The
Drive
for
Federal Aid
Rural Free Delivery of U.S. Mail—A Powerful Force for Road Improvement
It is hard for rural residents today to realize the isolation in which most farmers lived in the 19th century. There were then no rural mail delivery, no telephones. One had to go to town, perhaps 4 or 5 miles away, to get a newspaper. If the roads were bad, as they usually were in winter and spring, the rural schools and churches might be only a third filled, and even neighbors might have difficulty communicating with each other.
One of the strongest arguments of the good roads advocates of the 1890’s was that good roads would reduce this isolation, and particularly, would make it practical for the Government to deliver mail to the farms, as some European countries had been doing for decades. In 1893, largely through the influence of the State Granges of the Patrons of Husbandry, Congress appropriated $10,000 for an experimental program of rural mail delivery. After some foot dragging by the Postmaster General, who thought the idea impractical, the Post Office Department established the first experimental rural delivery routes from Charlestown, Halltown and Uvilla, West Virginia, on October 1, 1896, and by July 1897, 44 routes were in operation. Congress increased the appropriation to $50,000 in 1898, and thereafter the free delivery system grew rapidly until, by 1903, there were 8,600 carriers traveling 200,000 miles per day and reaching almost 5 million people.[1]
The Department made it a rule that rural delivery would be established only along reasonably good roads and that the carrier need not go out on his route unless the roads were in fit condition for travel. These requirements marshaled public opinion on the side of those who wanted better roads, and hundreds of counties undertook substantial road improvements to get rural delivery. In Texas, for example, 100 fords were replaced by bridges in 1901 and 1902.
Under a 1906 agreement between the Postmaster General and the Secretary of Agriculture, a locality desiring a rural mail route could petition the Office of Public Roads for an engineer inspector to examine the route and recommend whatever was necessary to make it suitable for carrying the mail. It was then up to the local officials to make the improvements, but sometimes the inspector, if requested, might assume temporary supervision of the work as an object lesson in roadbuilding. Director Page, thus, hoped to greatly extend the OPR’s educational work:
As the chief aim and purpose of this Office is to bring about a general and uniform improvement of the country roads throughout the United States, a cooperative plan such as the one described above offers the best possible means of achieving positive results in furtherance of that purpose. By this means correct methods of road building and road maintenance will be introduced into practically every section of the United States.[2]
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