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When America Sent Children Through The Mail
The package was their eight-month-old son.
In January 1913, an Ohio couple paid fifteen cents to send a package to Grandma’s house, about a mile down the road. They even had it insured for fifty dollars.
The package was their eight-month-old son. His name was James Beagle. He weighed about ten and three-quarters pounds, just under the eleven-pound limit of America’s brand-new Parcel Post service.
Rural mail carrier Vernon O. Lyttle picked him up and delivered him safely to his grandmother. And no, they didn’t stuff the baby into a cardboard box.
The Post Office Department had begun Parcel Post service on January 1, 1913. For rural families, it was a major improvement. Things that once required a trip into town could now arrive along the mail route.
But delivering somebody’s baby was certainly not what Washington had in mind. James wasn’t the only child who traveled this way. On February 19, 1914, five-year-old May Pierstorff traveled about 73 miles from Grangeville to Lewiston, Idaho, to visit her grandparents.
Her parents paid 53 cents in postage. A contemporary newspaper report said the stamps were attached to her small suitcase. May rode in a railway mail car with postal clerk Leonard Mochel, her mother’s cousin.
