For most of history a letter was expensive, unreliable and paid for by whoever received it. Then one penny changed everything. These stories follow the mail from a barrel on a Galapagos beach to a cancellation stamped in lunar orbit, by way of pillar boxes that were once green, a shed in the Everglades, and a sheet of stamps with the airplane printed upside down.
Every tile in a Mail and Postage game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Stamps
nine stories
1The first stamp wore a teenager's portrait
On the tile: Penny Black1840
Britain's Penny Black went on sale on May 1, 1840, and became valid for postage five days later. The engraved profile of Queen Victoria came from a medal portrait sketched when she was 15, and that young face stayed on British stamps for the whole of her long reign. Eleven printing plates turned out more than 68 million of them. Each stamp carried letters punched into its lower corners marking its exact place in the sheet, a quiet precaution against forgers.
Before 1847 a clerk simply wrote the postage in the upper right corner of a letter, and the person receiving it often paid. On July 1, 1847, the Post Office Department put its first general issue stamps on sale in New York City: a five-cent Benjamin Franklin and a ten-cent George Washington. Those two were the only people on American stamps until Thomas Jefferson joined them in 1856. Washington has since appeared on more United States stamps than anyone else.
Early American stamps came in flat gummed sheets with nothing between them but paper. Until manufacturers began perforating sheets in 1857, a clerk selling a single stamp reached for the scissors and cut it free, and anyone buying several got a strip to trim at home. The rows of tiny holes that collectors now measure with a gauge, argue about and pay premiums for began life as nothing more romantic than a way to stop cutting.
The 24-cent airmail stamp of 1918 needed two passes through the press, one for the red frame and one for the blue Curtiss Jenny inside it. Collectors knew that doubled the chance of a mistake, and William Robey, a Washington bank teller, was watching for one. On May 14, 1918, a clerk handed him a sheet of 100 with the airplane flying upside down. He paid face value, 24 dollars, and soon resold the sheet for 15,000. In 2018 one stamp from it brought 1,593,000 dollars.
5A schoolboy sold the rarest stamp for six shillings
On the tile: British Guiana1873
A stamp shipment to the colony of British Guiana fell far short in the 1850s, so the postmaster had a plain one-cent stamp printed locally to keep the mail moving. One is known to survive. A 12-year-old named Vernon Vaughan found it among his uncle's papers in 1873 and sold it for six shillings. The same scrap of magenta paper sold at auction in 2014 for about 9.5 million dollars, four times more than any other single stamp had ever fetched.
6A postmaster general spoiled a rare error on purpose
On the tile: Hammarskjold1962
In 1962 at least four panes of the four-cent Dag Hammarskjold stamp turned up with the yellow background printed upside down, an error worth a small fortune to whoever held them. Postmaster General J. Edward Day refused to let a handful of people get rich by accident. He ordered 40 million more stamps deliberately misprinted the same way, which flattened the value of the originals. The decision was controversial. Day answered that the Post Office was not in the stamp lottery business.
When the Postal Service prepared its Legends of the West sheet in 1994, the stamp meant to honor the rodeo star Bill Pickett carried a portrait of his brother Ben instead. The sheets were recalled before the official sale date and the errors were to be destroyed, but 183 had already reached the public. Rather than let those few become a fortune, Postmaster General Marvin Runyon ordered 150,000 more of the mistaken sheets sold at face value by lottery.
8The public voted on which Elvis to put on a stamp
On the tile: Elvis1993
Choosing the face on a stamp is normally the quiet work of a committee and a postmaster general. For its 29-cent Elvis Presley stamp the Postal Service put the design to a public vote instead, offering a choice between the young singer and the older performer. Youth won. The stamp issued in 1993 has been the best-selling commemorative in United States postal history, and the Postal Service later counted 124 million of them bought and never used on a letter.
9The first commemoratives were twice the usual size
On the tile: Columbian1893
American stamps had always been small, plain and more or less interchangeable. For the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago the Post Office Department issued sixteen stamps on the voyages of Columbus, measuring seven-eighths of an inch tall by about one and a third inches wide, nearly double anything before them. They were the first United States commemoratives, and they set a pattern that still holds. A commemorative is bigger, busier and meant to be looked at rather than merely used.
The first rider left St. Joseph, Missouri, at 7:15 on the evening of April 3, 1860, with a pouch holding 49 letters, five telegrams and some papers. Fresh horses waited every 10 to 15 miles and fresh riders every 75 to 100, at an average of about 10 miles an hour. The mail reached San Francisco around midnight on April 14. For all the legend that grew around it, the service ran less than two years before the transcontinental telegraph made it pointless.
2A stray dog rode the mail trains and collected tags
On the tile: Owney1888
A shaggy pup crept into the Albany, New York, post office one autumn day in 1888, and the clerks let him stay. Owney took to riding mail wagons down to the depot, then the mail cars themselves, and clerks along the lines clipped metal baggage tags to his collar to record where he had been. He gathered so many that Postmaster General John Wanamaker gave him a little jacket to spread the weight. His travels reached Mexico, Canada, Japan and China.
Mary Fields was born enslaved in Tennessee in the early 1830s and was well into her sixties when she won a star route contract in 1895, carrying mail by stagecoach between Cascade, Montana, and St. Peter's Mission. The round trip was 34 miles through weather, bandits and wolves. She drove it for eight years without missing a day, and when the snow was too deep for the coach she put on snowshoes and walked it. She was the first African American woman to hold such a contract.
Supai sits at the bottom of a side canyon of the Grand Canyon, on the Havasupai reservation, and no road reaches it. Its mail goes down by mule. A wrangler on horseback leads a string of ten to twenty-two mules nine miles down the trail, five days a week, each animal loaded with as much as 200 pounds of letters, groceries and furniture. Mules have made that trip since the 1930s, and it is the last mule train delivery in the United States.
On Geneva Lake in Wisconsin the mail arrives by water, and the boat does not stop for it. A carrier waits at the rail, jumps onto the pier as the Walworth slides past at five miles an hour, runs the mail to the box, grabs the outgoing letters and leaps back aboard. The route serves 75 lakeside homes and has run since 1916. Tryouts are held each June, and in the summer of 2024 all five carriers aboard were women for the first time.
In 1890 nearly 41 million Americans, 65 percent of the country, lived in rural areas and had to fetch their own mail from the post office. Postmaster General John Wanamaker, a merchant by trade, thought it made more sense to have one person deliver the mail than to have 50 people ride into town to collect it. Congress balked at the cost for years. An experimental appropriation of 10,000 dollars passed in 1893, two postmasters general called the idea impractical, and rural free delivery finally began on October 1, 1896, in three West Virginia towns.
7Scheduled airmail began with a pilot flying the wrong way
On the tile: First airmail1918
Scheduled airmail service began on May 15, 1918, linking Washington, Philadelphia and New York. The pilot leaving the capital had simple instructions: follow the railroad tracks north. He went south instead, and came down near Waldorf, Maryland, about 20 miles the wrong way. He stopped to ask a farmer for directions and crash-landed in a freshly plowed field. The mail went back to Washington by truck and caught a flight north the next day.
8An Idaho carrier skied the mail over the mountains
On the tile: Ski mail1920
Rocky Bar and Atlanta, Idaho, sit sixteen miles apart in mountains that fill with snow. In 1920 the carrier between them made the trip on skis, with as much as 80 pounds of mail strapped to his back. His was one of the most dangerous routes in the country: between 1892 and 1913, seven carriers lost their lives in snow slides on it. Carriers used whatever means necessary to get the mail through, and on this route that meant skis, winter after winter.
9Before mailboxes, a man with a bell collected letters
On the tile: The Bellmanbefore 1852
In Victorian Britain a letter had two ways of reaching the post: carry it to a receiving house, which was an early post office, or wait for the Bellman. He wore a uniform, walked the streets ringing a bell to attract attention, and took the letters people handed out to him. Then the Uniform Penny Post of 1840 buried the arrangement under its own success. Use of the mail multiplied so rapidly that the old ways of collecting, sorting and delivering letters all had to change with it.
1A bank's bricks went through the mail, 50 pounds at a time
On the tile: Bank of Vernal1916
In 1916 William Coltharp wanted pressed brick for the front of a new bank in Vernal, Utah, and the nearest supplier was in Salt Lake City. Ordinary freight would have cost four times what the brick was worth, so he mailed it. The brickmaker wrapped each one in paper and packed ten to a crate to stay under the 50-pound limit: 1,500 crates in all. The parcels went by rail to Watson, Utah, and the rest of the way by truck, a roundabout 400 miles. The Vernal post office was swamped, and the rules were rewritten within months.
On June 8, 1959, the submarine USS Barbero, lying off the coast of Florida, launched a guided missile loaded with 3,000 letters. It covered more than 100 miles at up to 600 miles an hour and reached a naval air station near Mayport in about 22 minutes. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield announced that before anyone reached the moon, mail would be crossing to England, India and Australia by missile within hours. History went a different way.
3Mail once flew under city streets at 30 miles an hour
On the tile: Pneumatic tube1890s-1953
Beneath six American cities, from the 1890s into the early 1900s, the mail traveled on air pressure. Clerks packed as many as 500 letters into a canister and sent it hurtling through an underground tube at about 30 miles an hour from one post office to the next, below the traffic and the weather. Motor vehicles proved more efficient and the service was suspended in 1918. New York and Boston revived their tubes in the 1920s; Boston's closed in 1950 and New York's in 1953.
4The Apollo 11 crew forgot to cancel their envelope
On the tile: Moon cover1969
Apollo 11 carried a commemorative envelope meant to be postmarked on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, along with the steel master die, shaved to a fifth of its weight, from which the First Man on the Moon stamp would later be printed. Between the landing and the launch, the crew forgot. They made up for it after the Eagle rejoined the command module in lunar orbit, when Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins took hold of the rubber stamp together and canceled the envelope, still dated July 20.
With Paris cut off in the winter of 1870, the city sent its mail out over the German lines by air. Sixty-seven balloons rose during the siege, fifty-five of them cleared to carry mail: 11 tons of letters, some two and a half million, and 102 passengers. Getting replies back in was the hard part. The balloons took 400 homing pigeons out with them, and photographers shrank sixteen pages of messages onto a film an inch or two across for a bird to carry home. Only about one pigeon in eight arrived.
6A barrel in the Galapagos passes mail hand to hand
On the tile: Floreanasince the 1800s
On Floreana Island in the Galapagos, whalers years from home set up a barrel and left letters in it for homebound ships to carry. The first written mention is in Captain David Porter's account of his 1813 visit, which describes a box nailed to a post under a black sign painted with the name of a post office. Passing crews have replaced the barrel many times, and it is still there. Visitors sort through the mail, take anything addressed near where they live, and deliver it by hand. Guides will tell you that buying a stamp is cheating.
7The smallest post office was a shed for irrigation pipe
On the tile: Ochopee1953
Fire destroyed the general store in Ochopee, Florida, in 1953, and the post office inside it. What was available nearby was a tomato farm's shed for storing irrigation pipe. It has been the post office ever since. At 61.3 square feet it is the smallest the Postal Service operates, with room for one clerk, a counter and very little else, and it still sells stamps to anyone who pulls off the road in the Everglades.
Around 1916, special delivery messengers in Washington posed for a photograph on brand-new Autopeds, motor scooters built in Long Island City. There were no pedals and no cranks. Popular Mechanics reported that the machine would hold an average of 20 miles an hour on country roads and cover 100 miles on a single gallon of gasoline. The Post Office Department gave them a try. The Autoped never caught on, and the company stopped building them in 1921.
In October 1946 the Post Office Department spent three weeks testing helicopters on mail runs around Chicago, and by 1949 the city had regular service. Los Angeles and New York got it too. In Chicago the machines worked from the roof of the post office itself, lifting sacks straight off the building and out over the city. The shuttle ended in 1957 for a plain reason: helicopters kept getting heavier, and eventually they were too heavy for the roof.
1The American mail is older than the United States
On the tile: Ben Franklin1775
On July 26, 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress resolved to appoint a postmaster general for the United Colonies at a salary of a thousand dollars a year, and to run a line of posts from Falmouth in New England down to Savannah in Georgia. Benjamin Franklin took the job. That short resolution is the birth certificate of the Post Office Department, which makes the American mail older than the country it serves.
2Free delivery is why Americans have street addresses
On the tile: Street address1863
Until 1863 postage paid only to move a letter from one post office to another. You collected it yourself, or paid extra, or hired a private firm to bring it around. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair argued that free delivery by salaried carriers would be more convenient and would make people write more letters. Congress agreed, effective July 1, 1863, in cities whose local postage covered the cost. One consequence landed on every customer there at once: Americans now had to put a street address on a letter.
An act of 1845 told the Post Office Department to stop favoring stagecoach operators and award mail contracts to the lowest bidder who could provide, in the words of the law, due celerity, certainty and security of transportation. Clerks tired of writing the phrase out and marked those contracts with three asterisks instead. The bids became star bids, the contracts became star routes, and the name has outlasted the paperwork by well over a century.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night is widely quoted as the motto of the United States Postal Service. It is not. The Postal Service has no official motto at all. The words are an inscription carved into the old New York City post office at Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street, adapted from a translation of Herodotus, who was describing the mounted couriers of the Persian empire around 500 BC. It is a building's decoration, not a creed.
5The ZIP Code puts the whole country in five digits
On the tile: Mr. ZIP1963
By July 1963 every address in the country had been given a five-digit code. The first digit divides the United States into broad bands, zero in the Northeast running to nine in the far West. The next two narrow it to a sectional center, and the last two land on a particular post office or city zone. Nobody was required to use it at first, so the Post Office Department sent out a cheerful cartoon figure called Mr. ZIP to win the public over.
Into the twentieth century the Post Office could not carry a package heavier than four pounds. Private express companies handled everything larger, and country merchants liked the arrangement. Rural Americans did not. Parcel post opened on January 1, 1913, with an eleven-pound limit that rose steadily in the years after, and 300 million parcels went through it in the first six months. Sears handled five times as many orders that year as the year before.
From January 1911 the post office took deposits. The Postal Savings System paid two percent a year, opened for a dollar, and at first capped an account at 500 dollars, and it was aimed squarely at people who kept their money in a mattress or had lost faith in banks. Deposits peaked in 1947 at nearly 3.4 billion dollars. Then banks raised their rates, savings bonds paid better, and the system closed in 1967 with about 50 million dollars left unclaimed.
Abraham Lincoln was 24 when he was appointed postmaster of New Salem, Illinois, in May 1833, and he held the job until the office closed three years later. Mail came once a week, and rather than wait for people to call for it he often walked it around himself, the letters tucked in his hat. When the office shut he still held sixteen or eighteen dollars of postal money. An agent came for it months later, and Lincoln counted out the exact sum from an old sock.
Anthony Trollope, remembered now for his novels, spent the 1850s working as a surveyor's clerk for the Post Office. Traveling on business, he probably saw roadside letter boxes in France and Belgium, and he proposed a trial at home. Four cast-iron pillar boxes came into use on Jersey on November 23, 1852. Guernsey followed the next year, boxes began appearing on the British mainland from 1853, and none of those original four on Jersey survive.