After wasting all of November, I am finally getting back into model railroading which for me has always been a cold weather hobby. Yesterday I was at my LHS and I saw some olive drab mailboxes by JL Innovations which I purchased. I was surprised to see they were labeled pre-1955. I am old enough to remember the switch from the olive drab to red, white, and blue mailboxes but my memory is it was done later in the late 1950s. My railroad is set in 1956 and until now I have painted all my mailboxes olive drab. I did some research and found the order to change colors was made on the Fourth of July in 1955. My question is how long it took the Post Office to repaint/replace the olive mailboxes. Would there still have been some olive drab mailboxes in 1956 or would the change over have been completed by then. Would it be appropriate to have the olive mailboxes in some towns and the red, white, and blue in the others. Also, my recollection is the new boxes were blue with red tops. The only white I remember would be the lettering. Is that memory correct?
One more question. I know that the Post Office had olive drab drop boxes for the mail carriers. Were those converted from the regular mail boxes or were they original equipment.
Mail boxes were painted olive drab, starting in 1946. The war department gave their excess olive drab paint to the Post Office.
on July 4th, 1955 the new red/white/blue scheme was adopted. the current dark blue scheme was adopted in 1971.
Modeling BNSF and Milwaukee Road in SW Wisconsin
The drop boxes were the same shape as the large mailboxes, but they had a full front door that opened so the delivery truck driver could leave mail for the mailman who walked the neighborhood route. There was one about a block from my house when I was young
George In Midcoast Maine, 'bout halfway up the Rockland branch
G Paine The drop boxes were the same shape as the large mailboxes, but they had a full front door that opened so the delivery truck driver could leave mail for the mailman who walked the neighborhood route. There was one about a block from my house when I was young
Yeah, and the green ones didn't have that drop slot flap door thing.
Robert
LINK to SNSR Blog
The storage box on the corner in front of our house was still OD when I left home in 1966. Just like the railroads painting their equipment, there were so many boxes out there, there may still be some green ones somewhere.
An interesting question. The US Postal Service has a brief article on its website about this general subject: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/collection-box-colors.pdf
One interesting factoid in that article is that olive drab was chosen because the government had such a huge surplus of olive drab paint following WWI.
What I remember is this, and for all practical purposes my memories for this sort of thing start around 1960. There were plenty of olive drab "drop boxes" on the routes near our house, although not on our street itself. As I recall they were not lettered or marked. There may have been stamped-in raised lettering. Most mail carriers lugged their own huge leather mailbags although on streets with sidewalks (we had none) some pushed 3 wheel carts that held that bag. That is when those drop boxes were really needed. I think it was well into the late 1960s before the mailman had a truck. Even then he'd park it and walk a few blocks rather than stop and start because our mail and that of our neighbors was delivered through a slot in the front door not a street side mailbox.
I do recall that most of the nearby red white and blue "mail boxes" were not the rounded top affairs that looked like the drop boxes, but smaller boxes (not bigger than a breadbox) usually affixed to a utility pole. perhaps cast iron? They had raised letters, maybe cast in. Only at busy corners and in front of our post office itself were the mail boxes new, rounded top and red, white and blue.
One practical difference is that the old smaller boxes had openings large enough to post a normal letter, or card, or postcard. The rounded top boxes had the hinged door and you could actually drop in a small package or padded envelope.
But in some parts of my home town even circa 1960 a few of the actual mail boxes were still olive drab just like the drop boxes. I do recall this because people would remark on being confused. So my crude and unspecific recollections are that the colors did not change at the snap of a finger. It took a while. I suspect there were plenty left in 1956. The more important the route and the larger the city the more likely it was that it had been changed is my hunch.
Similarly the 1954 decision to make stop signs red did not result in a presto/changeo overnight. I can recall plenty of yellow stop signs in small towns when we'd drive for a vacation and again that was in the very early 1960s.
One caution about my recollections. I definitely recall that when I was a very young boy we had two mail deliveries a day. But supposedly most residential twice a day delivery stopped in 1950 when I did not yet exist. Perhaps our town held on to twice a day longer beause so many routes mixed residential and small business? Or maybe I am confusing the fact that when I was young mail carriers could "frank" (cancel) mail themselves if they received mail that was to be delivered on their own route. My grandmother and her sister, my great-aunt, sometimes exchanged post cards that were mailed and received on the same day as a result.
I know my grandmother remembered when Sunday mail service was discontinued which another website says was 1912.
Dave Nelson
dknelsonSimilarly the 1954 decision to make stop signs red did not result in a presto/changeo overnight. I can recall plenty of yellow stop signs in small towns when we'd drive for a vacation and again that was in the very early 1960s.
Heck, I know where there were a couple as late as 2011!
NHTX The storage box on the corner in front of our house was still OD when I left home in 1966.
dknelson An interesting question. The US Postal Service has a brief article on its website about this general subject: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/collection-box-colors.pdf One interesting factoid in that article is that olive drab was chosen because the government had such a huge surplus of olive drab paint following WWI. What I remember is this, and for all practical purposes my memories for this sort of thing start around 1960. There were plenty of olive drab "drop boxes" on the routes near our house, although not on our street itself. As I recall they were not lettered or marked. There may have been stamped-in raised lettering. Most mail carriers lugged their own huge leather mailbags although on streets with sidewalks (we had none) some pushed 3 wheel carts that held that bag. That is when those drop boxes were really needed. I think it was well into the late 1960s before the mailman had a truck. Even then he'd park it and walk a few blocks rather than stop and start because our mail and that of our neighbors was delivered through a slot in the front door not a street side mailbox. I do recall that most of the nearby red white and blue "mail boxes" were not the rounded top affairs that looked like the drop boxes, but smaller boxes (not bigger than a breadbox) usually affixed to a utility pole. perhaps cast iron? They had raised letters, maybe cast in. Only at busy corners and in front of our post office itself were the mail boxes new, rounded top and red, white and blue. One practical difference is that the old smaller boxes had openings large enough to post a normal letter, or card, or postcard. The rounded top boxes had the hinged door and you could actually drop in a small package or padded envelope. But in some parts of my home town even circa 1960 a few of the actual mail boxes were still olive drab just like the drop boxes. I do recall this because people would remark on being confused. So my crude and unspecific recollections are that the colors did not change at the snap of a finger. It took a while. I suspect there were plenty left in 1956. The more important the route and the larger the city the more likely it was that it had been changed is my hunch. Similarly the 1954 decision to make stop signs red did not result in a presto/changeo overnight. I can recall plenty of yellow stop signs in small towns when we'd drive for a vacation and again that was in the very early 1960s. One caution about my recollections. I definitely recall that when I was a very young boy we had two mail deliveries a day. But supposedly most residential twice a day delivery stopped in 1950 when I did not yet exist. Perhaps our town held on to twice a day longer beause so many routes mixed residential and small business? Or maybe I am confusing the fact that when I was young mail carriers could "frank" (cancel) mail themselves if they received mail that was to be delivered on their own route. My grandmother and her sister, my great-aunt, sometimes exchanged post cards that were mailed and received on the same day as a result. I know my grandmother remembered when Sunday mail service was discontinued which another website says was 1912. Dave Nelson
Your memories closely parallel mine. My earliest childhood memory was my third birthday and I recall both the mailboxes and the stop signs changing color so it that had to happen no earlier than 1955 and probably later. I was also thinking along the same lines as you regarding the change of the mailboxes. Most likely happening in the bigger cities first. What I might do is taken the olive drab mailboxes from my biggest town and move them to the smaller ones and replace them with red, white, and blue ones.
In Omaha where I lived, I distinctly remember the yellow stop sign at the end of our street. It was different from the ones I've seen pictures of elsewhere. There was a white field in the middle with the black STOP lettering over it. I found this example of this type of sign:
https://img1.etsystatic.com/000/0/5461104/il_fullxfull.173451115.jpg
My understanding (from my father, who was a letter carrier in Minneapolis) is that part of the reason regular Post Office mailboxes were repainted red-white-blue was to differentiate them from drop boxes, which continued to be (and I believe are) painted green.