Stamped, Sealed, and Crying: The Year American Parents Literally Mailed Their Babies

Every family road trip has a breaking point. The kids are fussy, the car (or in 1913, the train) is expensive, and somebody utters the fateful sentence: "There has to be a cheaper way to get this child to Grandma's house."

In rural America in 1913, there was. And it came with a stamp on it.

A New Service Changes Everything

To understand how anyone arrived at the idea of mailing a human child, you have to understand what Parcel Post meant to rural families. Before January 1, 1913, the Post Office only handled letters and small packages. Rural Americans — who made up most of the country at the time — were largely at the mercy of private express companies that charged eye-watering rates to deliver anything substantial to a farm address.

Parcel Post changed that overnight. Suddenly, a farmer could mail eggs, tools, seed catalogs, and just about anything else at rates so low they felt like a gift. Rural mail carriers were already making daily routes past every farmhouse, so delivery was built into the system.

Almost immediately, families began doing the math. A train ticket to send a child across the county might cost a dollar or more — real money in 1913. Parcel Post rates, based on weight, could beat that. Considerably. The stamps cost a few cents.

The logic was airtight. The only flaw in the plan was, well, the child.

The Documented Cases

This isn't legend. On January 19, 1913 — barely two weeks into the new service — an Ohio family in Batavia handed their infant son to the rural carrier, addressed him to his grandmother a mile away, and stuck stamps worth about 17 cents to his clothing. The carrier, apparently a good sport, delivered the boy safe and sound. Newspapers picked up the story, and the Post Office quickly clarified that children were not acceptable parcels.

But the clarification didn't stop everyone. In 1914, a family in Idaho mailed their five-year-old daughter, May Pierstorff, nearly 75 miles to her grandparents. Her parents pinned about 53 cents in stamps to her coat — the parcel rate for her weight — and she rode the train in the mail car with a postal clerk who was evidently a trustworthy sort. May arrived safely, and the story became a beloved piece of Idaho lore.

Other cases trickled through 1915, including a Pennsylvania family that sent their daughter to visit relatives and a reported instance in Virginia. Postal officials kept issuing memos. Some clerks kept quietly going along with it, especially when the alternative was a child traveling alone on a long train journey with no adult to accompany her.

In fairness to the parents: the mail was often the most reliable institution in rural America. The carrier knew every family on his route. The mail car was warm in winter. And compared to a small child navigating a crowded rail station alone, the mail car with a familiar clerk might genuinely have been the safer option.

The Rules Catch Up

By 1915, the Post Office had heard enough. New regulations explicitly prohibited sending children through the mail, closing the loophole for good. The era of baby post lasted roughly two years — a historical blink — and then vanished into the realm of trivia.

Yet the story stuck around because it captures something larger. Parcel Post didn't just ship packages; it stitched isolated farm communities into the national economy. Historians credit it with transforming rural American life — enabling mail-order everything, from Sears homes to phonographs. The baby-shipping incidents are the comedic extreme of a genuinely revolutionary service.

You Can Still Follow the Route

For the traveler with a taste for the offbeat, this history is surprisingly visitable. The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., has documented these cases and features the era of rural free delivery in its exhibits. In Idaho, May Pierstorff's story is commemorated in local histories, and the small towns along her mailed route — Grangeville to Lewiston — still sit in gorgeous canyon country worth a road trip in their own right.

And the next time you're at a rural post office in farm country, take a look around. Those wide, worn floors and the counter built for bulky parcels? That's the architecture of the system that briefly, gloriously, delivered children.

Nobody's mailing babies anymore — the stamps alone would be a nightmare. But for two strange years, the most trusted delivery network in America proved that if you can ship it, somebody, somewhere, will try.