People used to send their children through the U.S. mail.

U.S. History

I n 1913, the United States Post Office began offering parcel service, allowing many more people to get goods shipped to their front doors. Immediately, Americans started shipping pretty much anything they could think of. One of the first packages sent was a brindle bulldog; college kids started mailing their laundry home; and more than one person received an opossum. But the most brazen customers trusted the Post Office with the most precious cargo of all.

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By the Numbers

Packages sent through the parcel service in April 1913

59.5 million

Cost of mailing an individually wrapped brick in 1913

18¢

Did you know?

Someone shipped a building's worth of bricks through the U.S. mail.

The first few years of the Post Office's parcel service were a little wild, and it wasn't just traveling children testing its limits. Builders realized the service's shipping rates were often cheaper than those of the freight companies they'd been using to bring materials to job sites. The most famous case of bricks-by-mail happened in 1917, when merchant W.H. Coltharp experienced a serious case of sticker shock when trying to ship the 80,000 bricks needed for the facade of a bank building in Vernal, Utah. The bricks were coming from Salt Lake City, and as there was no road between the two cities, shipping them by wagon freight cost four times as much as the bricks were worth. Vernal was only a couple of postage zones away from Salt Lake City, however, so shipping by train via parcel post cost half as much. Coltharp had his 40 tons of bricks split up into crates and mailed about a ton, or 40 crates, of bricks at a time. Suddenly, rail workers used to just throwing mail bags off a train and moving along had to stop and unload 2,000 pounds of bricks — and it started leading to major delays throughout the region. Eventually, word reached the postmaster general, who quickly drafted a rule limiting the parcels a person could mail in one day to 200 pounds.