These stages ran throughout the winter, except in bad weather, and the fare was then three dollars a trip. This winter trip was often a hard one. We read at one time of the ferries being so frozen over that travellers had to make a hundred-mile circuit round by Cambridge. This line of stages prospered; and two years later “The Portsmouth Flying Stage-coach,” which held six “insides,” ran with four or six horses. The fare was the same.
Old Coach and Sign-board, Barre, Massachusetts.
On this Stavers line were placed the first mail-coaches under the English crown. When Finlay (the post-office surveyor just referred to) examined the mail-service in the year 1773, he found these mail-coaches running between Boston and Portsmouth. Mr. Ernst says, “The Stavers mail-coach was stunning, used six horses in bad weather, and never was late.” These coaches were built by Paddock, the Boston coach-builder and Tory. Stavers also was a Tory, and during the Revolution both fled to England, and may have carried the notion of the mail-coach across the sea. At any rate the first English mail-coach was not put on the road till 1784; it ran between Bristol and London. It was started by a theatrical manager named Palmer, office work or coaching. The service was very imperfect and far from speedy.
Herbert Joyce, historian of the British post-office, says, “In 1813 there was not a single town in the British kingdom at the post-office of which absolutely certain information could have been obtained as to the charge to which a letter addressed to any other town would be subject.” The charge was regulated by the distance; but distances seemed movable, and the letter-sender was wholly at the mercy of the postmaster. The government of the United States early saw the injustice of doubt in these matters, and Congress ordered a careful topographical survey, in 1811-12, of the post-road from Passamaquoddy to St. Mary’s, and also established our peerless corps of topographical engineers. Foreigners were much impressed with the value of this survey, and an old handkerchief, printed in 1815 by R. Gillespie, at “Anderston Printfield near Glasgow,” proves that the practical effects of the survey were known in England before the English people had a similar service.
This handkerchief gives an interesting statement of postal rates and routes at the beginning of this century. Around the edge is a floral border, with the arms of the United States, the front and reverse of the dollar of 1815, a quartette of ships of war, and portraits of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and “Maddison” intertwined.
Its title is “A Geographical View of All the Post Towns in the United States of America and Their Distance from Each Other According to the Establishment of the Postmaster General in the Year 1815.” By an ingenious arrangement of the towns on the main coast line and those on the cross post-roads, the distance from one of these points to any other could easily be ascertained. The “main line of post towns” extended “from Passamaquoddy in the District of Maine to Sunbury in the State of Georgia.”
The object in publishing such a table as this was to make a durable record by which it was possible for the people to compute easily and with a handy helper what the cost of postage on letters would be. The following “rates of postage” are given on the old handkerchief:—
“Single Letter conveyed by land for any distance not exceeding 10 miles, 6 cents.