The Vital Link: Parcel Post in Rural Benton
Local resident G.H. Mottinger celebrates the expansion of money-order services to his remote post office and muses on the potential for rural education.
Beginning the first of this month, the Mottinger post office is a money-order office. The department made it a money-order office unsolicited, it being their aim to facilitate the parcel post business. It surely is a great benefit to rural districts where there is no store. Parcel post has come to stay and the service is improving every day. Once per week, three orders of fresh meat come to this office from Kennewick as regular as clockwork and arrive in first class shape. Long live the parcel post. I hope to see the time, though, when books from a circulating library will be carried to rural districts at half rate, which would put country children in a position to get plenty of good books to read as well as city children. Many country boys and girls are hungry for books to read and if they could get them would spend many leisure hours in better company.
“Many country boys and girls are hungry for books to read and if they could get them would spend many leisure hours in better company.”
Mottinger was a small community along the Columbia River that has largely vanished, but the letter touches on the enduring struggle to provide equal access to information and goods for rural populations—a precursor to today's debates about rural broadband.
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