Where’s my mail?

How many times, when our post office delivery is late, do we grumble and complain about the service?

Recently, while scanning the old newspapers for data, I came across a snippet in a column written by the late Glenn Ellis, publisher of the Marengo Pioneer-Republican, in March of 1959.

“As Mark Hadenfeldt came up on our porch and delivered our mail on February 9, one of those days when it was so icy and so terrible under foot, the thought occurred to us that we really have come a long way in Marengo in the last 100 years or so.

“Prior to 1846, no mail whatever came to Marengo unless somebody went to Iowa City on horseback after it. That was not every afternoon, we will venture. That was 113 years ago.

“How terribly spoiled we have become since then. Today, if the paper is 15 minutes late, we get impatient and fidgety and wonder what the heck is the matter.

“We know the doggoned train must have been late. Doesn’t that fool engineer know when he is due in Marengo?”

Records are sketchy on the location and distribution of the mail in Marengo in the mid 1840s. In 1846, this city (which was not yet a city) got her first post office and first postmaster, Robert McKee.

Pauline Lillie, in her 1984 History, reports that McKee dispatched the mail from his home in the east part of Marengo. It is suggested that the mail came into Iowa City from Galena, Illinois by stagecoach in the 40s.

It was received once per week in Iowa City and was brought on to Marengo by horseback — who knows how many days later.

The 1881 History of Iowa County reports that as the stage coach routes expanded in Iowa, mail eventually reached Marengo via the Western Stage Company. Horseback riders took mail to the north or south for dispatch.

R. B. Groff’s experience as one of those riders is recounted in the 1881 History of Iowa County.

“I had the contract of supplying mails from Marengo to Marietta, the old county seat of Marshall, to Toledo, county seat of Tama, Iowa.

“I frequently swam the Iowa River with my team, got sloughed before we had bridges or ferries.

“I lost the mail one time when Walnut Creek, twelve miles west of Marengo, in the spring freshet of 1858 had her ‘back up.’ The mail floated some eighty rods, grounded in a slough, and laid there quietly three days, when it was fished out by the postmaster, Blake, carefully dried on a board and sent through next trip.”

The town of Marengo was not laid out until 1847 — the year after we had an official post office. The first newspaper, the Iowa Valley Visitor, was published in 1856.

Rail service reached Marengo in 1856, and the mail was then brought in by train. It may well have been dispatched at the depot or carried to a separate location for dispersal.

In 1859, when the city of Marengo was incorporated, there were 525 recorded residents. The Western Stage Company ceased its routes early in the 1870s, and by 1880 the population of Marengo had grown to 1,738 residents.

From the 1880s to the early 1910s, mail was dispersed from businesses or private homes. In the early 1910s, proposals were made to erect a post office building.

Locations then were on the east side of the square, on the east side of Court Avenue between Washington and Hilton Streets, and at the southeast corner of Washington Street and Marengo Avenue.

In 1931. the present Post Office Building was constructed.

In the Pioneer Republican of December 1901, four new rural free delivery mail routes were announced. The carriers for those routes would be Fritz Brauch, R. B. Brenneman, George Kibler, R. Scott Roberts, and James C. Wilson.

Certainly now you can add many names to that list of both rural carriers and city carriers you have known.

In the 1860s or 1870s, it took weeks for the delivery or receipt of a letter. Over the years so much change has come in the collection of and posting of our mail.

Today all mail leaving Marengo is canceled and sorted in Cedar Rapids — even that mail you send to someone in Marengo.

Our mail comes to us through Cedar Rapids, and now our daily newspapers come via the U.S. Postal Service.

And, yes, still today — 177 years later---we grumble and complain when our mail is dropped 15 minutes later than we had expected.