Special Delivery: Canada's Postal Heritage

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

The Canadian Postal Museum, created in Ottawa in 1971, became part of
the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 1988, taking with it some 40,000
objects and tens of thousands of philatelic items. Photographs of
hundreds of these documents and artifacts form the basis of this
colorful look at Canadian postal history, with a brief glance back to
the beginnings of written communication. Twelve chapters by three
authors take us from the earliest stagecoach routes of our pioneer era
to the post office’s acquisition of Purolator. The text is livened
with anecdotes concerning postmasters and letter carriers, those who
wrote the earliest postcards (“the poor man’s telegraph”), and
those serving in the Canadian Postal Corps who relayed morale-boosting
mail from home to the troops in the trenches during World War I and to
our forces the world over in a later combat.

There is nostalgia here for a time when the mail got through so quickly
that people mailed fresh fish; for the era of mail-order catalogues; and
for “a society in which a visit to the post office was no less
important than attending church on Sunday.” There is little, however,
about the cruel economics that curtailed the expansion of home delivery,
wiped out rural post offices, and reduced the number of days when mail
is delivered. Still, this is a rich collection of colorful photographs
of postal paraphernalia and ephemera from the museum’s huge
collection.