Curious case of mailing CHILDREN!
Children “mailed” by their parents because it was cheaper to mail them!
I don’t know about you, but I feel sorry for the United States Post Office. WHY?
Well one of the most overlooked, yet most significant innovations of the early 20th century might be the Post Office’s decision to start shipping large parcels and packages through the mail. Up until 1913, the U.S. Postal Service didn’t deliver packages that weighed more than four pounds, which meant that American citizens had to hire private delivery companies whose prices for delivering packages were high. However, that year it was announced that Americans could send packages weighing up to 11 pounds through the Post Office. In a period of just six months, due to increased access to mail order companies like Sears & Roebuck, millions of parcels were mailed, spurring the national economy to faster growth and particularly improved the lives of people in rural America.
When the US postal service began parcel deliveries on January 1, 1913, customers and postal officials were slowly becoming familiar with the ins and outs of the service. People immediately started testing the limits of the system.
Few examples:
1. A farmer shipped 1 and 1/2 tons of hay by parcel post from Oregon to Idaho.
2. Someone shipped a coconut from Miami to Detroit fourth class; postage and address was attached to the shell.
3. Someone shipped AN ENTIRE BANK BUILDING from Salt Lake City to Vernal, Utah–80,000 bricks packaged in small bundles.
Even poisoned candy, loaded pistols, and assorted body parts in various stages of decomposition.
Different towns worked the system with different items, depending on how their postmaster interpreted the regulations. It wasn’t long before some ingenious parents cottoned on to the idea of mailing their children!!. But they weren’t stuffed into mailbags; With stamps attached to their clothing, children rode trains to their destinations, accompanied by trusted postal workers.
In January 1913, the 10-month old baby boy of Mr. and Mrs. Jesse (Mathilda) Beauge of Batavia/Glen Este, Ohio, was posted for the cost of 15c in stamps to his grandmother about a mile away by Rural Free Delivery carrier Vernon Little. Baby James was just shy of the 11-pound weight limit for packages sent via Parcel Post. To avoid any impropriety, his parents did insure him for $50. James Beauge became the first-known account of a child being sent through the mail.
Over the next few years, stories about children being mailed through rural routes would crop up from time to time as people pushed the limits of what could be sent through Parcel Post. In the most famous case, on February 19, 1914, a four-year-old girl named Charlotte May Pierstorff was “mailed” via train from her home in Grangeville, Idaho to her grandparents’ house about 3 hours and 73 miles away. The postage stamps, $.55, cheaper than a train ticket ($1.55, which her parents could not afford) were attached to her coat. Her story has become so legendary that it was even made into a children’s book, Mailing May. She was stamped and tagged on the back of her coat as a 54lb baby chick.
The quirky story soon made newspapers, and for the next several years, similar stories would occasionally surface as other parents followed suit. “It got some headlines when it happened, probably because it was so cute,” United States Postal Service historian Jenny Lynch.
“Mrs. E. H. Staley of this city received her two-year-old nephew by parcel post to-day from his grandmother in Stratford, Okla., where he had been left for a visit three weeks ago. The boy wore a tag about his neck showing it had cost 18 cents to send him through the mails. He was transported 25 miles by rural route before reaching the railroad. He rode with the mail clerks, shared his lunch with them and arrived here in good condition.”
The practice is not as callous as it first appears, the few documented examples of children being sent through the mail were nearly all publicity stunts, instances of people who knew the postal workers in their area asking them to carry their babies a relatively short distance along their routes to some nearby relatives, or cases in which children were listed as ‘mail’ so they could travel on trains without the necessity for purchasing a ticket.
Postmen were trusted local officials whom rural people usually knew personally. May Pierstorff was herself sent with a cousin who was a postal clerk. Nevertheless the US postal service tried to shut the practice down and had to issue a directive that no humans were to be carried in the mail.
Fort McPherson, Ga. Postmaster General,Washington, D.C.
— Sir: I have been corresponding with a party in Pa about getting a baby to raise (our home being without One.) May I ask you what specifications to use in wrapping so it (baby) would comply with regulations and be allowed shipment by parcel post as the express co are to rough in handling.
The name signed to the letter is withheld at the request of Mr. Hitchcock.
As babies, in the opinion of the Postmaster General, do not fall within the category of bees and bugs — the only live things that may be transported by mail — he is apprehensive that he may not be of assistance to his correspondent.
The new regulation didn’t immediately stop people from sending their children by post. A year later, a woman mailed her six-year-old daughter from her home in Florida to her father’s home in Virginia. At 720 miles, it was longest postal trip of any of the children identified, and cost 15 cents in stamps.
Over the years, these stories continued to pop up from time to time as parents occasionally managed to slip their children through the mail thanks to rural workers willing to let it slide. Finally, on June 14, 1913, several newspapers including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times all ran stories stating the the postmaster had officially decreed that children could no longer be sent through the mail. But while this announcement seems to have stemmed the trickle of tots traveling via post, the story wasn’t entirely accurate. According to the regulations at that point, the only animals that were allowed in the mail were bees and bugs. There’s an account of May Pierstorff being mailed under the chicken rate, but actually chicks weren’t allowed until 1918.
Children may not be transported as parcel post, First Assistant Postmaster General Koons has ruled in passing upon two applications received at the Washington City Post Office for the transportation of children through the mail. Mr. Koons said children did not come within the classification of harmless live animals which do not require regulation.
“My father’s cousin was mailed by her father (Her father was a mine worker in Butte and couldn’t take care of her) in Montana to his parents in western Indiana after the death of her mother from the 1918 flu epidemic, which also killed her aunt and baby cousin in Indiana. My Dad said she arrived safely, albeit dirty from coal dust from the train, and in possession of substantial funds much given her by other passengers. This was approximately 1920.
But while the odd practice of sometimes slipping kids into the mail might be seen as incompetence or negligence on the part of the mail carriers, it should rather be considered indicative of just how much rural communities relied on and trusted local postal workers. In essence, the mailing of children was never an official policy of the USPS. It was a sign of the times that people even considered the notion and it was really more of asking the postal worker for a favor because “he was going that way anyhow.” Mail carriers were trusted servants. There are stories of rural carriers delivering babies and taking care of the sick. Even now, they’ll save lives because they’re sometimes the only persons that visit a remote household every day.
