I stopped by our local post office to pick up a package from Amazon the other day. I noticed I wasn’t the only one getting a box with a big grin on the side. In fact, the post office handles huge volumes of Amazon packages. I started wondering if the United States Postal Service (USPS) and United Parcel Service (UPS) would collapse if Amazon made good on the threat of creating a fleet of delivery trucks equipped with flying drones. Carrying that thought a little further… could porch pirates use drones to steal? I have a suspicion that retailers rely on USPS to handle packages that private enterprises would lose money delivering. Since USPS has been reporting big red numbers instead of profit, Amazon may be more of a lead weight than a profit center for the postal service. It wouldn’t be the first time the post office has signed a bad contract.
All this is my intro to the “parcel post bank,” the only building built by mailing bricks from a Salt Lake City brickyard to Vernal, Utah. Yes, bricks… 40 tons of bricks. It began with somebody in Washington changing postal rates and not accounting for the vast distances and empty spaces in the 1915 Uintah Basin. The post office calculated postage on parcel post by zones. By their reckoning, Vernal and Salt Lake City were less than 150 miles distant, so was only a zone two delivery. Nobody in Salt Lake City or Denver bothered to correct them. The post office was losing money on every piece of mail sent to the Uintah Basin. No big deal, there were so few people receiving parcel post. It wasn’t the first time Washington was not interested in anything west of the Mississippi.
The mail route from Salt Lake to Vernal in 1915 was complicated. The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway contracted to take mail and kick the mail off at the Mack, Colorado, train station. The Uintah Railway then hauled it to Watson, Utah, where it was thrown into a four-horse freight wagon or sometimes a gas-powered truck for the final 60 miles into Vernal, crossing the Green River on a cable ferry. Total mileage: 427 hard miles. I suspect it was the longest, most expensive zone two delivery in the country. The railroads had lucrative contracts which paid them by weight. It was a profitable, solid contract. The Uintah Railway also had a monopoly for freight going into the Uintah Basin. Its freight rates were much higher than most railroads.
Now we focus on a small but growing bank serving the Vernal, Utah area. WH Coltharp, a merchant, was building a new bank of brick. Most of the interior was constructed with red brick fired at a local kiln. Coltharp wanted an impressive façade of textured brick. That brick was available from a Salt Lake City brickyard and he ordered 40 tons of it made. It quickly became apparent that shipping it would cost him four times the purchase price of the brick. The 80,000 bricks would have to follow the same route as the mail, there was no other practical way to get it Vernal. Mr. Coltharp had a stroke of genius! He figured out a loophole that would allow him to save half the shipping by utilizing the USPS’s Parcel Post delivery. The bricks were mailed in 50-pound crates with individual labels.
The started postmaster had never had a shipment this big before, but the 50-pound crates made of lathe wire met all the regulations and there was no regulated total weight limit in his book. The first shipment of 40 crates was loaded on the D&RGW mail car and sent on to Mack, Colorado, where the train stopped to unload the bricks for 30 minutes. The D&RGW train cars were standard gauge and couldn’t be run on the narrow-gauge Uintah Railway tracks for the next leg of the journey. At Watson, Utah, the crates were unloaded into a warehouse where the men driving the freight wagons tried to figure out what to do with the added parcel post volume. There just weren’t enough horses and wagons to do the job.
More shipments followed and the backlog grew. Washington was still unaware of the brick shipments until one of the trucks overturned and a damage claim for bricks was filed. The Uintah Railway was also required to file a report with the postal inspector in Denver anytime mail was delayed more than seven days. That report soon grew so long, it finally got Denver’s attention. When the Denver inspector realized how much money they were losing delivering bricks, he sent off a letter to the Postmaster General in Washington. The Postmaster General quickly rewrote the regulations to limit total shipments from one person to the same consignee to 200 pounds a day. His changes arrived too late in Salt Lake City. There were already 30 tons of bricks in the system bound for the Bank of Vernal. But there were still 10 tons of bricks stranded in Salt Lake City!
It didn’t take long for Mr. Coltharp to outsmart the Postmaster General. He got all his friends and business partners to volunteer to be consignees for the last 10 tons. Each friend was mailed 200 pounds a day until all the bricks had made it to Vernal. Since some of these addresses were rural route delivery five miles from Vernal; the postal service was losing even more money delivering bricks. After that last brick was delivered, I am sure all the postal employees partied. The railroad schedules went back to normal, the horses got some rest, and the Bank of Vernal had a new building, delivered by Parcel Post. I wonder if the last box had a big Amazon grin/smirk printed on the label?
sources:
Uintah County Library, Vernal Utah: Bank of Vernal clipping file
Vernal Express: various editions 1914-1917
Jan 30,1914; June 2, 1916; May 7, 1915; May12, 1916; July 14, 1916; Aug 25, 1916; Nov 17, 1916; Nov 23, 1917
Article: The Bank That Was Sent by Mail by Lee Reay . Originally published in NRTA journal (National Retired Teachers) and reprinted by the Vernal Express in 1970
Book: Uintah Railway, The Gilsonite Route by Henry E. Bender Jr. 1970 by Howell-North Books
By ED PECK – Special to the Herald times
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