Postal Workers Who Made an Impact

A woman of many ﬁrsts, Katherine Stinson received her pilot’s license at 21. She was only the fourth woman in the US to earn her license, and she became known as the “Flying Schoolgirl.” Declared a daredevil for her stunt ﬂying, Stinson was the ﬁrst woman to perform a loop-the-loop. In 1913, Stinson became the ﬁrst woman to ﬂy the US Mail. The Flying Schoolgirl set even more records when she became the ﬁrst woman to ﬂy an experimental mail route from Chicago to New York in 1918. The year before that, Stinson set a nonstop long-distance endurance record, ﬂying from San Diego to San Francisco in nine hours and 10 minutes. She also became one of the pioneers of skywriting when she attached ﬂares to her plane, writing “CAL” across the California sky in 1915.

At the mere age of 15, Vinnie Ream took a job as a clerk at the Dead Letter Oﬃce in Washington, D.C. Dead letters are messages that cannot be delivered to their intended recipient or returned to the sender, usually because there is no return address on the letter. Ream was one of the ﬁrst women known to have worked at postal headquarters and one of only ten women hired to help process undeliverable letters. However, Ream’s true passion was sculpting. After meeting a sculptor-in-residence at the US Capitol, she began sculpting part-time. Ream soon gained a commission to sculpt a bust of President Lincoln. The bust was so well received that Ream was commissioned at the age of 18 to create a life-size sculpture of the president. She was both the ﬁrst woman and the youngest individual to receive a federal art commission.

Postal clerk Joseph William Briggs is sometimes credited as the ﬁrst person to imagine the free city postal delivery service we have today. Before free delivery was created, paid postage only meant that your mail would travel from one post oﬃce to another. To get your mail, you had to go to your city’s local oﬃce and pick it up or else pay a delivery person to drop it off at your home. During the winter, Briggs noticed his customers in Cleveland, Ohio, standing in the cold waiting for letters from their friends and family ﬁghting in the Civil War. He wanted to help and started a system to deliver mail directly to his customers for free. His new system was a success, and just a year later, Congress passed a bill that allowed free mail delivery in cities all over the country. In 1864, Briggs was put in charge of that operation. Although it isn’t entirely clear who ﬁrst came up with free city delivery, Briggs is remembered for his signiﬁcant contributions to the US Post Office.

William H. Carney made his mark in history as the ﬁrst African American to receive the Medal of Honor. Carney had a diﬃcult childhood. He was born enslaved and escaped to Massachusetts as a young man. During the Civil War, Carney joined the ﬁrst regiment of African American troops to ﬁght for the Union. During the Battle of Fort Wagner, this brave man became a hero when he stood his ground and saved the American ﬂag despite being shot. He delivered the ﬂag safely back to the Union lines before falling to the ground from his injuries. After the war, Carney was appointed as a letter carrier, becoming one of the ﬁrst African Americans to deliver mail for the Post Oﬃce. He delivered the mail for almost 32 years! In 1900, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery at
Fort Wagner.

Postal Workers Who Made An Impact