New employees – mostly women, who were working on the home front while men were serving in Europe and the Pacific – had to be quickly trained to ensure that mail could continue to be delivered, especially letters from soldiers overseas.
When the United States entered World War II, thousands of postal employees left their jobs to join the military. Nowadays, we can’t imagine a postal service that doesn’t deliver mail directly to our homes! The Beginning of ZIP Codes and State Codes As president, Lincoln expanded the postal service during the Civil War to include personal mail delivery to people’s homes. If someone failed to collect his or her mail, he would deliver it personally. In 1831, at the time that the Table of Post Offices was published, Abraham Lincoln was the postmaster in New Salem, Illinois. As the number of states grew, so did the list of abbreviations. The Table gave a list of accepted abbreviations to prevent this confusion. The Table of Post Offices encouraged people to spell out the entire name of the state, but who has time to do that? People commonly wrote out abbreviations for the states, but without a standard system in place, it would be too easy to confuse, say, Miss for Mississippi and Miss for Missouri. It had a listing of every post office in the country so that people could know where to go to drop off their mail and pick something up. In 1831, The United States Postal Service (USPS) issued a directory called the Table of Post Offices. The United States had a postal service from before its founding in 1776, but as it expanded westward, the need for a more centralized, more systematic service became apparent. We still use the same system today, albeit supplemented with the use of email and other electronic communication. It was designed with a specific goal in mind – facilitating the sending of mail as the country was expanding westward in the 1800s. However, do you get a thrill from receiving an envelope or package addressed to you? But, do you ever send off packages to other people? Even if you don’t regularly send snail mail, you are probably so familiar with the whole system of state abbreviations and postal codes that you don’t even think about it.īut the system didn’t just conveniently fall from the sky one day. If you are like most people, the chances are good that nowadays, you hardly ever write an address on an envelope and put it in the mail. A Brief History on State Abbreviations and Postal Codes
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