"Mail Call!" Footnote

(Here's a resend in larger print of the Footnote in today's Time Machine posting.) -tk



In his book on the history of Pocomoke City (formerly New Town) through 1882, the Rev. James Murray wrote:



The post office, in the early history of New Town, was a very small affair, so small, indeed, that I have the impression that there was no pay for transmission of the mail from Snow Hill to New Town, as that was, then, the mail route. I am indorsed in this declaration by the fact that it was transmitted by individual citizens when they would go to Snow Hill, on business, on public days. As early as 1820, Michael Murray, my father, was post- master for New Town. When other means of getting: the mail would fail, my father would send my two oldest brothers, each one on horseback, to Snow Hill for the mail. After these two brothers went to Baltimore to learn a trade, this duty at times fell upon my two next older brothers and myself. The mail was due at New Town once a week, and sometimes it would lay in the office at Snow Hill two weeks for the want of a carrier. In such emergencies, my father would say to us: "Boys, you must take the canoe," for then we had no horse, ''and go to Snow Hill for the mail." At that period I do not think I was more than eight years of age.