The U.S. Postal Service is celebrating its 250th anniversary this weekend, and you will not need to verify your mailbox for the invite.
The company’s semiquincentennial can be marked by an occasion on the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, two and a half centuries since its founding. Two newly introduced commemorative stamps can even mark the event.
USPS was based because the U.S. Submit Workplace Division on July 26, 1775, by decree of the Second Continental Congress. In 1970, Congress reorganized USPOD from a cabinet-level division into an unbiased company — the trendy USPS. Historians see the institution of a nationwide postal service as an important consider guaranteeing the younger nation stayed unified in the course of the Revolutionary Conflict.
One of many new commemorative stamps, introduced Wednesday by USPS, options Benjamin Franklin in a contemporary interpretation of one of many first two U.S. postage stamps ever produced in 1847. Franklin, a participant within the Second Continental Congress, briefly served as the primary U.S. postmaster normal after serving within the equal function underneath British rule from 1757 to 1774.
USPS
The opposite stamp celebrates women and men of the company with a brand new assortment of cityscape illustrations depicting a postal employee on her route by all 4 seasons. A 32-page booklet — solely the fourth ever launched by USPS — was additionally introduced Wednesday and is about to characteristic chosen stamp paintings from throughout the service’s historical past.
David Steiner, the newly appointed U.S. postmaster normal, mentioned that the brand new stamps symbolize enduring values each American can study from, together with perseverance, belief and creativeness.
“For the USA Postal Service, immediately is a milestone 250 years within the making,” Steiner mentioned in a press release Wednesday. “These stamps will function a window into our shared historical past.”
The museum doesn’t touch upon present or political occasions.
Saturday’s celebration comes months after sources mentioned President Trump was mulling folding the USPS into the Commerce Division, and even presumably privatizing it. Postmaster Normal Louis DeJoy introduced he could be leaving the place in February, and Steiner, a former FedEx board member, took over earlier this month within the place.
Steiner instructed USPS workers that he “didn’t consider that the Postal Service must be privatized or that it ought to change into an appropriated a part of the federal authorities.”
Smithsonian Nationwide Postal Museum 
However Saturday, the Nationwide Postal Museum family-friendly Postal Occasion can be celebrating. The museum will characteristic actions, crafts and video games, in addition to a Franklin reenactor, permitting youngsters to study postal historical past instantly from the founding father. Different historic touchpoints set to be highlighted on the occasion embrace Owney, the nineteenth century terrier that served as an unofficial Postal Service mascot, and the Stinson Reliant, an early airmail provider mannequin from the late Thirties.
The occasion will not simply be wanting towards the previous, nevertheless. Anne Matlock, the museum’s youth and household applications supervisor, mentioned that the occasion is “wanting again and searching ahead, all on the similar time,” with displays about the way forward for the Postal Service.
“We regularly do not take into consideration all of the ways in which the Postal Service is connecting us by our Household, our group, to different areas,” Matlock mentioned. “We would like individuals to sort of take into consideration these connections, see them in their very own lives, and share issues with all of the Postal Service employees.”
The museum can be teaming up with different Smithsonian establishments for the occasion, which is able to embrace an airmail supply sport with the Nationwide Air and Area Museum, a Franklin-focused inventive design exercise with the Nationwide Museum of American Historical past and storytime with the D.C. Public Library.
The free occasion will run from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
