Rural Free Delivery Changed American Society

Rural carrier in an early electric vehicle, circa 1910. Rural Free Delivery improved mail service for farm families. Smithsonian Institution. Public Domain

Americans have grown accustomed to having just about anything they need delivered to them regardless of where they live. However, this wasn’t always the case.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) experimented with its first trial of Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in West Virginia in 1890. Before RFD, only those who lived within a town proper got mail delivered to their house. The other roughly 65 percent of the country’s population who lived in rural areas weren’t as fortunate.

Farmers and other rural dwellers were forced to take sometimes long journeys on dangerous and difficult roads to reach the closest post office to pick up their mail. If the weather was bad, the farmers couldn’t make the trek into town for weeks. Even so, they paid the same postage rates as those who lived in towns.

Opposition

As early as the 1880s, some postmasters suggested postal delivery to rural areas, but Congress opposed this because of the expense. Private mail carriers who served rural areas protested that RFD would put them out of business.

Merchants in cities thought RFD would reduce the number of trips that farmers made into town to purchase goods. They were right. The passage of RFD led to rural families buying more items from mail-order companies, like Montgomery Ward or Sears, Roebuck and Company.

“There was definitely pushback for both rural free delivery and the introduction of parcel post from these general stores because they really set their own prices,” said Alison Bazylinski, a curator at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.

“They were small businesses and they were providing a wide variety of goods to the community. The introduction of mail-order catalogs and mail-order firms did undercut that because they offered things at much lower prices. They could offer just an astonishing array of goods because they had these massive warehouses and more capacity.”

Even with this, farm families continued to ask for a rural mail delivery service. Eventually, they were supported by national organizations, like the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry (a farming organization), to help them advocate for RFD.

After years of debate and lobbying for RFD from Postmaster General John Wanamaker, Congress eventually agreed to provide the funds for an RFD experiment in rural West Virginia. The RFD experiment consisted of five routes covering 10 miles. On Oct. 1, 1890, mail carrier Harry Gibson was credited for delivering the first rural mail in the United States.

RFD steadily grew across the country over the next few years, and many say it was due to the hardworking spirit of dedicated mail carriers. By 1901, mail carriers were delivering mail to over 100,000 miles of rural area at a cost of over $1.7 million per year.

Rural Free Delivery vehicle. Popular Mechanics, September 1905. Public Domain

Permanent Service

Then in 1902, after receiving over 10,000 petitions from postal customers, the U.S. Post Office established RFD as a permanent service. In its early days, many government officials disliked RFD because it was costly and ran a deficit. However, RFD continued because of its positive impact on society.

“Because of this rural free delivery, you get more people getting jobs as rural free delivery carriers versus maybe working in a post office,” Bazylinski said. “And you see the advent of mail order really spread across the country. Once people in rural areas had access to these avenues of mass consumption, that really changed things for people and their standards of living.”

Bazylinski noted that many historians have suggested that if RFD was not introduced when it was, the country’s road systems might not be as good as they are today. Since mail carriers had to travel further out, roads were improved to accommodate them.

However, with RFD came the closure of several town post offices. Trips to the nearby post office, formerly an important social event, dwindled.

The arrival of RFD also changed how the mail was carried. Since carriers now had to travel further distances, they started to use horse-drawn sleds before switching to motorized vehicles.

Some mail carriers still use unique methods to get the job done. In Alabama, a 17-foot mail boat delivers to 191 dockside mailboxes along the Magnolia River. In Arizona, a mule train hauls over 40,000 pounds of mail and other goods every week down a nine-mile trail to the Havasupai Indians at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

As of 2022, the RFD government mail service is still going strong with approximately 133,000 mail carriers serving about 80,000 rural mail routes.

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