The Mail Gets Delivered -
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The Mail Gets Delivered
The price of a United States’ postage stamp keeps going up. There is also talk of discontinuing Saturday mail delivery. I never stopped before to realize that delivery of mail six days a week wasn’t how it was always done. Does anyone really know how to write a personal letter any more??
Kingsville was born on July 4th, 1904, with the arrival of the first trains. The mail had been delivered to communities by stage coach prior to the arrival of the railroad. The railroad quickly became the main way to transport mail. Leonard W. Thomas was appointed as Kingsville’s first postmaster by the president of the United States on July 15, 1904. However, Mr. Thomas sold his pharmacy to Marcus Phillips and moved to Corpus Christi by September 13, 1904.
The mail was not delivered to homes until 1926. You had to go to the post office to collect your mail. It was a very informal process in the beginning and all the mail was sorted into a box. Folks thumbed through until they found their own mail. The post office moved several times over the years. For a while it was behind R. J. Kleberg & Company. Later it was located on north 7th street across the alley from the First National Bank. Our present post office was built in 1935 by the WPA (Work Progress Administration).
But the home and business delivery of our mail didn’t start until October 1, 1926, under the direction of Postmaster A. H. Firnhaber. As Kingsville paved its roads, home mail delivery became feasible. Mr. Firnhaber worked diligently to get businesses and home owners to put up address numbers so that the new mail carriers could actually deliver the mail correctly to homes and businesses. It never dawned on me that the buildings and homes ever were un-numbered. People described how to find each other by a street intersection and a count of houses or buildings and a direction. In Mr. Firnhaber’s administration the postage stamp rate was increased from 1 cent to 2 cents.
Another aspect of early mail delivery was the Railway Post Office. You could mail letters, ship packages and buy stamps from the R.P.O. clerk. Mail trains were met by an armed postal employee who received or delivered mail to the mail car.
If a community didn’t have a manned post office with an official postal employee they hung their outgoing mail in a pouch on a pole, and as the train rushed by, a hook would catch the mail pouch pulling it into the baggage car where the trainmen would store it until it could be processed by an R.P.O. clerk. Arriving mail was simply chucked out the mail-car door in a mail pouch as the train passed by.
Come visit the Irma Rangle Post Office next time you are in Kingsville and see a bit of history still in use. Then stop by to visit the 1904 Kingsville Train Depot Museum to see some of the old mail pouches used to handle the mail.