The following includes information that may be useful in understanding the present invention(s). It is not an admission that any of the information provided herein is prior art, or material, to the presently described or claimed inventions, or that any publication or document that is specifically or implicitly referenced is prior art.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of mailbox posts and more specifically relates to a mail post removably-coupled to a mailbox system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Rural Free Delivery—RFD as it is known to many—was the response over a century ago to the notion that rural Americans were as entitled to having mail brought to their homes as were their city-dwelling counterparts. After all, city dwellers had been getting their mail delivered by letter carriers since the Civil War, when Joseph Briggs, an Ohio postal clerk, proposed the idea because he could no longer bear watching wives and families receive the news of their war dead in the public domain of the post office.
Before RFD, Americans who lived in rural areas had to travel to the nearest post office to send and receive mail, and often these post offices were miles away. But rural mail delivery service frightened Congress, says Nancy Pope, a curator at the National Postal Museum. “Many deemed the nation too large and believed that such a service would bankrupt the country. It would require an infusion of cash from Congress, new roads and more postal employees to implement the service.”
Congress took the leap, and Rural Free Delivery became a critically important means of linking farm families with the rest of the world. Beyond that, RFD became a major avenue of commerce, helping to establish the catalog-shopping era of Sears, Roebuck; J.C. Penney; Montgomery Ward, and others. The rural parcel post service, which allowed carriers to deliver packages and parcels along with the mail, offered a breakthrough for the nation's farmers, bringing them closer to the rest of the world through items such as mail-order catalogs, and catalog-ordered merchandise.
On another level, rural Americans began to receive newspapers and magazines, whereas before, all news was local. Being able to get a newspaper from a larger city, or a national magazine, brought them closer to the national pulse of the country. For the first time, farmers in North Dakota could read the same information as someone in the rural areas of Florida, or the avenues of New York City. Rural Free Delivery was also one of several factors that led to the good roads movement. The Post Office Department had the right to refuse mail delivery until the roads were repaired. Communities repaired their roads.
Now more than 100 years old, the service itself is better understood today than it was at its beginning. One early customer, not fully aware of a rural letter carrier's scope of service, left the carrier the following note: “Please feed our chickens and water the cows and the mule in the stable. And if the bees have swarmed, put them in a new hive. We have gone visiting.”
Not much chance of a Rural Letter Carrier stopping to feed your chickens today, and the traffic along even our “rural” roads—cars, farm equipment, pick-ups, motorcycles—would make an early-20th century farmer's head spin. And yet, millions of Americans, both rural and suburban, walk out to their roadside mailbox once a day, open the box and see what the mail carrier has left them. The roadside mailbox is a daily fixture in the lives of millions of consumers; and one inventor, considering this utilitarian, commonplace receptacle, has conceived a means of brightening it up—making one's roadside mailbox not only useful, but attractive and personalized.
Various attempts have been made to solve problems found in mailbox post art. Among these are found in: U.S. Pat. No. 6,575,423 to Ronald D. Erwin; U.S. Pat. No. 5,143,285 to Brian E. Wise; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,190,214 to Richard J. Dewailly. This prior art is representative of mailbox posts. None of the above inventions and patents, taken either singly or in combination, is seen to describe the invention as claimed.
Ideally, a mail post removably-coupled to a mailbox system should be user-friendly and safe in-use and, yet may operate reliably and be manufactured at a modest expense. Thus, a need exists for mail post removably-coupled to a mailbox system provides a user with creating an attractive and personalized mail post removably-coupled to a mailbox assembly by enabling a user to decorate and re-decorate the mail post removably-coupled to a mailbox assembly for a distinctive, individualized home and landscaping accent such that an identity of a mail-receipt is readily known and to avoid the above mentioned problems.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds