History of the Goshen Post Office

          The first post office in America was established in 1639, by the General Court of Massachusetts, in a Boston tavern owned by Richard Fairbanks.

Initially, Britain delivered colonial mail, which was overseen by Benjamin Franklin from 1753 to 1774. In the early 1770’s, secretive talk of revolution against the British was through underground mail networks, first the Committees of Correspondence and then the Constitutional Post.

As late as 1766, Goshen and nearby towns received their mail from the post office in Hartford.  There is little recorded history of the amount of mail carried by post-riders.  One can safely assume it was infrequent. People communicated with relatives and friends by personal visits. It was not until 1789 that a postal route was established between New Haven, Connecticut and Lenox, Massachusetts; the post-riders passed through Goshen. Four years later, a post office was established in the Town of Litchfield and Goshen residents received their mail at that post office until 1803, when a post office was established in Goshen.

On July 26, 1775, the Continental Congress appointed Franklin as the first Postmaster General.  He served until November 7, 1776.  In May of 1789, following the adoption of the United States Constitution, the Office of Postmaster General was created,  and a few months later Samuel Osgood, of Massachusetts was appointed Postmaster General by President George Washington.  At the time, there were 75 post offices (in 2001, there were 34,223) and about 2,500 miles of post roads.

Until 1817 mail was received once a week, two years later mail was delivered twice a week, and four years later mail was delivered daily. Soon a stage route was established between Hartford and Sharon, and that too passed through Goshen. By 1831, the United States had twice as many post offices as Britain and five times as many as France.

          Post offices were established in East Goshen, in 1828; in North Goshen, in 1832; and in West Goshen, in 1849.

The United States Congress, of course, did not know that someday there would be a local newspaper for the Town of Goshen, Conn. called the Goshen News.  But our Founding Parents were prescient when it passed the  first major postal law, 1792, to encourage the exchange of newspapers by allowing them to travel through the United States postal system at extremely low rates of postage — in some cases for free — to ensure the success of the democracy. 

As Thomas Jefferson noted,

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now
trying . . . that man may be governed by reason and truth.
Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all
the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the
freedom of the press.

https://www.history.com/news/post-office-mail-delivery;
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/brief-history-united-states-postal-service-180975627;
https://facts.usps.com/history;
Quadrimillennium Editorial Committee, Goshen, Connecticut: A Town Above All Others, West Kennebunk,  ME: Town of Goshen, 199;
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-united-states-postal-service-4076789.