A Silly Question That Everyone Wants To Know.

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To start at the beginning, Ben Franklin became the first Postmaster of Philadelphia while it was still under British rule in 1737. At that time and well before anyone had ever consider anything like a postage stamp, postage was paid by the recipients of the mail rather than the senders. This arrangement created an issue for Franklin and by 1741, he had hundreds of recipients who had not picked up their post and paid the necessary penny for it. So he published the list of 800 names and warned that if they were not redeemed before March 25 following they would be 'sent away as dead Letters to the General Post Office'. This was the first use of the term 'dead letter' in the US (that I can find).

The US officially established the US Postal Service in 1775 and a position of "Inspector of Dead Letters" who was responsible with figuring out where dead letters should be sent. This approach existed for the nearly 50 years until the logistics drove the development of the first 'Dead Letter Office' in 1825. Postmasters around the country sent all their undelivered and unidentified mail to the single, centralized Washington DC Office for 92 years. (1825 through 1917).

It is interesting to note that during the 1860s, with the nation's men fighting in the Civil War, women postal employees outnumbered men 38 to 7 in the Dead Letter Office. These ladies were considered "skilled dead letter detectives" and inspected the details of the dead letters for potential clues about who sent it or where it was going. After the Civil War and into the 1880s, the Dead Letter Office continued to employ many women (and a few clergymen ) assuming that they would be more honest and discreet when opening a stranger's mail. One especially notable employee during this period was Mrs. Patti Lyle Collins who became renowned at sleuthing missing or garbled addresses. Ladies Home Journal called Collins the Dead Letter office's "presiding genius" and another called her "the greatest living expert in deciphering illegible and defective letter addresses". As a widow with 3 children, she replied upon her significant education and familiarly in languages, family history, and geography. For example, Collins took an envelope with the address "Miss Isabel Marbury ... Stock," and had it delivered, correctly, to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, knowing that Marbury was a common last name in that town....