Lorna Atwater, a rural mail carrier from Berea, Kentucky, was driving her seventy-five-mile route through the Eastern Kentucky foothills when she noticed the woods behind a customer’s house were on fire. She called the fire department and the homeowner — who she knew was the principal of the local high school — and wet down the backyard with a garden hose until the fire department arrived. Needless to say, putting out backyard fires was not in her job description.
In the United States, 129,000 rural mail carriers deliver to 50 million residential mailboxes, a number which has steadily grown by about a million each year. Many rural residents, of whom 19 percent are elderly and 22 percent lack broadband coverage, rely on mail delivery to pay bills, receive life-dependent prescription medications, communicate with loved ones, vote, and for “last mile” delivery of shipments from FedEx, UPS, and Amazon. Rural mail carriers operate “post offices on wheels,” meaning they not only deliver letters, periodicals, and packages, but also offer stamps and money orders and carry change-of-address and other United States Postal Service (USPS) forms. They are effectively roving hubs of federal services in rural areas.
In 2021 and 2022, I interviewed twenty-five rural postal workers for “Rural Free Delivery: Mail Carriers in Central Appalachia,” part of the American Folklife Center’s Occupational Folklife Project. Through these interviews, which are now housed at the Library of Congress, I saw how the specific conditions of rural mail carriers’ jobs enable them to sustain their communities in ways both within and extending beyond their job description. If President Donald Trump takes control of the USPS and makes moves to privatize the agency, as many fear, rural people across the country will lose not only mail delivery but the crucial community care that rural postal workers provide.
Rural carriers function as care workers in their…
Auteur: Emily Hilliard
