Children Sent by Mail

The fare to Grandmother’s house was fifteen cents. The traveller was eight months old, a rural mail carrier accompanied him, and his parents insured the “parcel” for fifty dollars, just in case. In January 1913, an Ohio baby safely reached his grandmother by post.

1. A joke for the camera

Provenance and sources for frame 1

A staged picture from about 1900, before Parcel Post began, in the National Postal Museum’s US Postal Employees collection, accession A.2006-22. The photographer is not named; the catalogue reports no known copyright restrictions. Displayed file: 648 × 1023 pixels. The collection notes no known copyright restrictions. Full image record in Russian.

flickr.compostalmuseum.si.edupostalmuseum.si.edufacts.usps.comView image file

The US Parcel Post service had begun only weeks earlier, on 1 January 1913. Its rules listed permitted goods and weight limits, but said nothing expressly about people. In the first years, several families made use of the omission, sending children to relatives in the care of postal workers.

On 19 February 1914, May Pierstorff, still not quite six, travelled from Grangeville to Lewiston, Idaho. Fifty-three cents in stamps were attached to her coat. She covered some seventy-three miles in a mail car, watched over by a relative who worked as a railway mail clerk. The journey cost her parents less than a passenger ticket.

The cases made the newspapers, and the Post Office had to clarify that people could not be accepted as mail. The ban did not end the practice at once: isolated journeys by children accompanied by postal employees were still reported in 1915.

A photograph of a child sitting in a mail carrier’s bag often illustrates these stories. But the National Postal Museum dates it to around 1900, before Parcel Post, and describes it as a playful staged picture. Real children travelled with postal workers their families trusted; delivery in a mailbag was a joke for the camera.