A friend of mine from Chicago, Wally Dworak, recently gave me an excellent idea for a story. I’m not going to give away the punchline, but the gist of the idea revolves around the United States Postal Service and the history of Parcel Post. Wait, wait, before you roll your eyes and put down the paper, it gets better, I promise.
The term “Parcel Post” refers to the sending of oversized packages through the mail service. Parcel Post was developed to handle mail that was too heavy for normal letter carriers to deliver. It was usually slower than letter post and was most often associated with rural communities. It’s usefulness coincided with the development of a national railway network which enabled parcels to be carried in bulk on a regular schedule and at economical prices.
Although foreign parcel services started in 1887 and the United States was a signatory for foreign parcel delivery, domestic Parcel Post service was not instituted until 1913. Parcel Post became available to Americans on January 1, 1913 as a way to encourage economical delivery in rural America. It was an immediate smash hit.
Farm families, who were largely poor, were excited about the new service because it meant they would be able to ship and receive eggs, live chicks, seeds, tobacco and food inexpensively and reliably. Soon urban dwellers began ordering through the mail more regularly, turning small mail-order companies like Montgomery Wards, L.L. Bean, J.C. Penney and Sears into icons of American industry overnight. Suddenly everyone from haircare product companies and seed companies to home appliance and automobile companies were shipping something care of the U.S. Postal Service and Parcel Post.
During the first five days of service, 1,594 post offices reported handling over 4 million Parcel Post packages. The effect on the national economy was electric. Not only did Parcel Post give rise to great mail-order businesses, it also created an immediate demand for special packaging suitable for mailing the wide array of goods deliverable under the new system. Montgomery Ward, the first mail-order house, started in 1872 with a one-page catalog. Parcel Post quickly made the mail-order catalog one of the most important books in the farmhouse, or in most cases, the outhouse. The mail order catalog quickly became “The Homesteaders Bible” or the “Wish Book.”
Sears, Roebuck and Company followed Montgomery Ward in 1893. By 1897, co-founder Richard Sears boasted he was selling four suits and a watch every minute, a revolver every two minutes and a buggy every ten minutes. And within five years, Sears-Roebuck had tripled its revenues.
By 1918, a large fleet of trucks were delivering Parcel Post shipments, enabling farmers to ship eggs and other produce directly to the customer. Eggs quickly became a mainstay of Parcel Post. In fact, six eggs were the first objects sent by Parcel Post from St. Louis, Missouri to Edwardsville, Illinois. The eggs were mailed at 12:05 a.m. and returned to St. Louis seven hours later baked in a cake.
A staggering variety of goods have been mailed by Parcel Post through the years including small animals that did not require food or water while in transit. Ironically, baby chicks began to rival eggs as the most oft-shipped item via Parcel Post. Baby chicks, shipped in specially constructed boxes, were roundly disliked by carriers because of their noise, smell and tendency to die en route. In the 1920s, a rural community like New Washington, Ohio (home to over 15 hatcheries) might ship as many as 80,000 chicks through the local Post Office every day.
It wasn’t long before local reporters in search of a good story began to note violations of the Parcel Post system either by those who didn’t understand the rules, or by those who simply didn’t care. Although tame by today’s standards, Roaring Twenties newsmen were aghast at parcels consisting of a live lobster mailed from the New York City post office to an elite upscale Philadelphian for dinner that night, a brindle bulldog delivered to a Yonkers (New York) resident, and a coffin delivered to Zanesville, Ohio. Unimpressed? Well, consider that these items were all sent in their natural form, sans packaging, adorned only with postage stamps.
In 1917, Postmaster General Albert Burleson ordered the imposition of a maximum daily limit of 200 pounds per customer per day. His order came after William H. Coltharp used the service to ship more than 80,000 masonry bricks over 400 miles via horse-drawn wagon and train for use in the construction of a new bank building. It was the largest thing ever to be sent through the mail via Parcel Post. Burleson famously said, “It is not the intent of the U.S. Postal Service that buildings be shipped through the mail.”
Coltharp, an enterprising young businessman, came up with the idea to construct his new bank in Vernal, Utah in 1916. He wanted the best bricks in the area and those bricks were made by the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company. The problem was that the brick Company was located about 120 miles away from Vernal, Utah as the crow flies, and even longer on the winding roads that wove through Utah. Coltharp realized that the freight costs to haul the bricks from Salt Lake City to Vernal were about four times more expensive than the cost of the bricks themselves. In what surely must have been a stroke of creative genius, Coltharp decided he would have the bricks mailed to the small town, taking advantage of the cheap Parcel Post rates
He carefully packaged the bricks in separate crates weighing less than the 50-pound weight limit. He shipped an average of 40 crates each day weighing roughly one ton collectively daily. The trek from the Salt Lake City post office to Vernal took a very circuitous route to say the least. First, the bricks were sent via the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad to Mack, Colorado. From there, they went to Watson, Colorado by way of a narrow gauge railroad. Finally the bricks were hauled the final 65 miles to Vernal by freight wagon. The total length of this route was over 400 miles.
Ultimately all of the bricks were delivered, prompting the U.S. Post Office to change their regulations. The Bank of Vernal was completed and was nicknamed “The Parcel Post Bank” by some of the town’s residents. The building, located on West Main Street and occupied by Zions Bank, is still standing and a registered county landmark.
Among the items considered unmailable in the new service were intoxicants, poisons, poisonous animals, insects, reptiles, flammable materials, pistols, revolvers, live (or dead) animals, live birds or poultry, raw hides or “any article with a bad odor.” But then there was the peculiar hobby of W. Reginald Bray, who liked to send things through the mail that were not specifically prohibited, but created a challenge for the postal service nonetheless. At one point or another, Bray mailed a bowler hat, a rabbit skull (the address spelled out on the nasal bone, and the stamps pasted to the back), a purse, a slipper, a clothes brush, seaweed, shirt collars, a penny, a turnip (address and message carved into the durable tuber), an Irish Terrier, and a pipe, among other curios. Bray successfully sent himself through the mail twice, in 1900 and again in 1903, the second time by registered mail. He was not packed in a box, but was delivered by postal carriers who walked beside him.
Still other unusual mailings can’t help but stir the patriot in all of us. Such as the “parceling” of Henry “Box” Brown, a slave in Antebellum Era Virginia. Brown collaborated with two white men to have himself mailed to an abolitionist in Philadelphia. Brown spent 26 hours in a wooden crate, most of it upside down! When he emerged from the crate in Philadelphia a free man, Brown said, “How do you do, gentlemen?” Afterward, he traveled and lectured for the anti-slavery movement and later became a performing magician. The middle name “Box” was added after his shipment to freedom.
But for me, and obviously my friend Wally from Chicago, the most fascinating aspect of parcel post is the little known fact that, prior to World War I, some parents sent their children Parcel Post. The most famous example of this happening 100 years ago this week.
Next Week: Mailing May Part II
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.
