Posts related to our Library and Archives.
Books, journals, collections, and more, newly cataloged and placed on the shelf! Bibliographic records for each of these items can be found in our online catalogs. Please visit the library’s Catalog page for more information. The general public may read and access these items in the Slusser reading room during business hours. Local members in […]
New on the shelf, June 2021 Read More »
The Postal History Foundation has acquired the oldest known envelope postmarked in Tucson, Arizona Territory, thanks to the generosity of volunteer Jack Mount. The envelope, known to collectors as a “cover,” was canceled in the Tucson post office on March 23, 1867, and delivered to an address in Providence, Rhode Island. Tucson’s post office was
Jack Mount helps the PHF preserve Tucson’s postal history Read More »
If you were on this planet in 1969, do you remember July 20th, the date the first person walked on the moon? The Postal History Foundation celebrates the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the first lunar landing with the exhibit, Small Steps, Giant Leaps, and Lasting Memories: Celebrating the 1969 Moon Landing. People all
It’s Out of This World! Read More »
Revisit some of the most important books you’ve ever read at the Slusser Library’s display of children’s literature on postage stamps.
Everything’s a Story Read More »
Our pop-up exhibit, “Tiny Windows to a Great, big World” at the Nanini branch of the Pima County Public Library celebrates the world of stamps during the month of October, stamp collecting month. The exhibit features the most popular and accessible way to collect stamps: by topic. If you like cats, you can collect cat
October: stamp collecting month Read More »
Book passage for the latest exhibit at the Postal History Foundation: Love For Arizona Airmail! Experience the chills and thrills of daredevil pilots who flew over Arizona skies in the early days of aeronautics through our photographs, newspaper articles, and historical postcards and envelopes. You’ll not only witness Charles Lindbergh’s dedication of the Tucson Municipal
Love for Arizona Airmail exhibit Read More »
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Click image to enlarge.
Click image to enlarge.
“Another week gone and no newsman yet. These months—years perhaps—will to a certain extent be a blank to us. We know nothing of what is going on the states, nothing of the political maneuvers. President’s messages, doings of Congress, elections of senators and assemblymen and the thousand and one maneuvers of the day, riots, mobs, fires, rail-road accidents—in fact I shall be a kind of Rip van Winkle & it will require the first ten years after returning to learn what has taken place while away.”
–Letter from A.W. Genung in Curtissville, San Joaquin District to “Woodward,” Dec 16, 1849, from James W. Milgram’s The Western Mails.
Imagine leaving everything and everyone you know and moving across the country to live in the wilderness, hoping to make your fortune in gold, silver, or copper. Living 1000 miles or more away from home, the only way to talk to your family and friends, and the only way to know what was happening outside your immediate vicinity, was through letters and newspapers: the mail.
Mail, including letters, supplies, and goods, was often freighted in by steamship from San Francisco to the port of Yuma. From there, items either continued up river or were loaded onto wagons, coaches, and pack animals and taken out to towns and camps.
The stage lines and buckboard lines that carried mail and supplies also transported passengers on a regular basis between towns, sometimes requiring at least one overnight stay. These vehicles were extraordinarily uncomfortable, however. After making the much longer overland (cross-country) trip on stagecoach, journalist Waterman L. Ormsby famously said, “I NOW KNOW WHAT HELL IS LIKE. I’VE JUST HAD 24 DAYS OF IT.”
Steamers left San Francisco for the Gulf of California every 20 days and then traveled up the Colorado River. The port at Yuma was a major artery in the delivery of supplies to Arizona.
The steamboats transported not only mail and goods, but also people. In 1874 Martha Summerhayes traveled on the steamboat Gila from Fort Yuma to Fort Mohave. In her book Vanished Arizona, she describes the conditions:
The staterooms “were always stuffy and noisy, and in the summer they were so suffocatingly hot.” In the dining room, “the metal handles of the knives were uncomfortably warm to the touch; and even the wooden arms of the chairs felt as if they were slowly igniting… A siesta was out of the question, as the staterooms were insufferable; and so we dragged out the weary days.”
Entrepreneurs from the Tucson area, such as Pinchney Tully, Estevan Ochoa, Pedro Aguirre, Mariano Samaniego, J.D. Kinnear, and William “Curly” Neal, provided much- needed services between short distances.
Tuffy Peach delivered mail on horseback three times a week between Camp Verde and Payson from 1910-1914. His route was 52 miles long, lasted 11 hours, and required one change of horse. When interviewed by the Arizona Philatelist in 1968, he described his work:
“I often had mail piled so high in front of me that I could hardly see where my horse was treading… “But, gosh, those horses knew the mail route better than the dispatch riders. We couldn’t get lost if we tried. Our horses wouldn’t let us.”
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