Biplanes, Trains, and Super-Fast Ponies, Zip Codes, Stamps, and Ben Franklin

The fascinating history of the U.S. Postal Service, but, alas, it’s now illegal to mail your child.

I’ d never been to the National Postal Museum, a Smithsonian museum in a stately granite, Beaux-Arts building constructed in 1914. The U.S. Postal Service renovated what was once Washington’s main post office in the late 1980s for this informative, enjoyable museum exploring the social, technical, and economic history of mail in America. It’s been open since 1993. Big chunks of it need an overhaul, but it’s fascinating and, across the street from Union Station, blessedly easy to find.

Escalators deliver visitors downstairs to history-oriented galleries on the start of America’s mail system from colonial times to today. War and peace, land, sea, air, and the moon, city and country, snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night, zip codes, anthrax, robots, and the Inverted Jenny stamp all figure in a story that’s truly like no other.

The downstairs space starts with a 90-foot-tall atrium. Suspended from the ceiling are three vintage airmail planes. There’s a reconstructed railroad car used for processing mail as it hurtled north, south, east, and west and an 1851 stagecoach with models of horses that look as if they’re galloping, coincidentally, we see, to White River Junction and Woodstock about 90 minutes from my house in ye olde Vermont. Do we still use stagecoaches and horses? Wow, could that explain why our mail is so slow?

Focused galleries are off the atrium. These galleries start in the wilderness. It’s 1673 and New York’s colonial governor wants a mail service all year long between New York and Boston — 268 miles through woods, over rivers, streams, and mountains, and lions, tigers, and bears to be no impediment. He was thinking in terms of colonial officials communicating with one another. Visitors walk through a simulated, very dark wilderness, fake trees notched to show how mail pioneers created that route between New York and Boston, which was also the earliest post road, called the king’s best road, today known as Route 1.

Through text, old prints, letters, and photo murals, we learn how a system to deliver letters evolved over a few decades from primitive and prolonged to organized, more or less, and relatively speedy. By 1776, a mail-delivery apparatus stretched 1,500 miles on dirt roads from Portsmouth in New Hampshire to Charleston, covering all 13 colonies and engineered, as many visitors know, by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was Philadelphia’s postmaster, then postmaster of all the British colonies in America, and then, in 1775, our country-in-the-making’s first postmaster general.

Franklin is the gift that keeps on giving — patriot, philosopher, inventor, pol, influencer, diplomat, printer, and newsman — but he’s most lauded in the exhibition for his accounting and technology skills. Franklin developed the national system’s solvent, even profitable, financial model, which lasted nearly a century, and he placed technology — specifically, speed — at the center of the system. He started the penny post, which allowed for home delivery for an added penny, and the Dead Letter Office for unclaimed or undeliverable mail. He also banned colonial officials from opening and reading mail. In England, royal mail officials pried as a policy.

The museum does a great job presenting the post office system as the superpower uniting our new, huge, mostly rural country. In his travels leading to Democracy in America, Tocqueville called mail “the great link between minds.” A post office could be a hut, while the locals using it lived in log cabins with only a bed, a few chairs, and a gun, but they also had a crisp, freshly published newspaper on their kitchen table. Americans have always loved the news: We were a new country and an economic, social, and political experiment; we lusted to know what changes were in the air. Newspapers were our civic blood, and we had them by the thousands. Franklin, a newspaper publisher among his many side gigs, and his successors made sure that postage for newspaper delivery was rock-bottom. And from Franklin’s day, reliable mail was available to not only elites but also thousands and then millions.

Among the most memorable stories are the ones of a son at war writing his mother at home, a Gold Rush digger writing his wife a thousand miles away, pioneers fresh off the wagon, in the middle of nowhere in Ohio or Iowa or Oregon, writing back to the “old country,” for them Boston, Vermont, or Philadelphia, with news of a baby, another few acres plowed, or a death. For millions, letters were a lifeline among far-distant family members who’d probably never see one another again.

And these letters did more than keep family and friends connected. They’re now primary sources for our history. An 1846 letter, densely written to save paper and postage, describes a young man’s impressions of the Alamo, San Antonio, and the tense zeitgeist in the early days of the Mexican War. He wasn’t a soldier but an adventurous tourist with a good eye for current events.

During the Civil War, the post office built a parallel mailing system from scratch, using a special postmaster and portable post office for every regiment so the Army wouldn’t overwhelm existing, rural operations. Free home delivery in part arose because women wanted letters from their men in the Army as soon as possible, without having to go to the post office every day in hopes of a letter. A lovely gallery on the mail in World War I and World War II put the post office at the center of a morale-building campaign to encourage overseas servicemen and their families back home, especially mothers, wives, and girlfriends, to write and write often.

There’s the Dead Letter Office for unclaimed mail, mail with insufficient postage, or mail with no address or an incorrect one. Patti Lyle Collins (c. 1840–1913), who worked in the Washington, D.C., Dead Letter Office, was part linguist, part seer, and part walking encyclopedia — she knew not only thousands of street names but also their colloquial names. She was a master in phonetics. Now, optical character-recognition software does the trick in deciphering addresses.

The museum treats the holiday-greeting-card revolution: Rooted in Victorian sentimentality, it became a trend that caused mail volume to rocket, aiding the bottom line, as did the introduction of parcel post in 1913. That boon to the mail-order business added to the post office’s business in the way of eggs, live critters, books, clothing, weapons, dirty laundry, appliances, and the Hope Diamond, which Harry Winston mailed to the Smithsonian via parcel post, with Post Office insurance, in 1958. With insurance, it cost $145.29 of which $2.44 paid for postage. In the mail, too, went five-year-old May Pierstorff, mailed in 1914 from Grangeville, Idaho, where she lived with her parents, to her grandmother 75 miles away. At 53 cents, the postage was cheaper than her train fare would have been. The postmaster pinned the stamps to her coat. Once she arrived, the postmaster there delivered her to Granny’s house.

These days, mail is delivered six days a week, in theory, by 300,000 carriers, with about 370 million pieces delivered every day. Around 31,000 post offices do the trick, along with nearly 450 processing centers, many the size of multiple football fields. A big part of the museum deals with the technology revolutions that make this happen. Zip codes are only part of the story. A video describes how piles of letters are culled by size, shape, and weight, how sensors read the stamps and addresses, and how robots mix with plenty of human handling, all to sort mail down to the location of recipients on the mailman’s delivery route. I’m impressed.

A big problem for the museum is the difference in tone and look among the galleries. Part of this relates to design. Some of the galleries date to the mid-1990s. Others came much later, so the older ones look fusty indeed, though they were probably drab the day they opened. Galleries designed closer to our time are more video-heavy, lighter, brighter, and more balanced between text and objects.

It’s clear that the U.S. Postal Service, created in 1971 as an independent agency replacing the cabinet-level Post Office Department, was involved in the galleries treating the postwar mail system. They’re very rah-rah, sis-boom-bah. Blemishes — no, warts the size of ponies — are nowhere to be found. These include the mass shootings that made “going postal” a cliché. The cataclysmic drop in first-class mail because of social media, email, and FedEx has led to terrible financial problems and calls to privatize the system. And then there are mega-goofs like the 80 million Maya Angelou stamps printed with an inspirational quote not from an Angelou poem but from a children’s book by Joan Anglund. Oops. Someone misread his Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations. It was discovered the day the stamp debuted. All unmentioned.

I saved the stamp galleries — the best part of the museum — for last even though they’re by the front door. The Smithsonian, owning millions of objects, has something about everything. That includes a British Penny Black stamp from 1840 that depicts Queen Victoria in profile. It was the world’s first adhesive postage stamp used in a public postage system and is on display in a superb series of galleries on the history of American stamps. They opened in 2013 but look fresh and engaging and go from high point to high point. The Smithsonian is likely the world’s biggest stamp collector, and the stamp galleries are the largest museum space in the world devoted to philately.

Of the six thematic spaces in these galleries, the mother lode is a dark space with dramatic red walls and wall niches exhibiting stamp treasures, among them the Inverted Jenny, a sheet of a hundred 24-cent stamps from 1918 depicting the Post Office’s Curtiss Jenny JN-4HM biplane designed especially for airmail delivery. The stamps had a patriotic red, white, and blue palette — white from the paper, a red border, and a blue plane. The sheet must have been placed in the printing press upside down after the red border was printed. The stamp was to be issued the day airmail service along the East Coast started. A video on the Inverted Jenny is in the show. It’s a gripping, entertaining, human-interest story that fits with the best elements of the museum, which convey to us that each bag of mail is a sample of the range of human emotion and aspiration.

Every year around 30 or 40 new stamps are issued. The 29-cent Elvis stamp from 1993 is the biggest stamp hit by numbers, with 500 million printed. It’s unique in another respect. Normally, a commission picks subjects and designs. For the Elvis stamp, it offered two designs and submitted them to the public for a vote: Mark Stutzman’s “Young Elvis,” trim from all that hip swerving, and John Berkey’s more mature Elvis, to describe it diplomatically. I call it “Fat Elvis.”

If I remember correctly, you could pick up a ballot at any post office or vote by a perforated postcard in People. I’ll admit to hoping there’s a statute of limitations for voting more than once, as I might very well have. “Young Elvis” won with 75 percent of the vote, no surprise since “Jailhouse Rock,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” and “Hound Dog” are, like me, a product of the mid-’50s that has stood the test of time. “Fat Elvis” looked as if he’d spent a long weekend at the Heartbreak Hotel chugging hooch. Though the postal service printed 500 million, some 200 million were purchased but never used, giving it a tidy profit.

My favorite stamp is also from 1993 and memorializes Grace Kelly. A monochromatic baby-blue and minimalist, it conveys her mix of froideur on the surface and sizzle underneath. Czeslaw Slania, the Swedish stamp and banknote master engraver, designed it, using special paper with a satin finish. No one could leave thinking stamps aren’t art.

Museum-wide, there’s nothing about the Comstock Act, the 1873 law that criminalized obscene or lewd material if it traveled through the mail. Bans of pornography always become parodies of themselves. Next time the galleries are redone, a section on this fool’s errand, spiced up with some examples, would be a good addition. I would have done more on post office architecture, which was once very good. A gorgeous central post office was once as much a sign of civic pride and taste as a museum or a grand train station. The WPA post office murals are, as far as I can see, also unmentioned. When there’s a reinterpretation, and I hope it’s sooner rather than later, I’m happy to curate — pro bono — a gallery on voting by mail. It’s a subversion of the individual, of common sense, of democracy, and of truth itself.

This is the first of a series of stories I’m planning on the Smithsonian. Of all the Smithsonian museums, the National Postal Museum is among the least celebrated. It’s not well marketed, and its press and publicity function seem moribund. Stamp collectors and history buffs know it. Possibly the museum’s curators don’t want to get into the victim-versus-oppressor misery ride, so Smithsonian Central has left it forlorn. Academically, it’s very strong. I’d ditch the new but unbuilt Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum, both gimmicks and shams, and pump some extra bucks into the National Postal Museum, the Freer Gallery, the zoo, and its libraries and archives.