Solving Mail Mysteries

When we put something in the mail, we expect it to be delivered. Since the founding of the United States, the mail that went unclaimed at local post offices, bore insufficient postage, or lost momentum due to incomplete, illegible, or missing addresses was forwarded to the specialists in “dead letters” at the Post Office Department. The Dead Letter Office clerks used analytical reasoning, languages, and geography to “blind read,” or deduce, the correct addresses and send the mail on its way.

The Dead Letter Office hired its first women in 1862. Men were fighting in the Civil War, and the Post Office Department was flooded with mail. Three years later, the Dead Letter Office employed thirty-eight “ladies,” who outnumbered their seven male counterparts. But the women each earned only $600 annually—$300 less than their male coworkers. Several female employees signed a petition requesting a raise; their pay increase was granted in a subsequent congressional appropriation, along with a title change to “clerks.” Still, the women’s salaries remained lower than the men’s, and their offices and entrances were separate. Although both offices were visible to tourists visiting the nation’s capital and were written about in the popular press, the conspicuous presence of these white, middle-class women working in a federal agency challenged nineteenth-century norms.

This “Blind Reading” scrapbook preserves a proud selection of the clerks’ accomplishments in just a two-year period. Each of the twenty-one carefully mounted envelopes bears the following marking: “Deficiency in Address Supplied at Dead Letter Office.” Like answers to a puzzle, the solutions are written on the backs of the pages, denoting successful delivery. The elegant handwriting and construction of this unsigned volume are identical to those in an album in the United States Postal Service’s collection attributed to Clara M. Richter (ca. 1845–99). Shortly after the Civil War, the unmarried German immigrant joined the staff at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the post office. During her thirty-plus years of public service, Richter became chief of the Dead Letter Office’s foreign mail, reviving letters from the dead and helping make international communications more reliable. 

—Lynn Heidelbaugh, Curator of Postal Operations, National Postal Museum