Part 2

In 1820 the population of Niagara County was 18,156, of which 10,834 were inhabitants of the present County of Erie. There were then 15 slaves in the whole County of Niagara.

In 1821, the County of Erie was organized with its present boundaries. Its population at each census since has been as follows, viz: 1825, 24,316; 1830, 35,719; 1835, 57,594; 1840, 62,465; 1845, 78,635; 1850, 100,993; 1855, 132,331; and 1860, 141,791.

It is probable that in 1790, Winney and Johnston were the only white residents upon the territory now embraced within our city limits. In 1796, there were but four buildings in all that territory--as stated by the late Joseph Landon. In 1807, there were about a dozen houses. This number, it is said, had increased to more than 200 houses, when, on the 31st of December, 1813, the village was burned by the British and Indians;--only the house of Mrs. St. John, Reese's blacksmith shop, the gaol, and the uncovered frame of a barn escaping the general conflagration.

The white population of the territory now comprised in our city limits did not, in 1800, probably exceed 25. The earliest census report which gives any information in regard to its population is that of 1810 when the population was 1,508. It was 1,060 in 1814; 2,095 in 1820; 5,141 in 1825; 8,668 in 1830; 21,838 in 1840; 34,606 in 1845; 49,769 in 1850; 74,214 in 1855; and 81,129 in 1860. It is believed that it is now about 100,000.

But little reliable information in regard to the transportation of the mails west of Albany from 1800 to 1824, can now be obtained; and as the transportation service and the origin and progress of the system of posts, by which, even now, much of this transportation service is performed, are believed to be the most interesting of the topics of the present paper (as that service itself is the most essential of those connected with the Post-office establishment), it has been deemed proper to refer to the probable origin of that system;--a system which in its continued extension and constant improvement, has grown into the Post-office establishment of the present day. These are now, almost universally under the control of the State or sovereign power, and they are certainly among the most important and beneficent of the institutions of civil government.

It is said that the Assyrian and Persian monarchs had their posts, at a day's journey from each other, with horses saddled, ready to carry with the utmost dispatch, the decrees of these despotic rulers. In the Roman Empire, couriers on swift horses carried the imperial edicts to every province. Charlemagne, it is said, established stations for carriers who delivered the letters and decrees of the court in the different and distant parts of his dominions. As early as the XIth Century the University of Paris had a body of pedestrian messengers, to carry letters and packets from its thousands of students to various parts of Europe, and to tiring money, letters and packets in return. Posts for the transmission of Government messages were established in England in the XIIIth Century, and in 1464 Louis XI. established a system of mounted posts, stationed four French miles apart, to carry the dispatches of the Government.

Government posts, as the convenience and interest of the people at large began to receive some attention from their rulers, were at times allowed to carry private letters, and private posts for the transmission of general correspondence were sometimes established. This was at first but an irregular and uncertain service, without fixed compensation; but considerable regularity, order and system were the results of the public appreciation of their convenience, and of the gradual improvements which followed their more general employment.

In 1524 the French posts--which had previously carried only the letters of the King and nobles--were first permitted to carry other letters; and in 1543 Charles V., Emperor of Germany, established a riding post throughout his dominions. It was not until the reign of James I. that a system of postal communication was established in England, although Edward IV., in 1481, had established posts twenty miles apart, with riders, to bring the earliest intelligence of the events of the war with the Scots. It was not until about 1644 that a weekly conveyance of letters, by post, was established throughout that kingdom. Mail coaches were first used at Bristol, in England, in 1784. They were placed on the post routes in 1785, and their use became general throughout England.

The mail service of North America, which in its magnitude and regularity, and in the extension of its benefits to every settlement and fireside, has, it is believed, no superior, probably had its beginning in private enterprise; although perhaps sanctioned at the very outset, by local authority.

As early as 1677 Mr. John Hayward, scrivener, of Boston, Mass., was appointed by the General Court to take in and convey letters according to their direction. This was probably the first post-office and mail service authorized in America. Other local arrangements, necessarily very imperfect in their character, were made in different colonies soon after; some of them having the sanction of Colonial Governors or Legislatures.

Thomas Dongan, the Governor of New York under the Duke of York, in a letter to the Duke's secretary, dated February 18, 1684, says:

You are pleased to say I may set up a post-house, but send me noe power to do it. I never intended it should be expensive to His Royal Highness. It was desired by the neighboring colonies, and is at present practiced in some places by foot messengers.

In the same letter Gov. Dongan says he will endeavor to establish a post-office in Connecticut and at Boston. Under date of August 27, 1684, Sir John Werden, the Duke's secretary, wrote to Gov. Dongan:

As for setting up post-houses along the coast from Carolina to Nova Scotia it seems a very reasonable thing, and you may offer the privilege thereof to any undertakers for ye space of 3 or 5 years, by way of farm; reserving wt part of ye profit you think fit to the Duke.

At least as early as January, 1690, there was what was called a public post between Boston and New York, and in 1691 there was a post of some kind from New York to Virginia, and from New York to Albany. This was during the war with the French, and these posts were probably established by the military authorities.

On the 4th of April, 1692, Thomas Neele, having obtained a patent to establish post-offices throughout the American colonies, appointed Andrew Hamilton (afterwards Governor of New Jersey), his deputy for all the plantations. Mr. Deputy Hamilton brought the subject before Gov. Fletcher and the New York Colonial Assembly in October following, and an Act was immediately passed "for encouraging a post-office."

In 1705 Lord Cornbury, the Governor of New York, informed the Lords of Trade of the passage by the New York Assembly of "an Act for enforcing and continuing a post-office," which he recommended His Majesty to confirm "as an act of necessity," without which the post to Boston and Philadelphia would be lost.

In 1710 the British Parliament passed an Act authorizing the British Postmaster-General "to keep one chief letter-office in New York and other chief letter-offices in each of His Majesty's Provinces or Colonies in America." Deputy Postmasters-General for North America were afterwards, and from time to time, appointed by the British Postmaster-General in England. Dr. Franklin was appointed to that office in 1755, and it is said that in 1760 he startled the people of the colonies by proposing to run a "stage waggon" from Boston to Philadelphia once a week, starting for each city on Monday morning and reaching the other by Saturday. In 1763 he spent five months in traveling through the Northern Colonies for the purpose of inspecting and improving the post-offices and the mail service. He went as far east as New Hampshire, and the whole extent of his five months' tour, in going and returning, was about sixteen hundred miles. He made such improvements in the service as to enable the citizens of Philadelphia to write to Boston and get replies in three weeks instead of six weeks, the time previously required.

In 1774 Dr. Franklin was removed from office; and on the 25th of December, 1775, the Secretary of the General Post-Office gave notice that, in consequence of the Provincial Congress of Maryland having passed a resolution that the Parliamentary post should not be permitted to travel on a pass through that province, and of the seizure of the mails at Baltimore and Philadelphia, the Deputy Postmaster-General was "obliged, for the present, to stop all the posts." It is supposed that this terminated the regular mail service in the old Thirteen Colonies, and that it was never resumed under British management.

Before this suspension of the Parliamentary posts, Mr. William Godard of Baltimore had proposed to establish "an American Post-office"; and in July, 1774, he announced that his proposals had been warmly and generously patronized by the friends of freedom, and that postmasters and riders were engaged. During the preceding six months he had visited several of the colonies in order to extend and perfect his arrangements, and there appears to have been a very general disposition to abandon the use of the British post and sustain that established by Mr. Godard. In May, 1775, Mr. Godard had thirty postmasters, but Mr. John Holt of New York City was the only one in this State. In that year partial arrangements for mail service in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts were made by the Provincial Congress of each of those Colonies.

The old Continental Congress first assembled in September, 1774; and on the 26th of July, 1775, it resolved "that a Postmaster-General should be appointed for the United Colonies who should hold his office at Philadelphia and be allowed a salary of $1,000 for himself and $340 for his secretary and comptroller; and that a line of posts should be appointed, under the direction of the Postmaster-General, from Falmouth, in New England, to Savannah, in Georgia." Dr. Franklin was then unanimously chosen Postmaster-General. The ledger in which he kept the accounts of his office is now in the Post-office Department. It is a half-bound book of rather more than foolscap size, and about three-fourths of an inch thick, and many of the entries are in Dr. Franklin's own handwriting. Richard Bache succeeded Dr. Franklin November 7, 1776, and Mr. Bache was succeeded by Ebenezer Hazard.

The Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1778, gave to the United States, in Congress assembled, "the sole and extensive right and power of establishing and regulating post-offices from one State to another"; but the increase of mail service was comparatively trifling until after the organization of the Post-office Department by the first Congress which assembled under the Constitution of the United States. This gave it efficiency and value, and provided for the early extension of its benefits to the inhabitants of the several States.

The National Congress, organized under the Constitution, commenced its first session on the 4th of March, 1789, but it was not until September 22, 1790, that an Act was passed for establishing, or rather continuing, the postal service. The Act then passed provided that a Postmaster-General should be appointed, and that the regulations of the Post-office should be the same as they last were under the resolutions and ordinances of the Congress of the Confederation.

In 1790 there were but seventy-five post-offices and 1,875 miles of post-roads in the United States, and the whole amount of postages received for that year was $37,935. The population of the United States, as shown by the census of that year, was only 3,929,827; and the whole mail service was performed upon our seaboard line, passing through the principal towns from Wiscassett in Maine, to Savannah in Georgia, and upon a few cross or intersecting lines, on many portions of which the mail was carried only once a fortnight.

On the 3d of March, 1791, the Postmaster-General was authorized to extend the carrying of the mail from Albany to Bennington, Vermont. It is probable that the post-office at Albany was a special office until late in that year, as in an official list of post-offices, with their receipts for the year ending October 5, 1791, New York is the only office in this State; and by an official statement dated April 24, 1790, it appears that the contractor from Albany to New York received the postages for carrying the mail, and that that was the only mail service in this State north or west of New York City.

It is stated in a "History of Oneida County" that the first mail to Utica was brought by Simeon Post in 1793, under an arrangement with the Post-office Department authorizing its transportation from Canajoharie to Whitestown at the expense of the inhabitants on the route; and that in 1793 or 1794, the remarkable fact that the Great Western Mail, on one arrival at Fort Schuyler (Utica), contained six letters for that place, was heralded from one end of the settlement to the other. It is added that some were incredulous, but the solemn and repeated assurances of the veracious Dutch postmaster at last obtained general credence.

On the 8th of May, 1794, sundry post-routes were established, among which is one "from Albany by Schenectady, Johnstown, Canajoharie and Whitestown, to Canandaigua"; and in July, 1794, four-horse "stages" were run from Albany to Schenectady daily. The passenger fare by these stages was only three cents per mile.

On the 31st of July, 1794, the Postmaster-General, Timothy Pickering, advertised in the Albany Gazette for proposals for carrying the mails in this State, as follows: (1.) "From New York by Peekskill, Fishkill, Poughkeepsie, Rhinebeck, Redhook, Clermont, Hudson and Kinderhook to Albany," to leave New York every Monday and Thursday at 4 p. m., and arrive at Albany on Wednesday and Saturday by 7 in the evening. (2.) "From Albany by Schenectady, Johnstown and Canajoharie to Whitestown," to leave Albany every Thursday at 10 a. m., and arrive at Whitestown on Saturday by 6 p. m. (3.) "From Canajoharie through Cherry Valley to the Court House in Cooperstown," to leave every Friday at 4 p. m., and arrive on Saturday by 1 p. m. (4.) "From Whitestown to Canandaigua once in two weeks"; to leave Whitestown every other Monday at 8 a. m., and arrive at Canandaigua the next Thursday by 2 p. m. This advertisement bears date July 8, 1794. It does not state the mode of conveyance required.