The Deadwood coach

The National Postal Museum's record for this photograph is one sentence long. It shows a stagecoach on its way to Deadwood City, South Dakota, in 1889. The photographer is unknown, and no driver, passenger or company is named.

Why a coach carried the mail

Stagecoaches carried mail under contract from the earliest days of the postal system. In 1773 post road surveyor Hugh Finlay noted a stage driver who held a contract for semiweekly mail between Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Boston, Massachusetts. In 1785 the Continental Congress told the postmaster general to award mail contracts to stagecoach operators, using postal money to help public travel and trade. Coaches were preferred over riders on horseback even when they cost more and were sometimes slower.

An act of Congress in 1845 ended that preference. Contracts would now go to the lowest bidder promising "celerity, certainty and security." Postal clerks shortened the phrase to three stars, and these became known as star routes. Even so, the department kept favoring coaches on some routes through the 1850s.

For the stage companies, the mail was the money. The museum says mail contracts made up the bulk of their profits, so the company that won a route contract was the one most likely to succeed. The routes used by mail stages became lifelines into the territories, and settlers and fortune seekers soon traveled them.

Inside a mail coach

Concord style mail coaches were used from the early 1800s through the early 1900s. They took their name from Concord, New Hampshire, where Lewis S. Downing and J. Stephen Abbott designed and built them. They were painted in bright colors, with oil paintings on the doors, but built for rough roads. They came in six, nine and twelve passenger sizes, not counting riders on the roof when the inside was full. The mail usually rode in a space under the driver's seat, and baggage went on the roof rack or in the rear compartment.

Room was always short. Up to eight people could be packed inside, with more on top and mailbags stuffed in among the passengers. Because a stage line was paid for its mail contract either way, drivers sometimes left mailbags by the side of the road to make room for a paying passenger's baggage, and the next stage occasionally picked them up. Coaches traveled day and night, stopping only to change horses at stations built every ten to fifteen miles.

A coach on the road

Star route contractors became known for moving the mail by whatever means worked, from boats to snowshoes, but most traveled by horse or horse drawn vehicle until the early twentieth century. For the towns along a route, the arrival of a coach carrying mail and passengers meant the latest news was at hand. The museum's own stagecoach exhibit uses a Library of Congress photograph from the John C. H. Grabill Collection titled The Deadwood Coach.

From the National Postal Museum collection, record A.2006⁠-⁠83.