Free mail delivery began nationally in 1863. It began in 44 northern cities. (The South was not the place to begin a new federal program at that time, to say the least!) Following the Civil War, the service grew to other urban residents. Providing mail delivery to rural areas was debated, and in 1896, Congress allocated funds to test rural delivery in West Virginia. People loved it and the service spread.

The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum has put up a very good on-line exhibit showing (and telling) the history of rural delivery. It can be found here.

Great pictures and good history. Rural delivery allowed rural residents to receive newspapers (and weather reports.). Interestinly, one of the early proponents of rural delivery was John Wanamaker, a Philadelphian who created the modern department store. Doing without rural delivery, he noted, "obliges people to go or send for mail, and that means, in the winter or stormy seasons, and for families of aged people, the depredation of going w/out letters & periodicals (hardly less valuable) that lie in post offices for long periods not called for. We shall look back with astonishment before many years that the present system had to be suffered so long."

New Age shamanism leads to three deaths in Arizona. But distortion of Native American spiritual practices is not "new."

Fall brings sights, sounds and smells to my community in West Virginia. There are jar flies at night and on weekends they are cooking apple butter at the church.

Two important rural journalism news stories: First, W. Horace Carter (above) died. Carter, 88, was editor and publisher of The Tabor City Tribune in North Carolina. In 1950, four years after he founded the paper, Carter began a series of stories and editorials about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in southeastern North Carolina. "The Klan, despite its Americanism plea, is the personification of Fascism and Nazism," the World War II veteran wrote. 

Carter and his family were threatened constantly over the years. "He was a God-and-country kind of guy," said his son, Russell Carter. "But he was committed to social justice, and he was not prepared for the fact that other people didn't see it that way." Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1953 for his anti-Klan articles and editorials.

Also, this week the MacArthur Foundation named Jerry Mitchell of Jackson, Mississippi, as one of its two dozen fellows. Mitchell is a reporter at the Clarion-Ledger newspaper and has been unrelenting in reporting on civil rights-era crimes. He will use his "genius grant" of $500,000 (paid over five years) to complete a book. "There are a lot of rabbit trails I want to run down," Jerry said. We here at the Yonder couldn't be prouder of both of these guys.