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  • 2014-01-07 (xsd:date)
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  • Were Children Once Sent Through the U.S. Mail? (en)
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  • Although the sending and delivery of packages has long since become a facet of everyday life, with not just the U.S. Postal Service but also private companies such as UPS, FedEx, and OnTrac engaging in that service, it was not until 1913 that the U.S. Post Office introduced a Parcel Post service for the handling of mail too heavy for normal letter post. As of 1 January 1913, Americans could send packages weighing up to eleven pounds through the Post Office, a service that proved a boon to business, as farmers, manufacturers, and retailers could now ship many of their products directly to consumers' homes. In the early years of Parcel Post service, before the U.S. Post Office implemented more specific regulations, people shipped all sorts of unusual things by mail — including, as suggested below, babies and small children: However, it was neither a regular occurrence nor a routine aspect of the Parcel Post service for people to wrap up children, slap some stamps on them, and ship them cross-country — 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. As early as 17 January 1913, just a few weeks after the introduction of the Parcel Post service, the New York Times reported that the Postmaster General was considering (humorously or otherwise) the propriety of sending infants through the mail and noting that postal regulations did not allow for it: Nonetheless, two weeks later the Times reported that a mail carrier in Batavia, Ohio, had delivered a baby sent by his parents to a grandmother who lived about a mile away: And a year later, the Times reported a similar instance of a small boy's being shipped by his grandmother from Stratford, Oklahoma, to an aunt in Wellington, Kansas, via Parcel Post: Several other instances of children being transported by Parcel Post were reported in the press over the next few years before the Post Office finally clamped down on such occurrences for good, with the Times reporting that: Neither of the photographs displayed above has any connection to a real-life case of a child being sent via U.S. mail, however. They're both simply vintage cute posed humor shots taken from a collection of historic Smithsonian Institution (SI) photographs uploaded to Flickr, the image on the right being described by the Smithsonian as by far the most popular photograph from the Institution in that collection. As the author of an SI article about that image wrote in 2009: (en)
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