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Woodville service to Sperryville also failed due to lack of space in that facility. “There was no place to put even one letter carrier’s case.”
Mail service for both closing offices continues, virtually unchanged, through the Boston, Va., office rural delivery system. All mail, both incoming and outgoing, funnelled from Boston to the local offices for many years.
Postal routes evolved with the growth of the country. In colonial times, correspondents depended upon friends, merchants, and other travelers to carry messages between the colonies. Most mail, however, was between the colonists and England, with mail drops set up in coffee houses and taverns. By 1673, a monthly postal route ran between New York and Boston, Mass. In the south, private messengers connected the plantations.
Rapid expansion followed. A young Benjamin Franklin, the struggling printer and publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, was appointed postmaster of Philadelphia by former-Virginia governor Alexander^ Spotswood in 1737, and promoted to Joint Postmaster General for the Crown, but was dismissed in 1774 for actions sympathetic to the cause of the colonies.
He became the first Postmaster General under the Continental Congress and served until November 1776, planning and designing a system that, even as a modem corporate entity, remains essentially the same today. It wasn’t until 1829, under Andrew Jackson, that the Postmaster General became a cabinet level position.
By then, the Woodville post office had already been in operation for more than a quarter of a
See CLOSING, Page 3
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