People
One of the earliest tales of beating the mail system occurred in 1849 with the escape of Virginia slave Henry “Box” Brown. One night, Brown had a dream to “mail [himself] to a place where there are no slaves.” With $86 in hand, Brown enlisted the help of a local storekeeper to box him up with water and biscuits and send him north to freedom. James Miller McKim, a Philadelphia abolitionist, agreed to receive the box. The trip began on March 23. While the journey only lasted 27 hours, Brown’s box was passed from wagon to railroad to steamboat and back again. The box often ended up upside down, but Brown remained quiet enough to avoid discovery. On March 24, Brown arrived in Philadelphia and was released as a free man. That wasn’t the only case of shipping people by mail. In 1914, 5-year-old May Pierstorff was sent from Grangeville, Idaho to visit her grandmother in Lewiston, Idaho. When it came time to buy tickets, Pierstorff’s parents discovered that sending their daughter through parcel post was cheaper than buying fare. Pierstorff, who weighed less than the 50-pound weight limit, was sent through the mail at the chicken rate. Before Pierstorff boarded the train, her parents clipped 53 cents to her coat and sent her on her way. Upon arrival in Lewiston, the postmaster personally delivered the young girl to her grandmother’s house. Six years later, the practice of shipping humans through parcel post became illegal.
Diseases
In the August 7, 1895 issue of The New York Times, Miss Daisy James from the New York Post Office noted that dead birds and other small animals were sent to taxidermists throughout the country. She also handled various strains of smallpox, diphtheria, and scarlet fever that were shipped by physicians to the national Health Board.
Buildings
The largest thing to be sent through the mail was a building. In 1916, a young businessman by the name of William H. Coltharp decided to construct a new bank on the corner of a street in Vernal, Utah. Of course, Coltharp couldn’t send a completed building through the mail, wall by wall. But Coltharp wanted the best bricks in the area and decided to have those bricks sent from the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company—all 80,000 of them. He reasoned that parcel post was the most inexpensive way to ship the bricks for construction, and he carefully packaged the bricks in separate crates weighing less than the 50-pound weight limit. Somewhere around 40 crates were shipped each time, and each shipment weighed roughly one ton collectively. It was Coltharp’s infamous scheme that prompted the U.S. Postal Service to change their rules so that a customer could only send 200 pounds of goods per day. Their reasoning? “It is not the intent of the U.S. Postal Service that buildings be shipped through the mail.”
Skis, deer tibias, and dead fish
Even today, individuals still test the limits of our country’s postal service. In 2000, a team of social scientists from the science-humor magazine Improbable Research conducted a study to see what bizarre items they could sneak through the post office. The team broke the proposed items into six categories: valuable items, sentimental items, unwieldy items, pointless items, suspicious items, and disgusting items. Among the valuable items was a pair of “new, expensive tennis shoes” that were bound together by duct tape. The shoes took only seven days to reach their destination, and a mail clerk along the way tightly tied the laces together in a knot. For one of the sentimental items, the researchers sent a molar tooth to themselves in a clear plastic box. After 14 days, the tooth was delivered in a repackaged mailer and accompanied with a note: “Please be advised that human remains may not be transported through the mail, but we assumed this to be of sentimental value, and made an exception in your case.”