Smithsonian Delivers a Museum on Mail

Mail, an experience and bond shared by Americans, is celebrated in a Smithsonian museum that opened Friday.

“Letters are bridges, not just between distant places but between generations,” Barber Conable of the Smithsonian Board of Regents said at the opening of the museum, located in the former Washington City Post Office adjacent to Union Station.

While the $15.4-million facility holds one of the world’s largest collections of rare and unusual stamps, it is more than just a stamp collection.

Early airmail planes, a stagecoach, a reproduction of a railway mail car, a 1920s Model T Ford with skis on the front for snowy deliveries and sundry other modes of moving the mail are featured. Other galleries look at letter writing, mail and American history and art in the mail.