In 1896, they began reaching out to rural America, connecting farms and homesteads one address at a time with the wealth of products and services available from our nation’s cities. The connection? Correspondence, catalogs, and parcel post. And as the connection to rural America grew, so did our nation and its economy.

Today, America’s rural letter or highway contract carriers serve more than 36 million addresses coast to coast. Not just homes and farms either, but office buildings, apartments complexes, and shopping malls—the flora and fauna of urban America, the harvest of economic growth.

You probably have seen your rural letter carrier at work, driving alongside the road, mailbox to mailbox, picking up, and delivering the mail. What you may not have seen, however, is the wide range and high quality of the products and services they provide. In addition to picking up and delivering your mail, they

• Pick up and deliver parcels, and Priority Mail and Express Mail items.
• Sells stamps and Postal Money Orders.
• Accept and deliver Registered Mail, Certified Mail, and Insured Mail items.
• Accept payment for Collect on Delivery (COD) packages.

If you would like to order stamps, postal cards, or stamped envelopes, just ask your rural letter carrier for a Stamp Purchase Order form. It comes with its own envelope.

If you give your rural letter carrier your written authorization, he or she will leave oversized parcels at your mailbox or other location, weather permitting, so you don’t have to go to the Post Office. Or you can call 1-800-ASK-USPS and they will redeliver packages or other items requiring your signature.

Rural and highway contract letter carriers serve the farthest regions of our nation. They are proud to deliver for you. So, what is a rural or highway contract route? They are Post Offices on wheels offering all services customers would drive to their local Post Office for. The majority of Southwest Florida mail routes are rural or highway contract.

To find out if you reside on a rural route, go to usps.com, click on find a Zip Code, and enter your address. Once your Zip plus four information is provided, there is a selection for mailing industry information on the right, click there to view a route number with a letter C, R, or H before it. “C” stands for city delivery, where Post Office on Wheels is not applicable; “R” stands for Rural and “H” stands for Highway Contract, both of which have Post Office on Wheels service.

For more information about purchasing stamps, stamps by mail, postal regulations, a free subscription to USA Philatelic magazine, Post Office events, the location of the nearest postal store or contract unit, or for answers to your specific Postal Service questions, contact USPS at 1-800-275-8777, or visit www.usps.com. To schedule a presentation for your community, club or group on how the Postal Service brings the Post Office to your home or office computer, call 239-573-9638.

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Please Note: For broadcast quality video and audio, photo stills and other media resources, visit the USPS Newsroom at www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/welcome.htm.

An independent federal agency, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, 149 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes, six days a week. It has 34,000 retail locations and relies on the sale of postage, products and services, not tax dollars, to pay for operating expenses. Named the Most Trusted Government Agency five consecutive years by the Ponemon Institute, the Postal Service has annual revenue of $75 billion and delivers nearly half the world’s mail.