About this episode

This episode explores the bizarre practice of mailing children through the postal service in early 20th century America.

In the winter of nineteen fourteen, a five-year-old girl named May Pierstorff stood on a train platform in Grangeville, Idaho, with fifty-three cents in postage stamps pinned to her coat. Her parents had just mailed her to her grandmother. In this episode, I dig into one of the strangest true stories in American history, the brief window between nineteen thirteen and nineteen fifteen when poor rural families discovered that the brand new parcel post service would accept a child at the counter, weigh her like a crate of apples, and deliver her, and the federal government had never written a rule saying otherwise.I follow every documented case, from baby James Beagle, mailed to his grandmother in Ohio for fifteen cents just days after parcel post launched, to six-year-old Edna Neff, who traveled seven hundred and twenty miles from Pensacola to Virginia in the care of railway mail clerks, to little Maud Smith, whose forty-mile trip through the Kentucky hills finally triggered the federal investigation that ended the practice. Along the way we look at everything else Americans crammed into the mail in those first wild years, the eggs and the bees and the day-old chicks, the man in…

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