Rural Free Delivery

Similar... A different design, though.

Found another RFD amongst my things:


Osage City, MO, Oct 1, 1907

If you don't know it already, Osage City, Missouri is a discontinued post office being in operation from 1856-1962.

Yes, thank you for posting that. I was going to mention it too, but forgot.

Hello everyone! I'm brand new to this forum and until a couple of days ago, didn't really have that much interest in stamp collecting.

However, recently my mother passed away and while dad was going through some of her things he found this pin that he is pretty sure belonged to my grandfather (mom's dad) from when he was a letter carrier in Hamersville, OH. I'm assuming he did this in the 1920's to maybe the 1940's (years are uncertain).

It looks like it could be a hat pin but looks to be too large to wear on a shirt or coat. I've only done a little research on the net but have yet to find another picture of one. Any more info would be appreciated.

Yes, you have a cap badge. And a wonderful family treasure. Here is a close-up of a pair of carriers wearing theirs. It is cropped from a large portrait of 7 postal workers, I believe your cap badge to be somewhat older than 1920, perhaps c1905.



Also, here is a listing of the Hamersville Ohio PO employees in 1911, from p410 of the "Official Register of the United States 1911, Vol II, The Postal Service" Unfortunately, 1911 is the last year the PO employees were included in the Register. Finding later employee lists is more difficult.

Was wondering what the RFD in this Georgetown, Texas postmark stand for, until I read this topic.
We never stop learning.
Thanks for sharing.

When I was growing up in northern Indiana in the 1950s and 1960s, it was simply RR 1 or RR 4 (Rural Route) or just Rt. 1 and Rt. 4. Each mailman (yes, we called them mailmen) had X number of people on his route and all mail for that route went to his box/slot whatever. Sometime in the 1970s, when I was away at college, they started giving 5-digit numbers based on county roads to all houses and farms. You still had a mailman with a route but the mail was sorted by those numbers--all the mail for numbers on his route went to him. When the address was merely "Rt 1" it meant the carrier had to know where, on what county road, the Marvin Jones family lived and where the August Torquemada family lived. After they instituted the 5-digit rural "street numbers," anyone could substitute on any given day for any carrier--you no longer had to know the Route. It's an ironic commentary on how rural life changed within my lifetime. There is no rural America left anymore, really, It's all been suburbanized, Twitterized, Televisionized, mass-marketized.

In 1960 it was still very much the same rural free delivery as in 1900, in many ways. And it was just the way things were. We were only about 5 miles either direction from towns of 40,000 and 25,000. But the difference was that in town mailmen walked their routes, while rural delivery was for everything outside that walking delivery zone. The mailman often drove his own car with a sign in the back warning others of frequent stops. We've long forgotten what a convenience it was to have your mail delivered if you lived outside of town but back when RFD was first established, it was a Really Big Deal.