By Janet Wedge
My mother was for many years the postmaster (not postmistress) in a small town in Pennsylvania. The document officially appointing her in 1936, signed by Franklin Roosevelt and James Farley (postmaster general at the time), hangs on the wall in my study. She was proud of the fact that she was able to institute home delivery of mail, assign routes, manage a staff of carriers, and eventually to secure a brand new post office for the town.
What I recall most vividly during her tenure is that the post office was a place for residents to meet, to gossip and exchange news, and a place to get help. Ours was a community of first and second generation immigrants, the largest contingent from Eastern Europe. Although my mother was born in the United States, her ancestors, and a majority of the other residents in town, came from Poland. An English-speaking adult, trained as a school teacher, my mother was able to retain enough fluency in Polish to write and translate letters to and from the “old country” for the many patrons who came to the post office and to help them with the complicated process of mailing packages to their relatives at Easter and Christmas.
Today the United States Postal Service is a semi-independent entity, expected to deliver the mail and discharge its other responsibilities, while minimizing costs if not turning a profit. Other companies like FedEx and UPS have siphoned off business from the Postal Service. And other forms of communication—e-mails and social media—have taken the place of letters. I mourn the loss of the art and practice of letter-writing, and it pains me to think that post offices in many small towns are likely to be closed in 2012. I cannot but believe this will be a loss for those communities.
I fear the loss most especially because I, with two co-authors, Louise North and Landa Freeman, have been immersed in letters for a book that was published by Lexington last year, In the Words of Women: The Revolutionary War and the Birth of the Nation, 1765-1799. The letters written by women to husbands, children, parents and other family members, as well as friends, during the period indicated in the title, document the pain of separation and enable us to glimpse the details of their lives.
Sarah Perkins Hodgkins expressed so poignantly what letters meant when she wrote to her soldier husband in 1776: “Loving Husband these Lines come with my kind regards to you hopeing they will find you in as good health as they leave me and the rest of the family at this time. I received two Letters from you since [you] left home & was glad to hear you were well. I want to hear again. Don’t mis any oppertunity you may have of writing to me Sence that is all the way we have to converse together.”
From another collection of letters compiled by my colleagues and me—Selected Letters of John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005)— come Sarah Jay’s endearing references to her letters as “little fugitives” and “messengers of love.” John writes that he has “twenty little things to say” to his beloved helpmeet. I particularly like the lines by Sarah written to her husband on May 10, 1790: “It gave me pleasure in perusing yr. last favor to observe from the date of it that we had both been engaged on the same day perhaps at the same instant in writing to each other. What a delightful circumstance! it is that our thoughts & affections are not bounded by the space we occupy, & likewise that by the invention of letters we can make each other sensible that they are not.
The sentiments of these women almost bring tears to my eyes. I do fervently hope that we as a society will not lose the desire or ability to communicate via paper letter delivered by a real live postal worker based in a local post office.
Read more women’s letters from the period of the Revolutionary War and its aftermath posted on the blog.
About the author: Janet Wedge is a former high school teacher and adjunct professor at Manhattanville College and co-author of Selected Letters of John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay. She is also the co-author of In the Words of Women.
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