Rural Mail Carriers

​From the 1908 Dallas Morning News

If you should chance to be driving on one of the roads in the eastern part of Fannin County the chances are you would sooner or later meet a rural mail carrier, for there are lots of rural mail carriers in that part of the world.

And if you should happen to walk to the postoffice in Honey Grove some morning before 10:30 o'clock you'd find twelve rural outfits hitched to the rack in front of the postoffice, twelve of them belonging to the rural route carriers and one a hack of the star route that conveys mails to and through the Blue Prairie country north of town, that section lying between Red River and Bois d'Arc Creek, the mail it carries going to Monkstown for distribution.

In Honey Grove at this hour you'd probably find T. D. Bloys, the Honey Grove postmaster, almost too busy to give you a cheery greeting. The word "almost" is used advisedly, because nobody ever saw Mr. Bloys too busy to welcome people - even when eleven busy rural mail carriers are overwhelming his headquarters and dragging out fat mail sacks to dump into their wagons, and the door is kept swinging in and out until the hinges grumble.

They know every man, woman, child and dog within twenty-five miles of Honey Grove, these carriers.  Day after day, Sunday alone excepted, they make their trips, distributing and gathering up mails, regardless of weather, condition of roads or anything short of a broken leg or neck.

In this bunch of eleven mail carriers is represented a force that has no equal in Texas, as eleven carriers making for one town is the largest number so far on record in the State.  The town and Postmaster Bloys and the mail carriers take pride in this showing, too.

There are men in the service whom the people know well.  There are R. R. Richardson, R. L. Wood and W. S. Hodges. There is B. F. Ferry and there are C. P. Parkhill, C. M. Stone, T. H. Gross, J. T. Richardson, H. G. Zinniker, W. W. Mason and S. H. Lyon, all men experienced in the rapid transit of mail matter and eagerly watched for by the people of their routes.

All over that section the mail carts make their way, sometimes muddy, sometimes dusty, sometimes in heat, sometimes in bitter cold.  They reach out to a point within sight of Windom on the west and Petty on the east, to Sash on Bois d'Arc Creek on the north and to within four miles of Ladonia on the south.

Together they serve 1,500 families, carrying them their mails and newspapers daily, this representing something like 7,500 people.

The mail is a heavy one, the employment of these carriers having followed the discontinuance of eleven postoffices, each of them supplying a large number of people.

So swift is the service they render that pride is taken by the Honey Grove office and the carriers in the statement made that The Dallas News reaches Red River by 3 o'clock p.m. and the paper is in the hands of subscribers all along the route by that hour, and that the some condition prevails in all directions from Honey Grove.