Post Roads

Mail routes between New York and Boston took shape in the late seventeenth century. These roads traced routes that became great highways and are still known as the post roads. The Continental Congress began creating post roads during the revolutionary war. To designate a highway as a post road gave the government the monopoly of carrying mail over it; on other roads, anybody might carry the mail. At first the mail was conveyed on horseback. Later, stagecoaches carried both mail and passengers; the inns that served them became noted and prosperous hostelries. In 1787 connecting stretches of road reaching as far north as Portsmouth and Concord, N.H., as far south as Augusta, Ga., and as far west as Pittsburgh, Penn., were declared post roads. Between 1790 and 1829 successive acts of Congress increased the post-road mileage from 1,875 to 114,780. Steamboat captains also carried letters and collected the fees for them, until in 1823 all navigable waters were declared to be post roads, which checked the practice. Private letter-carrying companies after 1842 did much house-to-house mail business in the larger cities; but the postmaster general circumvented them in 1860 by declaring all the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia to be post roads. The Rural Post Roads Act of 1916 provided federal aid to the states for the construction of rural post roads. The term "rural post road" was construed, with certain limitations, to mean any public road over which the U.S. mails were then, or thereafter might be, transported.

Bibliography

John, Richard R. Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.