Birth of Rural Free Delivery

On November twenty-fourth, eighteen ninety-six, two mail carriers set out from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and changed rural American life. The Post Office Department established Pennsylvania's first rural mail routes here in New Stanton and nearby Ruffs Dale, just weeks after the nation's first five rural routes had launched in West Virginia. Before rural free delivery, farm families had to travel miles to a post office to collect their mail, often at great cost in time and money.

The new service broke down that isolation, connecting rural households to newspapers, catalogs, and correspondence. By nineteen oh five, the United States had thirty-two thousand rural routes. Rural free delivery later helped mail order catalogs like Sears reach farm families nationwide.