Six months.

Today we take it for granted that the mail will be delivered daily at our door. But many years ago it might have been placed in a tree trunk or underneath a rock. In the early days of the mail no one could be sure about where or when it would arrive.
    At the southern tip of Africa there was once a post office under a rock. In the old days the route from England to India was around the Cape of Good Hope. The journey was stormy and dangerous. It took six long months. Sailors often wished to send mail home, but they seldom met ships bound back to England. So at the cape the sailors would go ashore. They headed for a certain large stone. On the stone were scratched the words "Look here-under for letters. " They would leave their letters there, knowing that the next homeward-bound ship would stop and pick them up.
    There was another post office like this at the southern tip of South America. During the gold rush days, boats sailed around Cape Horn to California. At Cape Horn was a keg nailed to a post. Boats coming from the east coast would send a small boat ashore to this post office. They picked up any letters in the keg. At the same time they mailed letters home that boats sailing east could pick up.
    In the state of Washington stands the stump of a huge cedar. It, too, was once a post office. Settlers needed a place for the mail carriers to leave their letters. Their houses were so widely scattered that the mail carrier could not reach all of them, and the post office was far away over rough roads. So the settlers found a tree that stood where several trails crossed. They cut the tree down ten feet from the ground, hollowed it out, and covered it with a roof. Inside, they nailed a row of wooden boxes. Each box was marked with a family’ s name. The mail carrier could leave letters there for everyone for miles around.
    For the first few years after the English colonists came to America, there was no regular postal service. People gave their letters to any traveler who happened to be going in the right direction. Often they gave them to a peddler or a traveling shoemaker. When the traveler reached the town where the letter was going, he might stop at an inn. He would leave the letters there. But there they stayed until the person they were addressed to happened to come by and stopped at the inn.
    What about places like Virginia where there were very few inns? People who wished to send letters would leave them at one of the large plantations. The owners of the plantation would then send the letters on to a neighbor. The neighbor would do the same. It was a slow mail system.
    After many years, regular mail carriers on horseback were hired. They went from one big town to another. Between New York and Boston, for example, there was one "postrider" a month. He traveled only by day and took two weeks for the trip. Often the postrider left all the mail for a whole town at a crossroads store. It still took many weeks for a letter to reach the person it was addressed to.
    Finally, about two hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin was made postmaster for all the colonies. His first act was to make a long journey to find out the best routes for carrying the mail. Then he set up a line of post station between the northern and southern colonies. He ordered his postriders to travel by night as well as by day.
    Franklin’ s postriders could carry more letters in a shorter time from one colony to another. The letter service helped the young American colonies learn more about each other. They learned that they were all interested in the same things. This gave them the feeling of unity that later helped them win their independence.
    In time, the nation set up its own government. But there were still only seventy five post offices in the whole country. Between cities along the coast, mail was sent in sailing boats. But most letters were carried from one post office to another in stagecoaches. Trips were three times a week in summer and twice a week in winter . The stage stopped in all towns. Large and small. It stopped fifteen minutes in a small town and two hours in a larger one. But still the people of the town might reach the post office too late to catch the stagecoach. Sometimes, too, the drivers forgot the mail or even lost it. It still took a week for news to go from Washington D. C. to New York.
    Today an airmail letter can travel across the world in much less time than that, let alone the e-mail through computers. A modern post office handles more mail in a day than the colonial carriers handled in a whole year. You know that the letter you send will go anywhere you want it to go, and whenever.