National Postal Museum

Please take a few minutes to tell us what you think!

We have developed a short survey to help us improve the quality of our blog site and postings. Your help in completing the survey would be greatly appreciated!

Click here:http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NPMBlogSurvey.

Thanks so much!

On the Job: Rural Carrier Cashbox

By Nancy Pope, Historian

This is the first in a series of blogs spotlighting items and stories from America’s postal workers.

Rural Free Delivery (RFD) service began in 1896 and continues today. Rural carriers function a little differently from city letter carriers. For one thing, rural carriers are required to use their own vehicles to make their daily rounds. For another, rural carriers have, from the beginning, provided their patrons with more than just the day’s mail. They carry stamps, stamped envelopes, money orders, and other items that are more commonly found in a post office. This has led rural carriers’ vehicles to be nicknamed “post offices on wheels.”

Carriers often purchased metal cash boxes to keep money and other valuables safe and secure during their daily rounds. Many RFD cash boxes had storage compartments and shelves. All could be secured with a padlock, also to be purchased by the carrier.


The brass plaque on the front of this cash box from the museum’s collections bears the name of “John Goudy R.L.C. [rural letter carrier] No. 6.” Goudy served as a rural carrier in Steuben, Indiana during the first decades of the 20th century. The cash box was manufactured by Charles Boyer of Marengo, Illinois, probably between 1904-1918. This box was just a sideline in Boyer’s work. Boyer was an enthusiastic inventor, with patents for adjustable stovepipes and clothesline reels to his credit. But Boyer’s main focus was in the field of vacuum cleaning. His “plunger-type” vacuum design (patented in 1911) was an important step in the development of the modern vacuum cleaner.

"Stamps Teach" Pilot Program Brings Stamps into Classrooms!

An innovative program developed by the New Initiatives Committee of the National Postal Museum’s Council of Philatelists was launched on December 7.  "Stamps Teach" offers participating third through fifth grade teachers a variety of materials for their classrooms:  free lesson plans, handouts, colorful postage stamps, a classroom calendar and a complete learning center called Stamp Ventures.

Progam material example.

Sponsored by the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum, the American Philatelic Society and the American Stamp Dealers Association, the pilot program currently has 60 third through fifth grade teachers who have agreed to use stamps   in their  classrooms to teach one or more subjects. At the end of the pilot program, teachers will complete a short survey to evaluate the program’s effectiveness.

Lesson plans and the Stamp Ventures learning center support classroom instruction in language arts, mathematics, social studies and science. Additional subjects will be added based upon teacher feedback. Students use colorful postage stamps to complete projects that reinforce the lessons being taught by their teachers. The stamps enable students visualize the subjects and assist in remembering what they have learned.

The "Stamps Teach" pilot program is still open for additional teachers.Click here for more information about this free program available on the American Philatelic Society’s website!

You may also contact Gretchen Moody at Gretchen@stamps.org.

Flying the Mail - December 1918

By Nancy Pope, Historian

This is the second in a series of posts highlighting the lives and work of the remarkable kings of the skies, the airmail pilots.

America’s regularly scheduled airmail service began on May 15, 1918 with a series of flights connecting Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York City. Pilots were required to keep the mail moving by air every day. In 1918, flying was still a difficult skill to master. Aircraft were flimsy and prone to breakdowns. While the Post Office Department had skilled mechanics stationed at its airfields, errors and weather could quickly challenge or ruin a flight, leaving mailbags far from their destination, airplanes in crumbled heaps, and pilots injured, or worse.

New York City Postmaster Thomas Patten handing Lt. Torrey Webb a bag of airmail letters for one of the first regularly scheduled airmail flights in the United States in 1918.

The first December of airmail service was rife with problems and challenges. Even aside from the disastrous attempt by Otto Praeger, the postal official in charge of the service, to add a route from New York to Chicago that month (read about that here), keeping the mail moving between Washington, Philadelphia, and New York on a regular basis could be challenging.

Pilots had to practice takeoffs and landings and even trail seasoned airmail pilots on their prospective routes before being entrusted with the US mail. Dan Davison was a young pilot in training that December. He had joined the service December 2, 1918 and spent the week training for his job. On December 7, he was trailing veteran pilot Maurice Newton from the Belmont Park, Long Island field to Elizabeth, New Jersey. After landing Newton sent Davison back to fly another airplane to the field. Davison left Belmont at 3:40 with 60 gallons of gas. According to a telegram sent to Praeger, Davison "arrived to the south of this field about 4 pm, passed onto the west and came back approached the field again and then headed south again going out of sight. About 4:50 I received a telephone from him that he was down at Grant City, Staten Island. Landing gear broken, propeller and two lower wings broken, radiator broken."

Davison’s defense was that he became confused flying over Staten Island and “while endeavoring to find fixed the air pressure on the main tank failed. . . it becoming necessary to land which I did at 4:40, on a golf link breaking landing gear and both lower wings, radiator and propeller." Davison’s skills did not improve, and by the first week of January he was removed from the service.

Side-view of a deHavilland DH-4 airplane

Less fortunate was airmail pilot Carl B. Smith. He had also joined the service on December 2. While test flying modified de Havilland airplane (DH-4) #39464, on December 16, 1918 Smith was killed when the airplane stalled midflight and fell into a tail spin. He died in a crash at the Standard Aviation field in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Smith was the first pilot killed in the US airmail service. Smith had been seated in the front cockpit between the mail cockpit and the engine and was crushed between the two in the crash. Smith’s death led to further modifications of the DH-4 airplane, moving the pilot’s seat to the rear of the mail cockpit. This modification was one of several that turned the failing de Havilland DH-4 (nicknamed “flaming coffin”) into the successful DH-4B (nicknamed “workhorse of the airmail service).

Airmail pilot Lyman Doty.

Airmail pilot Lyman Doty joined the service on December 6, 1918. On December 28 he was flying mail from New York to Philadelphia in an unmodified de Havilland DH-4. The engine began to miss over Brooklyn, so Doty turned to head back to the Belmont landing field. During the landing, a faulty axle gave way and the fuselage crumpled. Trapped in the front compartment, Doty was badly hurt and rushed to a hospital in Jamaica, New York and the mail was placed onto a train for Philadelphia. By the next summer, Doty was well enough to return to flying the mail, and did so. Sadly, the brave pilot was killed in an airmail crash the following October. Witnesses near Catonsville, Maryland, saw his airplane flying low in a thick fog. As they watched in horror, Doty's airplane hit the top of a tree and plunged to ground where the airplane turned over and caught fire.

Davison, Smith, and Doty were three of the more than 200 pilots who flew the mail as employees of the US Post Office Department from 1918-1927. Many of these men were able to transfer their skills into flying the mail for privately-0wned companies as the service transferred from Department-operated into contracts with private airlines.

Introducing "Systems at Work"

Tad Suiter, Assistant Curator, Systems at Work

From wedding invitations to legal documents to twenty dollars in a card from grandma, we all depend on the postal service to get our mail where it is going, and to do so quickly, affordably, and reliably.

You drop a letter in a blue box. Days later, it’s at the address you wrote on the envelope-- clear across the country for less than 50-cents. But how does it work? How does the mail get from point A to point B?

This is one of the most commonly-asked questions by visitors. The National Postal Museum is proud to present Systems at Work, a new permanent exhibit dedicated to answering that very question. The exhibit explores the processing technology of the postal system and how those systems have evolved over the last two hundred years.

A view into the exhibit, Systems at Work.

At the center of the exhibit is an immersive 270° film experience that brings you into a modern mail processing facility, following letters, magazines, and packages as they join the approximately 700 million other pieces of mail that are sorted and delivered to 150 million addresses.

 The service depends on an astonishing network of people and technology that collects, carries, sorts, and delivers the mail. Seeing the size of the facilities in this network, and watching the mail as it flies past is a truly impressive experience and conveys the system’s impressive scale and (perhaps surprisingly) advanced technology.

As visitors pass through the exhibit, they will have an opportunity to explore the history that brought us to this point-- the technological innovations that have allowed the postal system to keep up with a nation that has changed radically and frequently over the last two hundred years. In 1808, a newspaper carries the latest news of a still-young nation to people hundreds of miles away. In the 1930s, a crate of eggs journeys from Seattle, Washington, to Alaska. In the twenty-first century, optical character readers process more than 10 letters per second. 

The exhibit offers a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of America’s post office through time. It is a long, continuous history of implementing new technologies and processes, including ships, planes, rural free delivery, fluorescent inks, ZIP codes, computers, scanners, and automated sorting machinery the size of a football field, to name but a few.

While the very question of the postal service’s survival is a hotly debated topic among Americans, few understand how the service operates. Today’s postal system is under intense public scrutiny. While mail volume shrinks, the number of addresses steadily increases. The cost of continuing to provide mail service to everyone while revenues decrease puts the US Postal Service in a Catch-22.

Systems at Work brings visitors into the heart of postal operations, and puts the evolution of that system in historical context. The goal of the exhibit is to take a vast network that most people never see, and make it visible, and help Americans better understand the intricacies of the postal debate.

What Role Does Mail Play In Your Life Today?

This question is a part of the museum's Systems at Work exhibit. We encourage the exhibits online visitors to leave their thoughts on these topics, just as visitors to the actual exhibit are doing.

 

Americans began to write fewer letters in the late 20th century. As more women moved into the workplace, less time was left at home for casual correspondence. At the same time, card companies were expanding their selections to cover just about any event or occasion that could arise. By the time that email became commonplace in first decades of the 21st century most of us had lost the habit of letter writing.

The black border of this 1861 envelope mark it as a “mourning” letter. The style was used for a period after the death in a family. This envelope was addressed to William Rives, a member of the Provisional Confederate Congress from his son.

Today we often seem to think of the mail more as receivers than senders. Our attention is paid to what comes into the mailbox, with little time spent on sending out items. And what is coming into the mailbox? Often its catalogs and product offers, although thanks to the recession, there seem to be far fewer “you are pre-approved” credit card offers. What tends to draw our attention to our mailboxes more often than not anymore are the packages that arrive after we have let our fingers do the walking through the online shopping world.

An example of modern direct marketing – a catalog with changing covers, depending on the last name of the recipient.

What role does mail play in your life today?  Tell us in the comments below.