Some stories just seem to have their own serendipitous rhythm. This is one of those stories. Last week I told you about the development of the United States Parcel Post service and how it changed the face of rural America and created mail order empires along the way. In between writing parts one and two, my wife Rhonda illustrated the value of Parcel Post in my own life. Seems that my son Addison went back down to Indiana University after Christmas break without taking a coat along. The temperatures went sub zero and of course, the idea occurred to him that he might need a coat. So I prepared myself for the 1 1/2 hour drive (one way) to deliver said coat.
Just then, my wife said, “No problem, I’ll just mail it to him.” What? Mail a coat? She proceeded to explain to me that it would cost $4.95, far less than the gas required to drive it down to him. (About five times less to be exact.) Not only did she send the coat, she stuffed the box with other goodies, too. Thank goodness for the United States Post Office. For context, I must confess that this same child once made it all the way to South Georgia before he informed us that he had forgotten his shoes. Yes, it’s never easy traveling with children and often it can be challenging and expensive.
Which brings us back to the point of our story. As we discovered in Part 1 of this tale, with the advent of Parcel Post before World War I, people began to send some very strange things through the U.S. mail. But none stranger than the parcel that was sent on February 19, 1914, 100 years ago this month.
For that was the day a 48 1/2 pound package (just shy of the 50 pound limit) walked into the Grangeville Idaho post office to be mailed 75 miles away to Lewiston, Idaho. The name of this most precious package was Charlotte May Pierstorff, but everyone called her “May.” She was a blonde haired, blue-eyed little darling just three months shy of six years old. Her parents, John Elmer Peirstorff and Sarah Charlotte Vennigerholz, had attached 53-cents in Parcel Post stamps to May’s coat. This little girl traveled the entire distance to Lewiston in the train’s mail compartment and was delivered to her grandmother’s home by the mail clerk on duty, Leonard Mochel.
Born in Westlake, Idaho, U.S. on 12 May 1908, May was on her way across state to see her grandparents. Seems that mailing May was cheaper than buying her a train ticket. Her parents did not want to pay the exorbitant train fare, which amounted to an entire day’s pay. Instead, they chose to take advantage of the new Parcel Post system created just the year before. They first checked postal regulations to make sure that there were no laws against mailing a human, then delivered their precious little package to the astonished postal clerk. The Pierstorff’s bought 53 cents worth of stamps and the postal clerk attached them to May’s coat, labeling the shipment as a “baby chick.”
A short time later conductor Harry Morris stumbled upon the little girl sitting quietly atop a pile of mail bags. Morris inspected the tag (and no doubt tallied the postage) tied to May’s coat, and since the mother was nowhere to be seen, allowed the girl to ride in the mail car to Lewiston. May rode in the train’s mail compartment under the watchful eye of the baffled postal carrier Leonard Mochel. Some accounts claim that May was “chaperoned” on her journey by a relative who worked on the Railway Mail Train. Later a city letter carrier posed for a humorous photograph with a young boy in his mailbag in response to the unusual event. The National Postal Museum still has this humorous picture on display to note those more turbulent times in USPS history.
Charlotte May Pierstorff lived an unassuming, normal life, marrying twice. Her first marriage was to Mark Chaffins and her second was to Kay William Sipes, with whom she had two children. She passed away at age 79 on April 25, 1987 in Santa Cruz, California. It wasn’t until a decade after May’s death that she was finally recognized for having been mailed. In 1997, author Michael O. Tunnell wrote a popular children’s book, Mailing May, that told the story of May’s childhood and her postal adventure.
Amazingly enough, May wasn’t the first child “mailed” in the U.S. She was just the most famous. That honor belongs to a tiny 10 ¾ pound unnamed baby boy who lived near Cincinnati, Ohio. In mid January 1913, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Beauge of Glen Este, Ohio was carried by Rural Free Delivery carrier Vernon Little to his grandmother, Mrs. Louis Beague about a mile away. The boy’s parents paid 15 cents for the stamps and even insured their son for $50.
Two weeks later, on January 27, Mr. and Mrs. J.W. Savis of Pine Hollow, Pennsylvania entrusted their daughter to rural carrier James Byerly out of Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, who delivered her safely that afternoon to relatives in Clay Hollow. The daughter cost her parents 45 cents to send.
Although 1913 started out with a bang for mailing children, the rest of the year passed pretty quietly. May’s travels in early 1914 changed all that. After May’s incident, postal employees demanded the public not mail children. But the wheels of the post office move slowly, and despite Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson’s directive that all human beings were barred from the mails, the practice continued. Barely a month after the “no-humans” announcement, rural carrier B.H. Knepper in Maryland carried a 14 pound baby from its grandmother’s home in Clear Spring to the mother’s house in Indian Springs, 12 miles away. A local newspaper reported that the baby slept through the entire trip.
Closer to home that same year, postal workers in Stillwell, Indiana accepted a parcel post box marked “live infant.” They delivered the box to South Bend, 30 miles away, where the baby’s divorced father received and opened it. Postage on the box was 17 cents.
The next year, a Florida state worker mailed six-year-old Edna Neff from Pensacola to Christiansburg, Virginia — an astonishing journey of 730 miles! The girl’s parents were separated and the mother had fallen on hard times. The mother had given the child up to foster care. A Pensacola probation officer had temporary custody of little Edna, but couldn’t afford the train fare for her and an accompanying adult. So she mailed Edna to the girl’s father. There is little information on the specifics of Edna’s trip, which was made by railway mail train, other than her weight, recorded as just under the 50-pound limit resulting in a trip cost 15 cents in Parcel Post stamps.
The year 1915 would turn out to be a banner year for mailing children as two more trips were made after Edna’s that year. In March rural carrier Charles Hayes of Tarkin, Missouri carried Mr. and Mrs. Albert Combs’ daughter Helen by Parcel Post for 10 cents. Hayes delivered Helen to her grandmother, Mrs. C.H. Combs, whose home was also on his route. That September, three-year-old Maud Smith made her Parcel Post journey when she traveled from her grandparents’ home to her mother’s, Mrs. Celina Smith of Jackson, Kentucky. By now, the public was growing increasingly unsettled by this mailing of children, since the percentage of child molesters amongst the population in 1915 was about the same as it is today.
The negative publicity probably prevented another child mailing until 1919, when it appears a press agent for the Aluminum Company of America arranged for the mailing of five-year-old Marmi Hood and four-year-old Evan Hedge to their respective fathers, who were locked down inside in the company’s plant in Alco, Tennessee, surrounded by union picket lines. After a two hour tearful visit, heavily documented by the company publicity department, the children were “mailed Special Delivery” back to the Alco, Tennessee Post Office, where their mothers were anxiously waiting for them. Postage for the stunt both ways was $2.26. Negative publicity about this particular event appears to have hastened the practice and this became the final case of “child mail.” Well, the final case of mailing a live child anyway.
The USPS officially announced on June 13, 1920, that it would no longer accept children as Parcel Post and violation of the new regulation could carry a stiff jail sentence. On November 22, 1922 a dark-headed teenage girl brought a package to the Albany, New York Post Office to be mailed. The destination was nearby and the postal clerk asked her. “Why don’t you just walk it there yourself?” The mystery girl answered that she was “in a hurry” and that the box contained “just some laundry.” The C.O.D. (cash on delivery) package was delivered just blocks away to undertaker A. B. Kiernan.
Upon opening the package, Mr. Kiernan and his wife found a dead newborn and a $5 bill. It was a girl, approximately three days old. An autopsy showed the child had been born healthy but was smothered to death, probably by a pillow. The unknown and undoubtedly desperate parents had sent her in hopes that she would get a decent burial. The Albany Times Union reported on November 23, 1922 that “The tenderest treatment is being afforded this tiny atom of humanity. Its little body reposes in a tiny white casket especially made by Mr. Kiernan and the wee form is clothed in immaculate white, which Mrs. Kiernan made with her own hands for this forsaken and cruelly murdered baby.”
Given the baby’s unknown identity, City Coroner John Mullen named her “Parcella Post,” for the way the baby had been delivered to the funeral home. No identity was ever found for the little girl. Her headstone in Graceland Cemetery, paid for by the citizens of Albany, reads “Parcella Post Infant.”
In 1965 a car drove into the Graceland cemetery and asked where her stone was. They left flowers on the gravesite, but no one thought to question the occupants in the car until after they were gone. Today, people adorn her gravesite with toys, flowers and notes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her story has become one of the region’s most oft-told, celebrated ghost stories. Funny how things come full circle isn’t it? That’s why the column is called “Bumps in the Night,” folks.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
