20 Things You Won’t Believe You Could Once Do At The Post Office

In 1913, rural Ohio parents Jesse and Mathilda Beagle mailed their baby son roughly one mile to his grandma’s house with prepaid postage and insurance through the fledgling Parcel Post program. In 1914, 5-year-old May Pierstorff hitched a 73-mile ride in Idaho with stamps pinned to her coat while accompanied by a relative who happened to be a postal clerk. No child was ever sent in a box or through a mail chute. Both children made it home just fine, and the postmaster general soon put a stop to such stunts.

In 1916, William H. Coltharp, a director of the Bank of Vernal in eastern Utah, wanted to build up the front of the bank with face bricks. But the wagon freight over the mountains would have cost four times what they were worth. Instead, he mailed them, sending about 15,000 bricks through Parcel Post, overwhelming local post offices. The popular legend adds another factor of five, to 80,000 bricks, enough for a whole building, but it was only the facade that went by mail. Before long, post office rules limited parcels to 200 pounds per sender per day.

The Post Office Department and the U.S. military introduced V-Mail, short for Victory Mail, in 1942 to solve a lack of shipping space on cargo ships bound for foreign shores. Citizens would write their correspondence on a peculiar sort of letter pad, and a machine would photograph it onto microfilm, which reduced the volume of a 1,500-pound sack of mail to a mere 45-pound sack of microfilm. Then, in the theater of war, machines would print the microfilm onto tiny pieces of paper so that soldiers could read the letters as actual letters. Over a billion V-Mail messages were sent during World War II.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935, the fledgling Social Security Board had no physical offices to register workers before payroll taxes began. So the Board looked to the post office to help distribute the registration forms, with tens of thousands of local branches, some even serving as typing centers where actual cards were issued. Within a year, tens of millions of people had applied. The popular tale about one man receiving the first card is false. Thousands of people were being registered at once at every office, so there is no definitive “first.”

When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, which mandated that all non-citizens residing in the U.S. must register with the government and be fingerprinted. Rather than send people through police stations, post offices were selected as neutral grounds to conduct the registration. Postal clerks were trained to take fingerprints and fill out forms for any person aged 14 and above. Within a matter of months, over 5 million people had registered themselves in this manner. This was not part of the wartime internment of Japanese Americans but rather a one-time effort by the U.S. government during wartime.

In the 1930s, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover began mailing bulletins on wanted fugitives to post offices across the country. In 1950, the agency started its formal “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” campaign, displaying mug shots printed on cardboard in the lobbies where millions of Americans waited in line each day to use the U.S. Mail. Calls made directly to the FBI from those lobby displays generated over 150 captures, representing more than 30% of all the program’s arrests. The posters remained a common sight in American post offices for many years.

The General Post Office was the place to pay the annual tax required by the 1867 law, and every year dog owners queued outside their nearest post office to hand over the money and receive a paper certificate. The tax rate was eventually set at 7 shillings and 6 pence, which remained the same for more than 100 years even as inflation rose. The post office never issued a metal dog tag itself. Owners had to obtain one from elsewhere. The scheme was abolished in 1987 because it cost more to administer than it raised in revenue.

In 1910, President William Howard Taft signed legislation that created the Postal Savings System, offering a reliable savings method to working-class people, people in remote rural areas, and immigrants wary of or unable to access traditional banking services. People could bring money to the post office where clerks would issue them savings certificates or cards for 10-cent stamps, both of which earned a guaranteed amount of interest. By the onset of the Great Depression, as banks were shuttering across America, demand for Postal Savings boomed, and the system eventually peaked with billions of dollars on deposit across millions of accounts.

From the beginning of Parcel Post in 1913 until well into the late 1960s, college students, summer campers, and army recruits used to send their dirty clothes home to be washed. Companies sold laundry boxes that included a flippable address card. So the student would pack his dirty laundry, pay the parcel rate, and send it to his mom. She’d wash and iron the clothes, flip the card over, and mail them back. If he wanted to slip a note in with them, he’d have to buy a stamp for it. This practice faded out in the 1960s as laundromats, affordable home washing machines, and easy-care synthetic fabrics made it unnecessary.

The War Savings and Defense Savings Stamps that Americans could buy at post offices during both World Wars allowed everyone from regular citizens to kids to contribute to war financing. A $25 War Bond was too expensive for most families to buy at once, so stamps for as little as 10 cents to fill up a booklet were sold at post office counters and could then be exchanged by a clerk for a bond. Those stamps didn’t buy postage to send a letter, they bought savings. World War II sales alone topped $8 billion.

From November 1922, you had to buy a license from Britain’s General Post Office if you wanted to own a home radio set. It cost 10 shillings a year for a stamped paper certificate. That money went to fund the newly established British Broadcasting Company, which became the BBC. In 1946, the GPO added a television-and-radio license at 2 pounds per year. The radio-only license was scrapped in 1971.

In the U.S., Post Offices provided a service called “Special Delivery” from 1885 to 1997. You would pay extra to have your letter delivered directly to the recipient, rather than waiting for the daily delivery. They would place a special delivery stamp on it, and a uniformed messenger, often on a bicycle, would rush it out to the addressee’s house immediately, day and night. Before telephones were common in the home, this was the quickest way to send important information. Telephones and faster regular delivery rendered the bicycle messenger obsolete.

Congress passed legislation in 1883 creating the U.S. Postal Note, which provided those without bank accounts and checking privileges a relatively inexpensive method for mailing small amounts. For a 3-cent postage stamp, the local postal clerk would then use a special hole punch device to mark off the precise amount, up to $4.99, on a piece of yellow note paper. Some tens of millions of notes were issued in this format during its first run, though a similar product was produced using stamps on cards a few decades later. Those wishing to send larger amounts still had to purchase a money order as usual.

Prior to the introduction of Rural Free Delivery in 1896, most Americans did not have a carrier that delivered their mail to their home. Rather, they would walk to the local post office and wait in line for the General Delivery window, where the postmaster would manually search through alphabetized wooden compartments for their letter. The postmaster also posted handwritten lists of “Uncalled For Letters” on the post office bulletin board so that citizens could check if they had any letters without waiting in line. The walk to the post office each day was often the social interaction for many small-town Americans.

Beginning in the 1870s, the government’s weather service sent daily forecasts via telegraph from Washington to regional distribution centers, which then printed them as “Farmers’ Bulletins.” The sheets were loaded onto overnight mail trains, which took them to local postmasters because small-town post offices lacked their own telegraph wires. In the mornings, the farmers’ bulletin would be posted on the lobby wall. People stopped in every day to read the news, including farmers, sailors, and merchants checking for frost, storms, or good planting weather. Eventually radio took over this role.

From 1873, the Post Office Department offered its “Official Postal Cards” for 1 cent, which included both the card and the postage. These were unlike the picture postcards available in stores, which had to be franked with an adhesive postage stamp. For many years, the penny postcard was the cheapest method of sending a short message, a business order or a brief note. This remained the case until 1952.

Britain nationalized its telegraph system in 1870. Then, a post office became the place for the public to submit telegrams by writing them out or dictating them to a clerk who sent them on. The telegraph office was the quick, convenient way to send breaking news before it became practical to make a long-distance call. The U.S. never operated a public telegraph service. It remained a private concern of companies like Western Union. Britain’s post offices continued to offer telegram services into the 20th century.

In 1864, the Railway Post Office began putting mail-sorting rooms in passenger cars. While a train sat or slowed at a depot, people could drop a letter straight into a slot on the side of the car and get it postmarked on the spot. The mail clerk would then sort the mail while the train was rolling on. This was different from the mechanical arms that snatched mailbags where trains never stopped, since passengers weren’t involved in that process. It ran until 1977.

Congress established the Federal Duck Stamp in 1934 to finance the conservation of wetlands. Every waterfowler age 16 and older must purchase the current Federal Duck Stamp and display it on their hunting license before they can go duck hunting. Post offices sold the Federal Duck Stamp at the same time as regular postage, and the proceeds went to the protection of habitat for migratory birds. Federal Duck Stamp artwork was popular with collectors even if they were not hunters. Today, Duck Stamps are still sold, but not usually at the post office counter.

The U.S. Post Office Department agreed in 1918 to carry live baby chicks via Parcel Post, a service that worked only because newly hatched chicks absorb enough of their egg yolk before they crack out of their shell to survive as long as 72 hours without food or water. Hatcheries could ship millions of chicks a year, packaged in specially designed, ventilated cardboard boxes delivered directly to rural post office counters from all over the country. This was a lifeline for small farms far away from commercial hatcheries, and helped to further industrialize poultry farming in the U.S. For many decades, postal workers would spend their spring surrounded by boxes of chirping chicks.

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