How Carroll County became the first place in America with countywide rural mail delivery

A gray cast-iron marker stands on Main Street near Longwell Avenue, just outside the old Westminster post office at 83 E Main St. Its raised lettering reads: "The first complete county rural free delivery service in the United States was inaugurated by the post office department on December 20, 1899, covering the whole of Carroll County and small parts of adjacent counties with Westminster as the central distributing point."

The State Roads Commission erected the marker in 1935, according to the Historical Marker Database's entry. The claim it makes is echoed by the state's own records. The Maryland Historical Trust's survey file on the marker states that "Carroll County has the distinction of being the first county in the United States to have had a county-wide Rural Free Delivery system in operation."

Rural Americans had no mail delivery to speak of for most of the 19th century. City residents got free home delivery starting in 1863, but "rural citizens had to pick up their mail at the Post Office," according to the U.S. Postal Service's history of the program, or pay someone to bring it out.

Louis E. Shriver, whose family ran the Union Mills post office in northern Carroll County, described the arrangement that preceded free delivery in an account preserved by the Union Mills Homestead. A liveryman from Littlestown named John Spalding held the mail contract on his route, Shriver wrote, making a daily round trip from Gettysburg to Westminster in "a rickety vehicle of some kind, with a steed to match." When the coach reached a stop, Shriver wrote, "the old leather mail pouch was unlocked and its contents dumped on the floor," and "there was a general scramble by all those present for any letters or other mail that might be addressed to them."

Congress spent the early 1890s appropriating small sums to test an alternative. According to the U.S. Postal Service's history of the program, rural free delivery began as an experiment in 1896, while "many city dwellers had enjoyed free home delivery since 1863." The Postal Service's account of the program's rollout puts the first experimental routes on Oct. 1, 1896, running out of Charles Town, Halltown and Uvilla in Jefferson County, West Virginia, with 44 routes operating in 29 states within a year.

Carroll County entered the experiment within weeks, though the two best available sources give different dates. The Union Mills Homestead places the county's first four carriers at the Westminster post office on Oct. 6, 1896, naming them as Joshua N. Corbin, David R. Geiman, Eugene Tubbins and Mark Yingling. Corbin, it says, "hurried out the post office door and began his route before the others" and so "became the first Rural Free Delivery mail carrier in Maryland," working a 34-mile circuit through the southern end of the county behind a horse named Harry and averaging about 30 pieces of mail a day. He was paid $25 a month for 27 working days, according to the same account, and paid about $9 of it to feed and stable the horse. The Maryland Historical Trust's survey instead states that "On October 15, 1896, Carroll County joined an experimental program."

What set Carroll County apart was not a single route but a vehicle designed to serve many of them at once. The Maryland Historical Trust's survey describes "a U.S. Postal Wagon designed by Westminster resident Edwin W. Shriver." The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum says Carroll County "was selected in part because it was the home of Edwin W. Shriver whose designs" were used as the basis for the countywide service.

The wagon was, in the Postal Museum's description, "a specially designed vehicle that allowed two clerks to receive, postmark, sort and deliver mail" while underway. Its first trip ran on April 3, 1899, according to the Maryland Historical Trust's survey, leaving the Westminster post office at 6:40 a.m. Westminster postmaster Milton Schaeffer sent the clerks out with 238 letters, six postcards, 261 newspapers and circulars, and five packages for the day's run, according to the Postal Museum. Shriver rode along with his assistant, Horace G. Reese, and Harry H. Harbough drove.

The route ran through Warfieldsburg, Baile, Dennings, Crawford's store, Taylorsville, Winfield, Gist, Klee's Mill, Bird Hill, Smallwood and Fenby before returning to Westminster, the Postal Museum's account says, "a twenty-mile round trip reaching 200 rural families."

Three more wagons followed by the end of the year. On Dec. 20, 1899, the arrangement became official. Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith "ordered that 63 small Post Offices and the routes of 35 star route contractors and mail messengers be discontinued and that rural free delivery be established in their place in Carroll County, Maryland," according to the Postal Service's history, which dates the order to "five days before Christmas in 1899."

By 1901, the county was covered by four wagons, lettered A through D, running a combined 108 miles, and by 26 numbered rural carriers, according to the Union Mills Homestead's record of routes and carriers. The wagons left Westminster daily, except on Sunday, at 6:30 a.m., and served as points where mail was exchanged with individual carriers. Some of those numbered routes started from other towns rather than Westminster: one left New Windsor on a 20½-mile loop, one left Mt. Airy on a 20-mile route, and another left Sykesville on a 19¼-mile route, according to the same record.

The Shriver family's own post office at Union Mills became a relay point on Wagon D's route, and a Shriver, Joshua B., appears in that same record as Carrier No. 21, leaving Union Mills at 8 a.m. for Cherrytown and the Hanover Road.

Louis Shriver, who by then carried the Wagon D route himself, was not entirely sold on what came next. In a letter dated April 27, 1904, he wrote that he could not "see how an ordinary carrier, single handed, can serve a route of that length, supply some four or five carriers with the bulk of their mail, and at the same time look after his own horse and vehicle, and perform the work in the prompt, save and generally satisfactory manner in which it is now accomplished." Even so, in that same letter, he wrote that "Carroll County is now referred to with pride by all of us, as a model of the Rural Free Delivery System."

“Free” did not mean free postage. "Rural customers paid the same postage rates as city people," the Postal Service's history states. What changed was that the Post Office carried the mail the last few miles to a farm's own box at no additional charge, ending the trip into town and the paid private contractor. The word "free," that history notes, "was dropped in 1906, since it was understood."

The wagons themselves lasted about as long as Shriver feared. "Drawbacks in the use of the wagons led to their replacement after five years of service," the Maryland Historical Trust's survey states, and the county shifted to individual carrier routes, the model that spread nationally when rural free delivery “became a permanent service effective July 1, 1902," according to the Postal Service's account of the program's rollout.

Edwin Shriver kept a logbook of the county's rural delivery years from 1898 to 1904. His son donated it to the Carroll County Historical Society in 1959, according to the Union Mills Homestead's account of the RFD collection, which describes the elder Shriver as "originator of rural free delivery in Carroll county."