Did you ever wonder about how often we communicate with each other via e-mail?
We aren’t talking about text messages here, just e-mail. The United States leads the world in the number of daily e-mails; nearly ten billion every single day.
But there was a time in America when sending or receiving a letter wasn’t quite so easy. In 1890, 65 percent of all Americans lived in rural areas. No radio, no telephones, newspapers were for city dwellers. On the farm, your nearest neighbors could be miles away.
And what’s where Rural Free Delivery or RFD comes in, and West Virginia is key to its important story. In the 1880s, sending or receiving a letter, meant a trip to town and there was no guarantee that any letters would be waiting for you. In 1887, the Postal Service begins delivering the mail, but only in towns with more than 10,000 residents, which left millions of Americans, and the majority of West Virginians, out of the loop.
But RFD changed all that, and its anniversary is tomorrow, October 1st, 1896.
The Postmaster General William Wilson got $40,000 for an experiment to see if the idea of bringing the mail to rural Americans was practical.
Wilson was born in Charles Town, fought for the Confederates in the 12th Virginia Cavalry, opened a law practice in the Eastern Panhandle and after a brief stint as WVU’s President, spent a dozen years as a Democratic Congressman before being appointed Postmaster General by Grover Cleveland.
The first experimental routes to to get Rural Delivery Service were in Jefferson County; five routes covering 10 miles. Harry Gibson delivered the first ever piece of mail through RFD. Gibson, along with Frank Young, John Lucas and Keyes Strider delivered on horseback. Strider’s 15-year-old cousin Melvin, still too young to get a paycheck, delivering his portion of that first batch of RFD mail on the 20-mile round trip on his bicycle.
RFD mail was wildly popular from the jump. Within a year of the service starting in West Virginia, 44 routes were being covered in 29 states. By 1902, it was adopted nationwide.
By the way, that first carrier, Harry Gibson remained on the job until 1919, when Vesta Watters Jones took over his route, becoming the first female mail carrier in our state and amongst the first women to carry the mail and she did it in a Model T Ford.
RFD carriers were a miniature post office on wheels. They not only delivered the mail, but also took letters and sold stamps, money orders, and other postal supplies that previously required a costly trip into town.
Curiously, not everybody loved the idea of Rural Free Delivery. It put some powerful private delivery companies out of business. Merchants worried that if farmers didn’t come to town occasionally for goods and their mail, they would lose sales. Full implementation of RFD out west was slowed for this very reason.
Stories of the early rural mail carriers are fascinating. If you’ve never received mail before on the farm, where’s the carrier supposed to put it? For some, that meant your lard bucket or cigar box became your first actual mailbox.
RFD mail connected Americans in a way it that had never been attempted before and it all started right here in West Virginia in 1896.