Can you imagine sending your precious baby through post?
Between 1913 and 1915, historians at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum identified approximately seven instances of children being sent through the US postal system. Her parents paid 53 cents in postage, attaching the stamps to her coat before handing her over to the postal service. He questioned how the postmaster in Caney, Kentucky, had permitted a child to board a mail train despite the recently introduced restrictions.
People began testing the limits of the new service, sending everything from eggs and bricks to snakes and other unusual items. With no explicit regulation prohibiting the mailing of human beings, some parents saw an opportunity to send their children to relatives at a fraction of the cost of a passenger train ticket. it occasionally made newspaper headlines, particularly when children travelled considerable distances While the practice was hardly widespread. The journeys were not always as alarming as they sound. In rural America, postal workers were often familiar faces in their communities, known to the families along their delivery routes. Some parents entrusted their children to carriers they knew personally, rather than handing them over to complete strangers. The children were also not necessarily stuffed into mailbags alongside parcels. They were sometimes accompanied by postal employees, particularly when travelling by railway mail. Fortunately, May was accompanied by a relative who worked as a clerk for the Railway Mail Service, making the journey considerably safer than it might otherwise have been. Her story eventually became so well known that it inspired the children’s book Mailing May . The incident, however, caught the attention of Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson. Alongside another inquiry about sending children through the mail that month, May’s journey prompted him to formally prohibit postal workers from accepting human beings as mail. The incident attracted newspaper attention and prompted an investigation by John Clark, superintendent of the Cincinnati division of the Railway Mail Service. the incident brought further attention to the need for stricter enforcement of postal regulations Although the exact consequences for the local postmaster remain unclear.
