When steamboats and horses carried the mail
Jim Bradshaw
I was looking for something else when I came across a listing of every post office in the United States at the beginning of 1851. It points up the fact that most of south Louisiana was still sparsely settled just fifteen years before the Civil War, and that it was no easy task for mail or people to get across swamps, marshes, and prairies in those days.
There were fewer than twenty post offices listed in south Louisiana west of the Atchafalaya River, and only two of those, Lake Charles and Ballew’s Ferry (near Vinton on the Sabine River), were west of the Mermentau. It would be thirty years before a railroad spanned the prairies and began to fill with towns that needed post offices.
The places listed in the "Table of Post Offic es in the United States on the First Day of January 1851” (W. & J.C. Greer Printers, Washington, D.C.), almost all sprang up on waterways of one size or another. In addition to Lake Charles and Ballew’s Ferry, they include Abbeville, Alligator (St. Mary Parish), Bayou Chicot, Bayou Ramos (St. Mary). Breaux’s Bridge, Fausse Pointe (probably Loreauville today), Franklin, New Iberia, Opelousas, Pattersonville (now Patterson), Perry’s Bridge (now Perry), Plaquemine Brulee, St. Martinsville [sic], Vermilionville (now Lafayette), Ville Platte, and Washington.
Mail from the outside world usually traveled first to New Orleans and from there was sent by various means into the interior. Newspaper publisher Daniel Dennett, who was also postmaster in Franklin, described a typical journey in 1876 in his book “Louisiana As It Is” (Eureka Press, New Orleans). The trip then was probably not much different than it would have been when the 1851 list was compiled.
The Morgan Louisiana and Texas Railroad had been operating from Algiers (across the Mississippi from New Orleans) to Brashear City (Morgan City today) since 1857, but travelers and mail bags still had to find other means of transportation from there.
According to Dennett, “The steamers of the Attakapas Mail Transportation Company leave Brashear City daily, for New Iberia, a distance of 72 miles, halting at Pattersonville, Centreville, Franklin, Charenton, and Jeanerette, and at intermediate landings. They usually extend their trips to St. Martinsville three times a week, 102 miles from Brashear.”
The mail might also be sent into the interior aboard “half a dozen or more small jobbing boats” that travelled to “Vermilion River, Grand Cote, Cote Blanche, Belle Isle, and the mouth of Bayou Sale.” These smaller boats carried the mail only when it was convenient’ They were mostly involved with “a large business towing rafts of cypress logs for the saw mills … and in bringing pieux [split cypress timbers] and other split lumber … to the planters on the Teche.”
Going north, mail coaches left New Iberia three times a week for Vermilionville, Grand Coteau, Opelousas, and Washington.
Another mail coach ran “regularly” between New Iberia and Abbeville, and “a horseback mail” went to “all the postoffices [sic] off the main traveled routes.”
“Regularly” might not have been as regular as one might expect. Newspapers throughout south Louisiana often railed about long intervals when no mail arrived from New Orleans. It could sometimes be weeks between deliveries.
Part of the problem was that there wasn’t a whole lot of profit in carrying the mail. Typically, a letter could be sent from anywhere in the United States to a settlement out on the prairie for a penny or less — and that penny had to be split between the railroad operator, the steamboat captain, and the guy riding horseback “off the main travelled routes.”
Of course, that was when a penny was still worth more than the metal it was made from, but not that much more.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
