In 1917, a Utah businessman found that transporting bricks by road was too expensive; he sent them through the postal system instead, until the sheer volume forced the US government to intervene

Coltharp exploited postal rates, shipping individually wrapped bricks in 50-pound boxes to build his Utah bank.

In the early days of America’s Parcel Post system it seemed everything that could fit within the rules was fair game for delivery. Farmers sent crops, families sent food and household goods, and businesses soon discovered that the postal network could be an unexpectedly cheap alternative to traditional freight. But in Utah, one businessman took the idea much further and used the mail to ship thousands of bricks for an entire bank.

When the postal service was a shipping network

According to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, on January 1, 1913, Parcel Post officially began, changing the way Americans could ship items. The service was particularly popular with rural families who had to haul goods into towns with express offices before they could be sent on. The new system linked packages straight to rural mailboxes, and it was nearly instantly popular. In the first half of the year, some 300 million parcels were processed. The weight limits increased quickly, from 11 pounds to 20 pounds, then eventually 50 pounds.The service was not limited to normal household parcels. Eggs, butter, vegetables and other common commodities were regularly sent through the mail, and the need for specially designed packaging arose.

A cheaper way to build a bank

A report by the Medium states that in 1916, William Horace Coltharp, who had helped build the Bank of Vernal in Utah, had a strange transportation problem. The decorative pressed bricks he wanted were made by the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company, which was about 125 miles away in a straight line. However, in the mountainous landscape, conventional transport was much more complicated. Medium reports that shipping the bricks by normal freight routes would cost more than four times their value. Coltharp looked to Parcel Post as a cheaper alternative.Postal rates were determined by the actual distance between places not the much longer route freight had to travel. Coltharp used the difference to have individual bricks wrapped and packed in boxes of about 50 pounds each, for mailing.

The post office starts to strain

What started as a brilliant way to save money quickly became a logistical nightmare. Thousands of bricks started arriving at Vernal, and the local postal operation was overwhelmed.In the end, Coltharp sent about 15,000 bricks, for a total shipment of some 37.5 tons, or 75,000 pounds, according to Medium. At the height of construction, the Vernal post office was already handling some two tons of mail daily, so the brick deliveries were particularly taxing.The Smithsonian National Postal Museum estimates the shipment weighed 40 tons, and Salt Lake City and Vernal postmasters and the Uintah Railroad, which hauled the parcels, were overwhelmed by the deliveries.

A new rule closes the loophole

Ultimately, the extraordinary shipment forced federal officials to rethink how Parcel Post could be used. The Post Office Department ruled that no one sender could send more than 200 pounds of parcels to one recipient in a single day.But by then Coltharp’s unconventional approach to building had already served its purpose. The bricks were sent from Salt Lake City to Vernal, piece by piece, by postal service.The episode became one of the most memorable illustrations of how a new public service could be stretched far beyond its intended purpose, and how quickly an inventive shortcut could expose the limits of the system itself.Images Courtesy: Smithsonian National Postal Museum and isock