The Great Northern's Mail-Tossing Problem
Mail clerks on the Great Northern train are repeatedly tossing sacks of mail into the wilderness near Scotia, leaving local postmasters to recover shredded, unidentifiable correspondence.
Mail clerks on the Great Northern fast mail train do not seem to improve with practice in the throwing off of sacks of mail at this point. Monday evening the postmaster at Scotia sent up a sack of second-class mail, destined for Newport, which had been picked up along the railroad track near Scotia. It had either fallen under the train when thrown out at this station and was carried on the trucks until it fell off, or the mail clerk came to a realization of having passed the town and hastily threw it out when near Scotia, eight miles away. The sack was all cut to pieces and there is no way of telling to whom the mail matter was addressed. A continuation of the practice may tend to discourage the practice of sending orders to big concerns in the east to be forwarded by mail. Postmaster Towle makes complaint to the postal authorities each time the mail is destroyed, but so far nothing has been done in the matter, except to give the clerks a caution, which seems to be as promptly disregarded. On several occasions sacks thrown out for this station when the train went through after dark were found next morning, some of them as much as 600 feet from the station.
“The sack was all cut to pieces and there is no way of telling to whom the mail matter was addressed.”
The struggle between local residents and distant, unresponsive corporate entities—in this case, the railroad and the federal mail service—remains a familiar frustration in rural Washington. Today's complaints about 'last-mile' delivery failures echo these early 20th-century grievances about the Great Northern's disregard for local infrastructure.
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