Country Post: Rural Postal Service in Canada, 1880 to 1945

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

Since 1972, the Canadian Museum of Civilization and its predecessors
have been publishing specialized scholarly research in the Mercury
Series. With now more than 400 titles in the fields of archaeology,
ethnology, history, and folklore, the series has evolved into much more
than the basic typescripts between plain covers with which it began.
Like a good museum, Country Post, the first contribution of the Canadian
Postal Museum to the series, represents a fruitful collaboration between
historian and curator. Appealing to the eye and meticulously researched,
the book addresses both the scholarly audience of the traditional series
and a more general readership.

The passion of recent protests over the closure of rural post offices
probably surprised many urban Canadians. The authors offer some
convincing explanations for the depth of emotion. Rural postal service,
they argue, was central to the development of the rural community in
social, economic, and even spatial senses. Through archival research and
oral history, they demonstrate the importance of everything from the
choice of location and architecture to the social role of the post and
the postmaster. In an interesting chapter on the economics of the post
office, they examine the post office savings bank system and the
legendary mail-order catalogue.

The authors have made every effort to cover all regions of Canada in
the discussion, and they are particularly to be commended for including
a good deal of material from Quebec, something that is lacking all too
often in Canadian historiography. The book has been published in French
under the title Le courrier est arrivé! La poste rurale au Canada de
1880 а 1945.