The History of the Post Office in British North America

by William Smith

From Pictou the mails were carried to Antigonishe twice a week, and with the same frequency from Halifax to Annapolis. Mails were carried in all directions throughout the province, but, with the exceptions mentioned, only once a week.

The management of this considerable system was in the hands of the deputy postmaster general and his assistant. It was impossible with the work demanding their attention in Halifax, and the deficiency of facilities for travel, that these two could give any attention to the offices which were not under their immediate eye, and consequently all attempts to exercise control over the operation of the system came by degrees to be abandoned. When postmasters were appointed, all the instructions they received were a few short directions from the deputy postmaster general, or from an outgoing predecessor, whose knowledge was a combination made up of the official instructions and the interpretations placed upon them, when occasion arose that required some action or decision on his part.

The way offices—those peculiar products of the Maritime provinces—excited the ridicule of English and Canadian trained officials. Page, in a letter to the secretary of the general post office, expressed his despair of comprehending the varieties of origin or practice of these offices. Not one in ten of the keepers of these offices were appointed by Howe; nor did he or any one in his office know the names of many of them, though Howe considered the offices to have been sanctioned by him.

What happened was like this: a postmaster would write to Howe telling him that there ought to be a house for leaving letters at, in such or such a village or settlement. If any person were mentioned as willing to take charge of the letters, Howe generally agreed to his being appointed, and considered the matter settled. If no particular person was mentioned, Howe agreed to the suggestion that there should be a receiving house in the place indicated, and left the selection to the postmaster.

The whole affair was considered as a private matter between postmaster and way office keeper; no letter bills or forms of any description were ever supplied to the way office keepers, and so long as they paid to the postmasters the amount of postage due on letters sent to them for delivery, the very existence of these offices was ignored.

These way offices were known locally as twopenny offices, that is, the keepers charged twopence on every letter passing through their hands. An instance will explain the mode of operation in these offices. A gentleman living in Port Hood, on the west coast of Cape Breton, stated that he had sent a double letter weighing less than half an ounce a distance of fifty miles; and as it had to pass through five way offices, the charge was one shilling and eightpence (thirty-three cents). He received letters from England, which cost one shilling and fourpence (twenty-seven cents) from England to the Straits of Canso; but the conveyance from that point to his home, a distance of twenty-six miles, cost one shilling and fourpence more.

The anomalies were due partly to the mixed character of the control of the system in the province, and partly to the inability of the deputy postmaster general, owing to his lack of efficient help, to supervise the system. Howe was under the authority both of the postmaster general in England, and of the provincial government, which provided for the maintenance of a number of offices, which would not have been sanctioned by the postmaster general on account of the expense.

Illegal conveyance of letters was the rule in this province, as well as in all the others. The great proportion of the correspondence between the towns and villages on the long coast was carried by trading vessels. On some of the main routes, notably from Halifax to Pictou and to Annapolis, there were fast four-horse coaches. They travelled eight miles an hour in summer and five in winter. They were employed to carry the mails, but it never happened that the mail bags contained as many letters as the pockets of the passengers.

In Cape Breton there was not a single carriage road in the island. Most of the roads were mere bridle paths, and in many parts there were no roads of any kind. It took five days to carry the mail bag from Halifax to Sydney during the summer, and from eleven to eighteen in the winter.

The deputy postmaster general had a salary of £400 a year, which was supplemented by the amounts collected as newspaper postage. In 1841, the amount of this perquisite was £330 a year. It was a cause of complaint on the part of rival publishers that the Nova Scotian, the leading newspaper in the province, paid no postage. As the circulation of this paper—1400 copies a week—was more than double that of any other paper in the province, the grievance was a real one.