In good ol’ days, letters so welcome, people paid to receive them

This week I continue a look back at the history of postal service in Arkansas. Last week I wrote of the long history of the post office in the English colonies of North America, and how the remarkable Benjamin Franklin served not only as the colonial postmaster general under appointment of the English king, but also later served in the same capacity for the united colonies before he was sent to Paris to represent American interests.

Later, President George Washington viewed the postal system as key to uniting a fragile coalition of people who often gave allegiance to home states or regions rather than the nation itself. As would be seen in Arkansas, postal services were eagerly sought by settlers, and the community post office over time would be a singularly important thread which stitched together our nationhood.

We would hardly recognize the postal services offered in antebellum Arkansas. First, until 1855 letters were paid for at the time of delivery — not when mailed. The U.S. Post Office did not begin printing stamps until 1847. Letters — the great bulk of the early mail — were usually redeemed as soon as they arrived at their postal destination. However, sometimes steamboat captains would advertise that letters were awaiting pickup, and failure to do so would result in the letter being forwarded to the dreaded “dead letter office.”

Sometimes prominent people were among those who were lax in picking up and paying for letters. The practice was so common in Little Rock that the newspapers published lists of unclaimed letters. In 1824 Robert C. Oden, a young lawyer and ambitious politician, was late in redeeming his mail. Oden was in good company, since Gov. James Miller was also listed as tardy.

For many years most post offices in rural Arkansas were located in private businesses. In many small towns the post office was in a general store. In the days before rural free delivery, many farmers came to town on Saturday to pick up mail and buy supplies, often spending a little time chewing tobacco with friends while huddling around a pot-bellied stove. Most postmasters were paid according to their revenue, so most of them were parttime.

A number of the early towns were named for their first postmaster. For example, in 1870 the settlement of Crawfordsville in Crittenden County was named for Adolphus F. Crawford, the postmaster.

The names of many post offices defy easy explanation. What is the story behind the name of Accident, a village in Montgomery County which lost its post office in 1890 after two years? And there must be good reasons why Clark County had a post office named Sodom.

Getting the mail to local post offices was a challenge throughout the 19th century. News accounts of delivery failures were frequent. In 1827 the Arkansas Gazette was riled by complaints of slow delivery, explaining that the mail carrier between Washington in Hempstead County and the Miller County courthouse would not attempt the route if high water threatened. As a result, mail was often two weeks late due to the carrier’s “neglect of duty.”

Such neglect was not the rule for postal contractors and carriers, and the stories of heroic mailmen are very much a part of the published record. Considering the challenges, it is remarkable that postal services eventually reached every village in the state. Imagine trying to deliver the mail in rainy season across the Delta, or in the mountains of Newton or Searcy county.

In 1920, a rural postal delivery route was established in Searcy County to connect Pindall with Western Grove and Mount Hersey for a total of 23 miles across some of the roughest terrain in Arkansas. In normal weather the postman, William R. Younger, used a buggy to make the thrice-weekly delivery, but if the weather was severe, he rode a horse.

Years later Younger recalled that his work day began at 4 a.m. with feeding the horses which would pull the buggy. “Next,” Younger recalled, “came the heating of bricks for a small stove which was always kept inside the buggy …” After inspecting the buggy, he greased the wheel hubs and commenced the delivery about 6 a.m. According to the editor of the Marshall Republican newspaper, “So strenuous was the wear and grind of bad roads and bad weather that during the first four years of service, four different buggies and 10 horses were used.”

Prior to the adoption of Rural Free Delivery in the 1890s, farmers and rural residents had to pick up their mail at the post office. This was three decades after free city delivery began. Implementing a national RFD service was a daunting undertaking and took years to complete.

In 1913, after years of lobbying by farmer groups such as the Grange and the National Farmers Union, Congress authorized expanding the RFD program to provide delivery of parcels weighing up to 11 pounds. Extending parcel post to the countryside was vehemently opposed by merchants, who feared competition from Sears Roebuck and other mail order houses.

Scheduled airmail service began in 1918. Claims have been made that the second airmail flight in the nation took place in Fort Smith in 1911 when Lincoln Beachy, a pioneering airman and barnstormer, delivered a bag of mail from a local ballpark to the Fort Smith post office, dropping it from the air.

Postal service rose to a new high in the early decades of the 20th century. The use of a Railway Mail Service began during the Civil War and expanded dramatically over the decades, greatly reduced delivery time nationally. The service employed both white and Black workers.

The stepfather of famed Black composer William Grant Still of Little Rock, Charles B. Shepperson, was a railway postal clerk. It was Shepperson, a lover of opera, who bought young William his first violin.

Black Arkansans played an important and long role in providing postal service. It is believed that the first Black postmaster in the U.S. was James W. Mason, appointed at Sunny Side, Chicot County, on Feb. 22, 1867. Before his untimely death in 1874, Mason would become a pioneering politician in Arkansas, including serving as a state senator and Chicot County sheriff.

On a more local level, F.W. White, a Black postal carrier serving an RFD route out of Argenta in the summer of 1909, began using an automobile. The Gazette believed White to be the only mailman doing so in the state.