the paper. By this point, each of the rural towns had their own post office which was good, considering the only way to know if you had a letter was to go and find out. 

List of letters, The Investigator, December 1, 1821

 This lead to long lines at the post office and, in a roundabout way, the first instance of free home delivery. The story goes that in the winter of 1862, Cleveland postal employee Joseph William Briggs was so moved by the sight of women lining up in the cold rain, desperate for word from their husbands and sons fighting in the Civil War that he began delivering mail to their homes for free. Later that same year, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair composed a report to the president wherein he recommended free urban home delivery by salaried carriers as a way improve user convenience. In 1863, Congress acted to authorize home delivery in cities where income from local postage was more than sufficient to pay all expenses of the service. Thus, the inclusion of home addresses on envelopes was born!

 By 1864, 65 cities had free home delivery. By 1880, that number was up to 104, and, by 1900, 796. Elmira began free home delivery in 1873 or 1874. There were initially four carriers for the entire city: John King, John Y. Carpenter, Uriah Warner, and Judson Cornell. All were Civil War veterans. John Carpenter was missing an arm. The volume of mail proved too much for just four men to handle and two additional carriers, William P. Roosa and John R. Brockway, were added in March 1874.  

Letter for William Beers with street address, 1879

Special thanks to Alan Parsons whose research request inspired this post.