For over a century since its founding by Benjamin Franklin in 1775, notably a year before independence, the U.S. Post Office Department, now the U.S.P.S., had difficulty reaching rural areas with mail delivery.
That situation changed with the appointment of George von Lengerke Meyer as Postmaster General by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. In his new position, Meyer set in place a new method of operation for postal service in rural areas. Termed Rural Free Delivery, and better known by its acronym, RFD, at last country areas were brought into the mainstream of the mail delivery system.
Meyer and Roosevelt had become friends while both were students at Harvard University in the 1870s. After graduation, Meyer had a successful business and mercantile career, also while serving as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, ultimately serving as the speaker, until President William McKinley appointed him ambassador to Italy in 1901, probably at the behest of Vice President Theodore Roosevelt.
Following McKinley’s assassination later that year, the new president sent Meyer as his ambassador to the Russian Empire. At the time, Russia was at war with the Japanese Empire, which conflict Roosevelt wanted to end. He called for a peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the result of which terminated the war, gaining the president the Nobel Peace Prize.
Meyer was credited with persuading Tsar Nicholas II to accept the terms of the treaty, for which action he was rewarded by Roosevelt in 1907 with his appointment as Postmaster General. In that role, he set out to put into operation a new method of enhancing postal services to the entire country, particularly the rural areas.
To achieve that goal, rural post offices needed to be opened all across the county. For smaller, unnamed communities, the Post Office Department decided to keep the names to words with four letters, thus here in the Northern Neck we have examples of that practice with Remo, Mila and Taft, and across the Rappahannock with Wake in Middlesex County.
The name of Taft for a post office does not come from Roosevelt’s successor as president, then serving as U.S. Secretary of War, but rather from the local Taft family. Meyer continued in office throughout the Roosevelt Administration, until Taft succeeded to the presidency in 1909, at which time the new president appointed Meyer Secretary of the Navy, a position he held throughout the Taft Administration.
In his four years as Navy Secretary, he built up the sea power of the U. S. substantially, turning over to his successor, Josephus Daniels, a fighting force that would serve well in the forthcoming First World War. After leaving office, Meyer returned to Boston where he died at the age of 59 in 1919. He was a Boston patrician both in appearance and in manner. In dealing with the King of Italy, the Tsar of Russia, or several American Presidents, he could handle himself with aplomb, unintimidated by the power wielded by others.
In 1966, Meyer’s family donated the portrait of Meyer painted in 1894 by Julian Russell Story, the grandson of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, to the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.
As with the daughters of many prominent American families, Meyer’s daughter, Julia, married into an Italian noble family in the person of Don Giuseppe Brambilla, thereby becoming Donna Julia. His grandson, Charles Meyer, rose in the corporate world to become president of Sears Roebuck Company in Latin America, and later to hold executive positions in the parent company’s headquarters in Chicago.
In our world, RFD is taken for granted, with home delivery of mail an expected daily routine, but that was not always the case. Although many of the rural post offices that cropped up all over the countryside during Meyer’s tenure as Postmaster General now are subjects of historical lore, the system he initiated remains. The post offices at Remo, Mila and Taft might be gone, but the folks who live in those areas get their mail delivered to their homes every day thanks to what George von Lengerke Meyer began.
