Joseph William Briggs,
City Delivery Pioneer
Joseph William Briggs, a Cleveland, Ohio,
postal clerk, often is credited with
conceiving the idea of free city delivery
while contemplating long lines of
customers trying to keep warm as they
inched toward his window in the winter of
1862. Many were women hoping for news
of loved ones in the Civil War. Briggs
enlisted local businesses to serve as
staging areas for sorting customers’ mail,
and he began delivering mail to his
patrons free of cost.
In 1864, Briggs wrote Postmaster General
Montgomery Blair, suggesting
improvements to the free letter carrier
system, launched in 1863. Blair liked
Briggs’ ideas, brought him to Washington,
and appointed him special agent in charge
of superintending the operation of the
letter carrier system, a role he performed
until his death on February 23, 1872.
A 1921 postal committee charged with
determining who should be credited with
the establishment of free city delivery,
after examining the available evidence,
reported to Postmaster General Will Hays
that “no one individual can be considered
the author or originator of this service …”
The committee said, “Mr. Briggs cannot be
properly credited as the author of the City
Free Delivery Service, but the evidence
seems sufficient to warrant the statement
that he was the first letter carrier in the city
of Cleveland, Ohio.”3
A plaque in the Cleveland Post Office
commemorates Briggs’ service as that
city’s first free letter carrier and his
contributions to establishing the service
nationwide.
City Delivery
Before 1863, postage paid only for the delivery of mail from Post
Office to Post Office. Citizens picked up their mail, although in
some cities they could pay an extra two-cent fee for letter delivery
or use private delivery firms. Among the postal reforms suggested
by progressive Postmaster General Montgomery Blair in his 1862
report to the President was free delivery of mail by salaried letter
carriers, which he felt would