Today’s Find
One hundred years ago today, the B.F. Goodrich Rubber Company’s New York branch received a letter that had been mailed eighteen years earlier.
The letter had been posted sometime around 1908, less than a mile from where Goodrich’s branch office eventually stood. It never actually made it to its original destination. By then, the building had moved. Instead, the letter slipped into the mail chute of the Mills Building at 15 Broad Street and stayed lodged there, undiscovered, for nearly two decades.
Nobody found it because nobody had reason to look (except maybe the original sender who was wondering where his tubes were). The Mills Building where the letter was lost, was a ten-story structure completed in 1882. It stood at the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, wrapped around the J.P. Morgan building next door. It stayed in use for 43 years until Equitable Trust took over the lease in early 1925. They began tearing the building down to put up a new skyscraper in its place.
It was during that demolition that workers pulled apart the old mail chute and found the letter still inside it. Here is a similar mail chute from the era:
And the best part of the story? Inside the letter was a check for $25.20 (roughly $900 today!). It was a payment for two inner tubes, written at a time when that was the retail price. By 1926, the papers report those same two tubes cost less than ten dollars. Apparently eighteen years of industrial progress in rubber manufacturing had cut the price by more than half.
Mail delivery at the time was pretty remarkable, too. You could mail a letter in New York one day, and have it delivered in San Francisco the next evening.
Even today, I once had a postcard delivered six months after I mailed it. But 18 years to go less than a mile?! Incredible. It reminds me of the Frog and Toad story where the two of them wait on the porch for days anticipating the mail. Because turns out, the mail carrier was a snail.
One thing I couldn’t find out was whether the original sender was able to get his tubes elsewhere.
See you tomorrow. – Chris
Sources
Wire report, September 9, 1926 (”And He Cussed the Tire Concern, Sure”)
Brownwood Banner-Bulletin, September 9, 1926 (”Eighteen Year Old Letter Contained Order for Tubes”)
Photos: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library, “Equitable Trust Company Building,” The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1926.
Mail Chute, Grand Central. Bain News Service, publisher, [between ca. 1910 and ca. 1915]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014699661/