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Nov 24, 2009 · On July 26, 1775, the U.S. postal system is established by the Second Continental Congress, with Benjamin Franklin as its first postmaster general. Franklin (1706-1790) put in place the...
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After Franklin returned to America, the clockwork-like...
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From 1753 to 1774, as he oversaw Britain’s colonial mail service, Benjamin Franklin improved a primitive courier system connecting the 13 fragmented colonies into a more efficient...
Mar 16, 2023 · The history of the Postal Service is a large story set on a broad canvas. It is intertwined with the history of America, and it provides a lens from which to observe the evolution of the United States. The postal system strengthened the foundations of our democracy by fostering the flow of ideas and access to America’s free press.
- Ben Franklin Kept Mail Moving Swiftly as Philadelphia Postmaster
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In 1737, by age 31, Franklin had already built a prosperous business as a printer, shopkeeper and publisher of a newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette. That year he was appointed postmaster of Philadelphia after British authorities removed his predecessor for failing to submit financial reports. As Devin Leonard notes in his book Neither Snow Nor Rai...
Franklin, a meticulous record keeper, was so skillful at running postal operations in Philadelphia that in 1753, the British Crown appointed him as joint postmaster for all 13 colonies. Though he nominally shared authority with William Hunter, a Virginia-based printer, Hunter pretty much let Franklin call the shots, according to Leonard’s book. Fra...
Eventually, by putting mail riders out on the roads at night, Franklin managed to cut the delivery time for a letter from Philadelphia to New York and receive a reply to just 24 hours. Franklin also arranged for small, swift packet ships to transport mail to and from the West Indies and Canada, which complemented the transatlantic service that the ...
Things came to a head after Franklin received an anonymously-sent package of letterswritten by Thomas Hutchinson, the British governor of Massachusetts. Franklin gave them to a friend, who then leaked them to a Boston newspaper, and they caused an uproar. “The letters [Franklin] sent over to Massachusetts from London showed the extent to which Brit...
Goddard tried unsuccessfully to get the Continental Congress to adopt his makeshift service as the official mail system. But the delegates wanted something bigger and better. After two months of study, in July 1775 they offered Franklin the new job of Postmaster General, at a salary of $1,000—about $33,500in today’s dollars—and authorized him to hi...
Aug 19, 1997 · The job of directing this nebulous body fell to Samuel Osgood of Massachusetts, named postmaster general by President George Washington in 1789. Osgood inherited a disorganized and impoverished postal system that consisted of 75 post offices and more than 2,000 miles of post roads.
- Cathleen Schurr
Oct 30, 2024 · An intercolonial mail service was established in 1672, when Gov. Francis Lovelace of New York organized a delivery system between New York City and Boston. A postal route from Maine to Georgia was laid out in 1683, the same year in which William Penn opened a post office in Philadelphia.
Aug 20, 2016 · On July 26, 1775, Franklin was appointed Postmaster General, the first appointed under the Continental Congress; the establishment of the organization that became the United States Postal Service nearly two centuries later traces back to this date.