Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Anniversary Celebrated

The Gurdon Post Office is hosting an anniversary celebration October 18. The ceremony will be open to the public.

There will be cake, cookies, punch and coffee available for customers. A special pictorial cancellation will also be available.

A new stamp honoring the proud tradition of rural letter carriers, which recently was dedicated by Postmaster General Marvin Runyon, will be available for purchase. The stamp is based on a photograph of an early rural carrier alongside his horse-drawn mail wagon.

Rural Free Delivery (RFD) began on an experimental basis on October 1, 1896, at Charles Town, Halltown and Uvilla, West Virginia. Prior to RFD, farmers had to leave their farms and travel to the nearest post office to collect their mail. (Many years earlier, in 1863, the Post Office Department implemented home delivery for city residents. The service was so popular that rural residents began making the same request of Congress.)

Within one year, RFD was extended to 29 other states.

By June 30, 1900, Rural Free Delivery was firmly in place, serving 879,127 customers on 1,214 routes. Six months later, the number of RFD customers doubled to two million Americans.

In time, historians would credit Rural Free Delivery with developing the nation's commerce, because of the millions of dollars spent on building roads and highways.

Today, the nation's rural carriers handle the postal needs of more than 25 million customers across nearly 57,000 routes located throughout the country.