National Postal Museum

On the Job: Foot Heaters

By Nancy Pope, Historian and Curator

This is part of a series of blogs spotlighting items and stories from America’s postal workers.

From the first days of the service, America’s rural letter carriers have been responsible for providing their own transportation to make their daily rounds. In cold winter months, carriers turned to small metal heaters to keep warm on their route. The side drawer could be opened and packed with hot coals to keep the heater operational. When new, the heater would have been covered with carpet fabric. Those riding in wagons equipped with such heaters could rest their feet in warmth and comfort during the journey.

This foot heater is part of the museum’s collections and was used by rural carrier Arthur J. Bessen, who purchased it shortly after starting his job on October 29, 1917. Bessen retired in October 1965 with forty-eight years of service.

Although there are no markings on the device to indicate its original manufacturer, it resembles similar heaters of the period, among them the Chicago Flexible Shaft company, which produced the popular Clark Heater. Those oval-shaped metal heating units were covered with green or blue carpet, which matched most carriage linings. The unit had a perforated drawer for coal. Ads boasted that properly prepared coal could burn without soot or smoke, from 12-15 hours. The H.T. Hearsey Vehicle Company of Indianapolis offered its Hearsey Heaters for a few dollars more than the Clark. Perhaps that was because of their use of the “Best Brussels Carpet” covering the device.

Lehman Brothers also sold foot heaters (not to be confused with the present day, recently bankrupted financial firm). The Lehman Heater was created in 1885. Lehman boasted in 1900 that they were selling heaters at the rate of 10,000 per year. Like the Clark Heaters, Lehman recommended that buyers use only coal provided by their company in their heaters.

To learn more about early 20th century vehicle heaters, their manufacturers, and the early 20th century advertising campaigns aimed at rural carriers check out this new addition to our website: RFD: Marketing to a Rural Audience.

New Curriculum Resource

By K. Allison Wickens
Director of Education, National Postal Museum

I am always looking for great curriculum to share with the Postal Museum’s education communities.  If you are ever looking for material to support teaching about the impact of African Americans in history, you should always stop by USPS.  Every year since 1978, it has issued a stamp honoring the contributions of African Americans with its Black Heritage series.  This year, the stamp honors John Johnson, trailblazing publisher and founder of Ebony and Jet magazines. 

I was thrilled to get a preview of the new education curriculum kit created by USPS’s Community Connection program http://uspsconnection.com/educator-kits/.  Like with many Black Heritage stamps before, the USPS created an adjacent curriculum guide to inspire teachers and provide resources for their classrooms.  Johnson’s life serves as a window to so many 20th century historic milestones like the Great Migration and Great Depression.  His work illustrates topics from Civil Rights to civil discourse.  His publications are remembered for the information and visual representation of the lives of black Americans included in the national and international media dialogue. 

His life as a publisher and journalist is also a wonderful platform to investigate key language arts standards.  The signature piece of the free downloadable kit is a beautiful and stunning “editor’s board” with photos, news clips, memos and quotes tacked onto it (http://uspsconnection.com/files/JohnsonBulletinBoard.pdf).  It’s a great access point to the life of a 20th century publisher for both the details it puts forth and the big picture when you step back and see it all at once. 

Looking and learning about his publications provides lessons in photojournalism, public speaking, reading comprehension, interviewing, and writing.  These skill-based lessons are intertwined with concept themes like community, culture, media, individual dignity, fairness, and meaningful civic action, among others. 

To learn about this and other USPS Community Connection programs go to: http://uspsconnection.com/.

To see all the African Americans featured on US stamps, take a look at the National Postal Museum’s Online exhibit: http://postalmuseum.si.edu/ARAGOBlackExperience.

For more about the newest Smithsonian museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture: http://nmaahc.si.edu/.

"On Time Delivery" highlights sled dog mail delivery

by Melody Parker, NPM intern

Many visitors to the National Postal Museum see our Alaskan dog sled, used by mail carriers Ed and Charlie Biederman in the 1920s and 30s. The delicate-looking, hand built sled is made of hickory, with iron runners, moose hide lashings and cotton cords that secured the loads of mail that were delivered on a 160-mile route between Circle and Eagle, Alaska. More on the Biederman sled

The dog sled’s fragile and empty appearance makes you wonder what did it carry? Why was it important? A sled like this is “one of the small reminders of a whole system of transportation and communication,” says William Schneider, author of On Time Delivery: Dog Team Mail Carriers, a book chronicling sled dog mail transportation that will be released in April 2012.

Schneider, an anthropologist who moved to Alaska in the 1970s to pursue research interests with Alaska Natives, took an interest in dog team mail carriers after hearing stories about them and traveling a few of the remaining dog trails. The story was nearly untold, which prompted him to probe deeper into this era of a greater connection to the land before the stories of these men and dogs faded from history.

For a period lasting about forty years until the 1940s, dog team mail carriers were charged with carrying mail and maintaining overland trails in interior Alaska as both postal employees and Star Route contractors. On Time Delivery recounts this unique mail service, while preserving the personal stories of the men who delivered the mail by sled dog teams and the communities that supported them.

On Time Delivery: There was little need for mail service in Alaska prior to the gold rushes of the late 1800s and early 1900s when prospectors flocked to the interior. The newcomers, unlike most longtime Alaskan residents, were highly literate, wrote letters, and demanded regular mail service as a way to connect to their friends, family and business partners back home. Mail is an important part of the family history of Alaskans who can track their ancestors back to the Gold Rush era. 

Sled dog mail carriers negotiated steep snowy summits, treacherous terrain, wind and even wildlife—like ornery moose—as they traveled the trails between mail cabins and roadhouses to deliver letters to their destinations. If conditions were good and mail loads were light, a carrier could travel between 20 to 30 miles in a day. 

Carriers’ families were often involved behind the scenes, too. One mail carrier’s wife took care of their nine children while her spouse ran the mail. “She made clothing for the family, sewed dog booties, and helped with fishing in the summer,” Schneider notes in his book.

On Time Delivery echoes the way mail carriers viewed their work—it was not a sensational story, but part of their everyday lives. “That’s not to say that the job wasn’t dangerous by any standard,” writes Schneider, who included a remarkable anecdote about a carrier who fell through thin ice and was pulled out by his dogs, yet continued on to the end of his route with blistered and frostbitten feet. 

More on dog sled mail carriers

Deep impact: Mail transportation after the turn of the 20th century deeply affected the culture of the Alaskan community, from how people moved around and met each other, to exposure of natives to the outside world via newspapers and magazines, to boosting literacy.

With the transition to airmail from sled dog mail service, the traditions and trails were abandoned but for the modern Iditarod, Yukon Quest, and Percy DeWolfe Races, that pay homage to a generation of rural Alaskans who experienced the country in a different way than anyone will ever again. Today, bush planes deliver most mail to remote Alaskan residents.

  
About the dogs: Mail carrying sled dogs were much larger than the dogs we see in the Iditarod races today. They weighed about 75 to 100 pounds, with thick coats of fur to keep them warm during temperatures as low as 50 to 60 degrees below zero. The dogs wore handmade booties to protect their feet, and they were fueled by dried fish that they ate along the trail. They were durably built, but not for speed like the thinner-coated racing sled dogs we see today.

In the old days, sled dog mushing was a common form of transportation to villages and towns. Today, people come to town by air or connect to the road system via snowmachines. Schneider is a “backyard musher” who enjoys sled dogs for recreational purposes rather than for racing. He cares for six dogs—that’s a lot of dog food, but not nearly as much as his brother-in-law uses to feed his 30 racing dogs.

 About Mr. Schneider: William Schneider lives with his wife Sidney and daughter Willa a few miles from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. He is the editor of many books and also the author of So They Understand: Cultural Issues in Oral History. His latest book will be available in April 2012 through the University of Alaska Press.

Introducing "Systems at Work"

Tad Suiter, Assistant Curator, Systems at Work

From wedding invitations to legal documents to twenty dollars in a card from grandma, we all depend on the postal service to get our mail where it is going, and to do so quickly, affordably, and reliably.

You drop a letter in a blue box. Days later, it’s at the address you wrote on the envelope-- clear across the country for less than 50-cents. But how does it work? How does the mail get from point A to point B?

This is one of the most commonly-asked questions by visitors. The National Postal Museum is proud to present Systems at Work, a new permanent exhibit dedicated to answering that very question. The exhibit explores the processing technology of the postal system and how those systems have evolved over the last two hundred years.

A view into the exhibit, Systems at Work.

At the center of the exhibit is an immersive 270° film experience that brings you into a modern mail processing facility, following letters, magazines, and packages as they join the approximately 700 million other pieces of mail that are sorted and delivered to 150 million addresses.

 The service depends on an astonishing network of people and technology that collects, carries, sorts, and delivers the mail. Seeing the size of the facilities in this network, and watching the mail as it flies past is a truly impressive experience and conveys the system’s impressive scale and (perhaps surprisingly) advanced technology.

As visitors pass through the exhibit, they will have an opportunity to explore the history that brought us to this point-- the technological innovations that have allowed the postal system to keep up with a nation that has changed radically and frequently over the last two hundred years. In 1808, a newspaper carries the latest news of a still-young nation to people hundreds of miles away. In the 1930s, a crate of eggs journeys from Seattle, Washington, to Alaska. In the twenty-first century, optical character readers process more than 10 letters per second. 

The exhibit offers a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of America’s post office through time. It is a long, continuous history of implementing new technologies and processes, including ships, planes, rural free delivery, fluorescent inks, ZIP codes, computers, scanners, and automated sorting machinery the size of a football field, to name but a few.

While the very question of the postal service’s survival is a hotly debated topic among Americans, few understand how the service operates. Today’s postal system is under intense public scrutiny. While mail volume shrinks, the number of addresses steadily increases. The cost of continuing to provide mail service to everyone while revenues decrease puts the US Postal Service in a Catch-22.

Systems at Work brings visitors into the heart of postal operations, and puts the evolution of that system in historical context. The goal of the exhibit is to take a vast network that most people never see, and make it visible, and help Americans better understand the intricacies of the postal debate.

Owney: Item #42

Patricia Raynor
Loan Coordinator, National Postal Museum

Owney, the postal dog, has been commemorated on a U.S. Postage stamp.  On July 27th, the first-day-of-issue ceremony was held at the National Postal Museum.  Owney and many of his tags are on display in the museum’s atrium.

July 2011 also marked the 100th anniversary of the Post Office Department’s transfer of the contents of its museum to the Smithsonian Institution.  Among the objects transferred to the Smithsonian was the stuffed figure of Owney.

The museum keeps a permanent file for each donation or transfer of objects, called an accession file.  The file for the 1911-12 transfer is identified with the unique accession number “52985.”  Each item transferred through this accession is given an identifying index number.  Owney’s full accession number is 52985.274.  The original papers in the accession file identify Owney as item #42 in the section of “Portraits, Paintings, Photos, Mail Equipment and Miscellaneous Articles” (below).   Owney is described as “the dog that travelled on postal cars (with postal clerks) all over the United States and made a trip around the world.” His catalog card describes him as a “stuffed dog.”

Owney Catalog Card

Looking through the “52985” accession file is almost as interesting as reading about Owney’s travels while he was alive.  Owney continued to travel to expositions posthumously – most notably to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and to the Philadelphia Exposition of 1926.  The accession file includes correspondence related to the Smithsonian’s loan of Owney to the Post Office Department for the purposes of exhibition at the 1926 Sesqui-Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.  The correspondence even includes the packing receipt shown below.



Owney certainly was a well traveled dog and from the accession record, we can trace his Smithsonian history from his transfer to the “National Museum” and initial display at the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries building until 1964 when he traveled across the National Mall to the new Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History), where he resided until he moved to his permanent home at the National Postal Museum in 1993.  Owney’s traveling days are over, but we look forward to receiving more documentation about his life as a mascot of the Railway Mail Service and his history at the Smithsonian Institution.

For more information on Owney visit the museum's special Owney web page.

 

Treating Objects Impacted by Disaster: The 9/11 Mailbags

By Manda Kowalczyk, Preservation Technician

This is the third in a series of three posts addressing the anthrax bioterrorism attacks that took place in October 2001. Click for parts one and two.

In October 2001, the National Postal Museum began collecting objects from the Church Street Post Office in New York City, which serviced The World Trade Center. The large items we collected, including a sorting unit, were wrapped up, palletized and delivered to NPM by a fine arts handler.  However, small objects, including two satchels and a mail sack, were put inside a box (shown below) and mailed to the National Postal Museum.

As these objects were en route to D.C., another tragedy occured. On October 6, 2001, two letters containing anthrax were sent through Washington, D.C.'s Brentwood mail processing center, the hub for D.C. mail activity.

On October 21, 2001 the Brentwood facility, later renamed the Curseen-Morris Mail Processing and Distribution Center after the two postal workers who lost their lives after inhaling the lethal anthrax, was closed and sealed for decontamination but not before the box containing these three mailbags had entered the facility. The package was held at the post office for several months while the building was decontaminated. 

Once the box arrived at NPM, the mailbags were sent to an off-site Smithsonian facility where they went through a second decontamination process to remove debris from the initial 9/11 attacks.  After decontamination the objects were bagged and sent back to NPM.

One of the mailbags as it arrived at NPM after decontamination.
 

Despite decontamination, the mailbags were still dirty and needed to be surface cleaned, photographed and put into boxes for storage. Recently the preservation department installed a new fume exhaust arm (also known as an elephant trunk) and exhaust fan enabling me to set out the mailbags and surface clean them using a High-Effeciency Particulate Air (HEPA)Vacuum and brushes. I wore my half-mask respirator, Tyvek suit and nitrile gloves for personal protection and went to work.

I found cleaning the mailbags to be quite a fullfilling and emotional experience and I was moved when I opened up one of the satchels and found numerous rubber bands (used to bundle mail) and two pens that belonged to companies in the World Trade Center (pictured below.) The zip codes were obvious clues.

Below are before and after treatment images of the three mailbags.

Before:                                               After:

    

      
    
    
 
 

Read more about the Postal Museum's September 11th collection in our four part series found here.

 

The Anthrax Mail Attack: Postal Workers on the Front Line

By Nancy Pope, Historian

This is the second in a series of three posts addressing the anthrax bioterrorism attacks that took place in October 2001. Click for parts one and three.

On October 15, 2001, an aide to then-Majority Leader Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota opened an envelope containing a threatening message and powdery substance that was later determined to be anthrax. The senators’ letters each contained the following note:

09-11-01
YOU CAN NOT STOP US.
WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.
YOU DIE NOW.
ARE YOU AFRAID?
DEATH TO AMERICA.
DEATH TO ISRAEL.
ALLAH IS GREAT.

The Senator’s staff was quickly provided with antibiotics. Twelve Senate offices shut down the next day, the Capitol the day after. 

During this time, postal workers continued to process the nation’s mail, including those in the Hamilton Township facility in New Jersey and the Brentwood facility in Washington, D.C. Two letters, addressed to Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Daschle, carrying the fictional return address of: “4th Grade / Greendale School / Franklin Park NJ 08852” had entered the mail stream in New Jersey. They passed through the Hamilton Township facility in New Jersey, and later the Brentwood facility in Washington. Daschle’s letter had traveled to the Capitol from Brentwood while Leahy’s letter was sidetracked to the State Department after a computer eye misread the letter’s ZIP code from 20510 for 20520.

The day after the Capitol shut down a Hamilton postal worker tested positive for cutaneous (skin contact) anthrax. A second worker from the same facility tested positive the next day. Meanwhile, at Washington, D.C.’s Brentwood postal facility, just over a mile north of this museum, postal workers continued work as usual. Senior postal officials continued to be assured by Centers for Disease Control experts that the envelopes carrying anthrax would not be a danger to postal workers.

Some workers (here shown at Merrifield, Virginia) were provided with masks and gloves for handling the mail.

The Hamilton facility closed for testing on October 18. The Brentwood facility remained open and operational. In the meantime, some of the Washington postal workers had begun seeking medical treatment for virus-like symptoms. One was Thomas Morris Jr., a distribution clerk in the Brentwood facility. His symptoms began on October 17, but were considered the result of a simple virus. In the early morning hours of the next Sunday Morris called 911 to report his breathing was “very, very labored.” Morris continued to explain what he feared might be the cause:

MORRIS: "Ah, I, I don't know if I have been, but I suspect that I might have been exposed to anthrax."

OPERATOR: "Do you know when?"

MORRIS: "It was last, what, last Saturday a week ago, last Saturday morning at work. I work for the Postal Service. I've been to the doctor. Ah, I went to the doctor Thursday, he took a culture, but he never got back to me with the results. I guess there was some hang-up over the weekend, I'm not sure. But in the meantime, I went through a achiness and head achiness, this started Tuesday. Now I'm having difficulty breathing and just to move any distance, I feel like I'm going to pass out. I'm here at the house, my wife is here, I'm on the couch." (1)

Morris arrived by ambulance at the hospital but died only a few hours later from anthrax inhalation. The same Sunday morning a second Brentwood postal worker, Joseph Curseen, was taken into a local hospital emergency room with flu-like symptoms. Curseen was sent home where his symptoms worsened, and he returned to the hospital. He died six hours after his second arrival, also from anthrax inhalation.

The nation’s focus turned from the US Capitol, which reopened on October 22, to the postal facilities and their stricken workers. In spite of prevailing expert opinion, it had become crystal clear that anthrax spores not only could escape from envelopes, but in fact had done so in alarming numbers. The other seven postal workers who were infected with anthrax and survived worked in either the Hamilton or Brentwood postal facility. Brentwood was closed on October 21.

The Brentwood facility reopened after a cleaning and decontamination process that cost $130 million. The Hamilton postal facility reopened in March 2005 at the cost of $65 million. 

The Brentwood facility being prepared for decontamination.

In recognition of the deaths of Brentwood’s postal workers, the facility was official renamed Curseen-Morris. On February 19, 2010, the FBI and US Postal Inspection Service announced that the investigation of the anthrax letters had been concluded, with evidence pointing to Dr. Bruce Ivins, a government scientist, as the culprit. Ivins, aware of the government’s suspicions, had committed suicide in July 2008.

 

(1) Internet news site, ABC News, accessed September 29, 2011, (http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92222&page=1)

The Anthrax Mail Attack

By Nancy Pope, Historian

This is the first in a series of three posts addressing the anthrax bioterrorism attacks that took place in October 2001. Click for parts two and three.

On October 2, 2001, with the nation still recovering from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a Florida newspaper employee, Robert Stevens, was hospitalized and died three days later from inhalation anthrax. On November 21, 2001 New England native Ottilie Lundgren died from inhalation anthrax. The weeks between these deaths brought the nation face to face with a new fear that a common part of their daily routine – the mail – had turned deadly.

Twenty-two people were infected with spores from the anthrax letter attacks. The letters, addressed to government officials and members of the media, led to the infection of nine U.S. postal workers and the death of two. Before the end of that October, the American public had become frighteningly familiar with phrases like cross-contamination, bioterrorism, and the difference between inhalation and cutaneous (skin contact) infections.

At first, authorities had no idea how or where Stevens had been contaminated. On October 8, US Attorney General John Ashcroft told reporters that they did not yet have enough information to say “whether or not this could be related to terrorism” or what he called “an occurrence.” The next day, the FBI took over the investigation and by October 11, after a second newspaper mailroom employee was found to have been exposed to anthrax, officials focused on the newspaper’s mailroom, and by extension, the mail.

The mail link drew national attention after an assistant to Tom Brokaw of NBC News tested positive for anthrax infection. She remembered that a threatening letter she opened two weeks earlier contained “a sandlike substance.”(1) Many began to approach their mail with extra caution. Herbert Bush of Flushing, New York began treating his mail literally with gloves, “I keep it at a distance and wear gloves definitely. I told my wife and daughter not to be too anxious to open anything.”(2)

Speculations flew over motives for the mailings; many feared they were a continuation of the 9/11 attacks. The fears were widespread. In Berlin, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s office was sealed off after white powder leaked from a letter in the mailroom. Similar discoveries led to led 55 people being taken to hospitals in Paris, the evacuation of Canterbury Cathedral in London, the evacuation of Canada’s main Parliament building, and the closing of the international airport terminal in Vienna in the weeks following Stevens’ death.

Americans did not realize that because of the way mail moves through the mostly automated systems in postal facilities, the nation’s postal workers were on the front line of this particular terrorist attack. When the anthrax letters passed through sorting centers they were shaken, squeezed, and jostled by machinery that culled, cancelled, processed, and sorted them. Even after mail was identified as the anthrax source, officials were not concerned about postal workers.

Experts did not believe that anthrax particles could pass through a paper envelope. But the micron-sized particles did leak through. Not only did the pressure of the processing machines force spores into the open air, but the routine use of blowing air to clean machines and surrounding areas spread those spores even further. The spores that escaped the envelopes in sorting centers also found their way onto other envelopes in a cross-contamination scenario that was also unanticipated by field experts.

As the media followed the story, there were occasional references to potential dangers faced by postal workers, but the focus quickly returned to the letters’ targets in the media and U.S. government. On October 17, although the U.S. Capitol was shut down after employees in Senator Daschle’s office tested positive for exposure, the regional mail facilities remained operational.

 

(1) “Anthrax Found in NBC News Aide,” New York Times, October 13, 2001 p. A1.
(2) “Scares over Anthrax Send Jitters Through the U.S. Mail,” New York Times, October 14, 2001, p. A31.

Badge of Service: Part II

By Historian and Curator Nancy Pope

As I mentioned in the first part of this series, the most commonly used identification credential in America’s postal history is the metal badge. Badges were first assigned to letter carriers in the 1880s, but before long just about every postal employee carried a badge of one type or another.

Among America’s letter carriers, there were those who had to wear the badge, and those who chose to wear them. City carriers were required to wear badges as early as 1887. These carrier badges were individually assigned and numbered. Carriers were responsible for purchasing their badges and wore them attached to their head gear. By the 20th century, city carriers could wear their identification badges on their uniforms. Over the decades, the requirement for wearing specifically assigned numbers on their badges died out.

Unlike their city cousins, Rural Free Delivery (RFD) carriers were not required to wear identification badges on the job. This did not dissuade many carriers from taking advantage of badges created and sold by different companies looking to expand their markets.

The wreath-style badge design was the first prescribed postal officials required their city carriers to wear. The style was common to see on carriers’ hats from 1887 through the early 1920s. 

 

Badges designed and patented by C.J. Hellers Company followed the wreath style design. Hellers was one of dozens of companies that found a ready market place of postal carriers looking to fulfill their work uniform requirements. Hellers the design on April 10, 1988. The original patent drawing shows that the company was anticipating using their design for a wider market than just America’s city carriers.

Although Rural Free Delivery carriers were not required to wear identification badges, some chose to do so. With that market in mind, and not to let an opportunity pass them by, Hellers offered a RFD version of their dual ribbon badge.

Given that rural carriers were not required to wear badges, it could be expected that the badges they purchased ranged greatly in design. They were still manufactured badges, but with designs that reflected different companies’ existing badge designs. Rural carriers had their choice of badges that ranged from ornate to plain.

 
By the 1920s carriers began sporting oval badges topped with a spread eagle. The outer circle indicated that the badge was from the U.S. Post Office, and often included the city, Chicago, Ill., in this case. The inner circle was reserved for the carrier’s badge number.

The next “Badge of Service” blog will focus on some of Railway Mail Service clerk badges.

Badge of Service: Part I

By Historian and Curator Nancy Pope

Handling and carrying the mail has, since the formation of the service in the 18th century, been the responsibility of individuals working for the federal government. The Post Office Department has long required its workers to carry identifying documents to prove that they are permitted to have access to the mail. One of the earliest such identifications was the pass signed by Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin in 1776 that identified William Goddard as the nation’s Riding Surveyor for the Post. Postmasters received signed certificates recognizing their appointments, mail agents carried special credentials while inspecting or protecting the mail.

The most commonly used identification credential in America’s postal history is the metal badge. Badges were first assigned to letter carriers in the 1880s, but before long just about every postal employee carried a badge of one type or another. The museum is home to dozens of postal badges, from the wildly ornate to inexpensively common.

Some postal jobs would seem to automatically demand the need for a badge, such as those who worked in the inspection service, a department responsible for investigating crimes against the mail.

 

But would the job of mail truck driver seem to demand a badge? It did. The Department demanded accountability for the mail from everyone who touched it, including those individuals who merely drove trucks full of mail between post offices and railroad depots in large cities.

Sometimes individuals who were not required to wear a badge by the Department did so on their own accord. This badge, worn by a Star Route Service carrier, was created by the National Star Route Carriers’ Association for the use of its members. Star Route carriers are not U.S. postal employees, but work as contractors to the service.

One of the most ornate badges in the collection is this early 20th century badge worn by a postal supervisor in the New York City post office. The American eagle sits watchfully over the circular badge proclaiming the New York City post office identification. The circular postal rider image was the Post Office Department’s seal at that time.

In contrast with New York’s ornate supervisor badge is this rudimentary plastic button worn by a temporary postal employee during the 1959 Christmas season. Postal officials typically hired hundreds of temporary workers during the holiday season to assist with the surge in mail volume accompanied.

 

The next “Badge of Service” blog will focus on those who were the first required to wear badges – America’s letter carriers.