This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

The United States Postal Service was established in 1792.

It's hard to believe that a service that was created over two centuries ago

is still used by everyone every day.

What's even more shocking is that there was actually a lot of debate

about whether there should even be a federal post office in the first place. Here's Daniel Piazza of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum with the story.

The post office department was created in 1792 with an act that President Washington signed into law that year,

but it had antecedents going back to the early 18th century. The British crown had

established a post office in the colonies as early as the reign of Queen Anne. This was in 1711. And in

those days, the post office was generally a contract that was farmed out to someone who paid the

crown a fixed sum for the right to operate a post office and then got to keep the revenue.

So the early colonial postmasters general in America actually bought their jobs.

Benjamin Franklin becomes joint postmaster general in 1753 along with William Hunter.

Franklin managed all of the post offices from Maryland North, while Hunter was in charge from Virginia to Georgia. We frequently hear about Franklin

as being the first postmaster general of the United States, which he was, but it's less well known

that he was also the last postmaster general

under the British crown, and in fact he had a much longer postal career under the British than

he ever did under the Americans. The Continental Congress, which formed during the revolution

and was the de facto government of the United States until 1789, formed a separate American

post office in 1775 and appointed Franklin as the first postmaster general. For nearly 20 years,

the post office had been authorized and reauthorized on a temporary basis, usually only until

June of the following year. The founders were

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