The first Rural Free Delivery routes were established on October 1, 1896, at Halltown, Uvilla, and Charlestown, West Virginia. Others immediately followed. President McKinley in a message to Congress December 3, 1900, states that “by the close of the current fiscal year about 4000 routes will have been established, providing for the daily delivery of mails at the scattered homes of about three and a half million of rural population.”[144] So successful did it prove that it soon displaced nearly all the star routes and was well established in practically all rural districts of the United States. In 1919 out of a total expenditure by the Post Office Department of over $362,000,000, a little less than $51,000,000 was distributed to the rural delivery service.[145]
The Department having adopted a rule to the effect that the rural delivery service would only be established along reasonably good roads, and that a carrier need not go out unless the roads were in fit condition spurred the inhabitants up to better attention of the roads for after a man once got in the habit of receiving his mail daily he wanted it regularly.
“When a heavy snow blocks the way of the rural carrier it is customary for the farmers to turn out and break the roads, and this is done several days earlier than would be the case ordinarily. In this way communication throughout neighborhoods and with the outside world is opened up promptly. In consequence the farmer is able to take advantage of good markets and the townspeople are not cut off from the supply of fresh country produce, as often has happened in severe storms. Also cases of distress in isolated farm homes are sooner reached and relieved.”[146]
The Department finding the rural delivery popular determined to make it not only more so but to make it pay also. So they took precautions to protect the mail in the farmer’s boxes by regulating the kind of boxes to be used and promptly prosecuting cases of thievery and molestation of mail; they established registration by rural carriers and allowed carriers to receipt for applications for money orders; carriers were also authorized to receive and deliver “drop” letters on their routes without passing them through the terminal post office. A little later when the parcel post was instituted the popularity of rural delivery was greatly enhanced. Like many other conveniences the rural inhabitants cannot now realize how they could get along without free delivery of the mails. Postmaster-General Charles Emory Smith in his report of 1900[147] says of the then quite new system:
Rural delivery has now been sufficiently tried to measure its effects.... It stimulates social and business correspondence, and so swells the postal receipts. Its introduction is invariably followed by a large increase in the circulation of the press and of periodic literature. The farm is thus brought into direct daily contact with the currents and movements of the business world. A more accurate knowledge of ruling markets and varying prices is diffused, and the producer, with his quicker communication and larger information, is placed on a surer footing. The value of farms, as has been shown in many cases, is enhanced. Good roads become indispensable, and their improvement is the essential condition of the service. The material and measurable benefits are signal and unmistakable.
But the movement exercises a wider and deeper influence. It becomes a factor in the social and economic tendencies of American life. The disposition to leave the farm for the town is a familiar effect of our past conditions. But this tendency is checked, and may be materially changed by an advance which conveys many of the advantages of the town to the farm. Rural free delivery brings the farm within the daily range of the intellectual and commercial activities of the world, and the isolation and monotony which have been the bane of agricultural life are sensibly mitigated. It proves to be one of the most effective and powerful of educational agencies. Wherever it is extended the schools improve and the civil spirit of the community feels a new pulsation; the standard of intelligence is raised, enlightened interest in public affairs is quickened, and better citizenship follows.
With all these results clearly indicated by the experiment as thus far tried, rural free delivery is plainly here to stay. It cannot be abandoned where it has been established, and cannot be maintained without being extended.
© Underwood and Underwood
HARD SURFACE HIGHWAY IN OREGON