What do we Know About the Postal System of the Shire?

Mail was mostly delivered to post offices in the United States before the Civil War. Because of the stress of having death notices or mail from loved ones in combat units, home delivery by the US Post Office began during that war. Before then, postal carriers personally delivered if someone paid them (it was an important source of their income), or one might pay another service for home delivery.

Here is a good article on American home delivery and the postal service. It was written in 2017, and since that time, when regular Saturday deliveries came to an end, the US Postal Service has begun Sunday deliveries for Amazon – for a fee.

One item of note from the article pertinent to this thread:There are a great number of links in the article that could be of interest, such as the one in the citation.

Alcuin said:

...Mail was mostly delivered to post offices in the United States before the Civil War. Because of the stress of having death notices or mail from loved ones in combat units, home delivery by the US Post Office began during that war. Before then,...

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I think it's up to "mails' types", for instances, stuff with limited validity would be required to be sent into targeted places directly without doubt, such as Bilbo's birthday's invites were required to be sent to residential directly, after all, I wouldn't dream of getting the invites after the celebration just has been over for days in my frequency of checking mails once in several days. XDD

Alcuin said:

Mail was mostly delivered to post offices in the United States before the Civil War. Because of the stress of having death notices or mail from loved ones in combat units, home delivery by the US Post Office began during that war. Before then, postal carriers personally delivered if someone paid them (it was an important source of their income), or one might pay another service for home delivery.

Here is a good article on American home delivery and the postal service. It was written in 2017, and since that time, when regular Saturday deliveries came to an end, the US Postal Service has begun Sunday deliveries for Amazon – for a fee.

One item of note from the article pertinent to this thread:

​

Deliveries were made Monday through Saturday, and usually multiple times a day – in 1905 Baltimore or Philadelphia, for example, a carrier could visit as often as seven times a day. If that sounds expensive, it was, and starting in 1923 many local postmasters winnowed local deliveries to one a day, although that cost-saving move wasn't universal until 1950.​

​

There are a great number of links in the article that could be of interest, such as the one in the citation.

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Did they actually end Saturday home deliveries in the USA? I remember having a small red 'flag' on the side of the mailbox at my parents house where you could put mail in the box and put the flag up to signal the carrier to stop and pick up your outgoing mail. The flag was in case there was no mail for you that day, the carrier would know to stop just to pick-up.

We still have Saturday deliveries in Germany. There has been talk of suspending Monday deliveries, but I'm not sure where that went. I can certainly imagine that companies would not have been amused at the idea.

Halasían said:

Did they actually end Saturday home deliveries in the USA?

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From “USPS Saturday Delivery & Hours”:The published time in the header of the webpage is listed as 20 August 2017 at 1:34:07 AM Greenwich Time, so it’s a little dated. The USPS website indicates today (i.e., just a few moments ago) that the Post Office delivers only Priority Mail (at a higher price than regular mail) on Saturdays. However, the Postal Service has delivery agreements with Amazon, and I believe that includes Saturday and Sunday delivery. This corresponds with the citation from the 2017 article.

Halasían said:

I remember having a small red 'flag' on the side of the mailbox at my parents house where you could put mail in the box and put the flag up to signal the carrier to stop and pick up your outgoing mail. The flag was in case there was no mail for you that day, the carrier would know to stop just to pick-up.

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That’s still the case.

Still, I believe the more pertinent information regards the British postal service, the Royal Mail, particularly as it was formerly practiced in England, especially in Oxfordshire and the surrounding region toward the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth.

USPS also sometimes delivers packages on Sundays. Not sure what causes them to do so but every once in a while I or a neighbor will get one. They've been saying Saturday's going away forever but it still hasn't happened.

1stvermont said:

Nice spot and I do think you are on to something. I was told once by a customer mail was delivered twice a day perhaps 50-70 years back here in the US.



I was just thinking, he had his morning letters but did he have to go to the Hobbiton post office to get them? or were they delivered to bag end?

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This was the line that got me to create Shire Post back in SR1387 (that's 1987 in the "real word").

I stumbled onto this conversation.... it's been a while since I was here. I created a whole world of postage stamps for The Shire, a postal route map, and postmarks for all 50 towns of the HPD (the Hobbit Postal District) which includes the four farthings along with Westmarch, Buckland, and Breeland. Back in the day (talking 1990s now) we had a list of over 400 Hobbit personas with real-world corresponding names and addresses. You could send in-character pen-and-ink mail to me under separate cover and I would put stamps and postmarks and re-send to the recipient. It was fun for a while but eventually collapsed under the sheer weight of trying to keep updated real-world addresses. Probably fewer than 100 actual letters were processed through the system and an absurd number were being returned for invalid real-world addresses. I wrote a treatise called THE HISTORY AND PRACTICE OF COMMUNICATIONS IN THE SHIRE under the pen-name Arlo G. Underhill, which expands upon how I envision the development of the Shire postal system, based upon what information Tolkien left us, and informed by my philatelic knowledge of real-world postal systems development, and central-place theory. I used to have that treatise posted somewhere on the web, but can't seem to locate it online anymore. I could post it here as text if desired. (It's over 6,000 words, so perhaps as an attachment rather than a post?)

I recently heard on the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast that in Victorian-era London (IIRC), some parts of town had at least 4 mail deliveries per day. If you wrote quickly enough, it was basically possible to hold a conversation by letter — provided your correspondent didn’t live too far away, of course.

Here in the Netherlands, we used to have far more deliveries than we do now. These days, there’s no delivery on Sunday nor on Monday — at least no residential deliveries; it’s probably different for businesses. No Monday deliveries is a fairly recent thing (couple of years at most); but I doubt there ever was a Sunday delivery, Calvinistic as this country used to be. To be fair, I only noticed it a couple of years after they stopped delivering on Mondays; I don’t receive a lot of snail mail any more.

Will Whitfoot said:

I used to have that treatise posted somewhere on the web, but can't seem to locate it online anymore. I could post it here as text if desired. (It's over 6,000 words, so perhaps as an attachment rather than a post?)

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Ooh, yes please! 👍

vor0nwe said:

I recently heard on the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast that in Victorian-era London (IIRC), some parts of town had at least 4 mail deliveries per day. If you wrote quickly enough, it was basically possible to hold a conversation by letter — provided your correspondent didn’t live too far away, of course.

Here in the Netherlands, we used to have far more deliveries than we do now. These days, there’s no delivery on Sunday nor on Monday — at least no residential deliveries; it’s probably different for businesses. No Monday deliveries is a fairly recent thing (couple of years at most); but I doubt there ever was a Sunday delivery, Calvinistic as this country used to be. To be fair, I only noticed it a couple of years after they stopped delivering on Mondays; I don’t receive a lot of snail mail any more.

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Yes, the mode of communications in the modern world has shifted dramatically over my lifetime. The development of communications in the real world is something of a study of mine. I currently have an exhibit on display at the West Fork Public Library in West Fork Arkansas about the postal history of Washington County, our local administrative district... about the size of one of the four farthings of The Shire. Before there were stamps (pre-1840s) one would tender a letter at the post office and pay the clerk, who would mark the mailpiece PAID and send it onward. There was mail delivery only within walking distance of the post office. All others would have to come to the post office to get their mail. About 1902 the price to mail a postcard dropped from 2 cents to 1 cent, and the use of postcards to exchange small news exploded. At that same time, Rural Free Delivery was instuituted to deliver mail to rural districts. In those days, anyone could start a new post office, with just three requirements. 1. The new LOCATION must be at least one mile from the next nearest post office. 2. The chosen NAME must be unique within the state, there can never be two post offices of the same name in the same state. 3. The applicant must post a bond of $25, to cover an initial stock of postage stamps and and be issued a postmarking device. In our local county, the number of of currently operating post offices jumped from a low of two in the beginning to a high of fiftyseven between 1902 and 1905. This was in the period before automobiles, but after railways had arrived. Since then the number of operating post offices has steadily dwindled as people began to acquire faster means of transportation. and began to drive past the smaller sites heading for larger towns. Also, postmasters who experienced a "reversal of fortunes" could voluntarily forfeit their office and be reimbursed their $25 bond. Today there are just seventeen post offices in Washington County Arkansas, and the smaller non-delivery offices are still experiencing occasional dissolution.

In our current times, I have met adults who have never in their lives received an actual letter from an actual person in the mail. I find this to be a sad state of affairs. Shire Post was begun in an effort to reverse the trend. In my collection of old letters dating from the 1800s there is a very common salutory line that many people used to begin their missives. I am struck by a wave of nostalgia whenever I read this:

"I take my pen in hand to write these few lines....."

The History and Practice of Communications in The Shire.
by: Arlo G. Underhill IX , SR. 2027

Will Whitfoot said:

This was the line that got me to create Shire Post back in SR1387 (that's 1987 in the "real word").

I stumbled onto this conversation.... it's been a while since I was here. I created a whole world of postage stamps for The Shire, a postal route map, and postmarks for all 50 towns of the HPD (the Hobbit Postal District) which includes the four farthings along with Westmarch, Buckland, and Breeland. Back in the day (talking 1990s now) we had a list of over 400 Hobbit personas with real-world corresponding names and addresses. You could send in-character pen-and-ink mail to me under separate cover and I would put stamps and postmarks and re-send to the recipient. It was fun for a while but eventually collapsed under the sheer weight of trying to keep updated real-world addresses. Probably fewer than 100 actual letters were processed through the system and an absurd number were being returned for invalid real-world addresses. I wrote a treatise called THE HISTORY AND PRACTICE OF COMMUNICATIONS IN THE SHIRE under the pen-name Arlo G. Underhill, which expands upon how I envision the development of the Shire postal system, based upon what information Tolkien left us, and informed by my philatelic knowledge of real-world postal systems development, and central-place theory. I used to have that treatise posted somewhere on the web, but can't seem to locate it online anymore. I could post it here as text if desired. (It's over 6,000 words, so perhaps as an attachment rather than a post?)

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Thanks so much for re-posting your fine essay! I do remember it on one of the sites years ago, but most of the old legacy Middle Earth sites have also collapsed into ruin due to neglect of various sorts. I think I got in on the Shire Post in its 'collapsing under its own weight' end-stage. I do like your coinage these days though, and how has those 'treasure hunts' go? I need to get back on the Dunedain Forum where I first read about that fun project of yours.

The treasure hoard on Treasure Mountain above Silverton Colorado has been recovered, but I have not heard that the other, up in the Ruby Range of NE Nevada has yet been found. We are considering doing some more of those... but since the Covid I have not ventured far from home.

Here's a photo of one of the extremely rare Breeland shilling green from SR1405. This was printed from a single subject copper plate engraved by the late Greg Franck-Weiby. (aka Ian Cnulle) . Only 16 examples of this are known to exist, though there are some later impressions from the original plate done in different colors.

Will Whitfoot said:

The treasure hoard on Treasure Mountain above Silverton Colorado has been recovered, but I have not heard that the other, up in the Ruby Range of NE Nevada has yet been found. We are considering doing some more of those... but since the Covid I have not ventured far from home.

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Those looked like it would be fun. Of course, you probably don't have any way of knowing if someone came across it?