Lorna Atwater, a rural mail carrier from Berea, Kentucky, was driving her seventy-five-mile route through the Eastern Kentucky foothills when she noticed the woods behind a customer’s house were on fire. She called the fire department and the homeowner — who she knew was the principal of the local high school — and wet down the backyard with a garden hose until the fire department arrived. Needless to say, putting out backyard fires was not in her job description.

In the United States, 129,000 rural mail carriers deliver to 50 million residential mailboxes, a number which has steadily grown by about a million each year. Many rural residents, of whom 19 percent are elderly and 22 percent lack broadband coverage, rely on mail delivery to pay bills, receive life-dependent prescription medications, communicate with loved ones, vote, and for “last mile” delivery of shipments from FedEx, UPS, and Amazon. Rural mail carriers operate “post offices on wheels,” meaning they not only deliver letters, periodicals, and packages, but also offer stamps and money orders and carry change-of-address and other United States Postal Service (USPS) forms. They are effectively roving hubs of federal services in rural areas.

In 2021 and 2022, I interviewed twenty-five rural postal workers for “Rural Free Delivery: Mail Carriers in Central Appalachia,” part of the American Folklife Center’s Occupational Folklife Project. Through these interviews, which are now housed at the Library of Congress, I saw how the specific conditions of rural mail carriers’ jobs enable them to sustain their communities in ways both within and extending beyond their job description. If President Donald Trump takes control of the USPS and makes moves to privatize the agency, as many fear, rural people across the country will lose not only mail delivery but the crucial community care that rural postal workers provide.

The rural mail carriers I interviewed told me stories of how their relationships with their customers and familiarity with the environment on their routes enabled them to assist in emergency situations, like the one Lorna Atwater encountered. Others reported helping corral cattle that had escaped and were in the road, bringing lost dogs back to their owners, saving the life of a customer who was choking, being the first on the scene of a traffic accident, or taking special care to ensure that veterans still received their prescription medications in inclement weather. Formally the USPS plays a critical role in the United States government’s National Response Framework, a network of government agencies that develops a comprehensive strategic response plan in the event of national disasters, bioterrorist attacks, pandemics, or other emergencies — but rural mail carriers are also key emergency responders in their communities on a more informal, person-to-person basis every day.

In a city, when a building catches fire or people are injured in a traffic accident, there are eyes and ears to respond immediately. In the country, where infrastructure is sparse and the population is less dense, a rural mail carrier might be the only person an elderly widow or widower talks to all day. The specific conditions of rural carriers’ work create consistent interactions with — and intimate knowledge of — the same people in one place, meaning that rural carriers function as care workers in their communities, providing services that could not be replicated by more mechanized or drone delivery. Kay Foltz, who delivers mail in Appalachian Ohio, said, “We deliver a lot of things that only get delivered because we know who’s there.” Rural mail carriers — many of whom work in the communities where they’ve lived their whole lives — know when a family is on vacation and their mail needs to be held, if an elderly person relocated to a retirement home and needs their mail forwarded to a new address, or where a letter addressed with merely a name and “Route 1” should be delivered.

In turn, rural carriers feel lucky to have well-paid, permanent, unionized jobs — a rare thing today in many of the areas they call home. Atwater says she initially took the rural carrier position because it paid more than she would have made as a public-school teacher, even with her master’s degree in early childhood education. LeAnn Carpenter, who delivers a rural route outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, said that the best part of her work was the sense that at the end of the day, she had done something that mattered — a feeling she did not get in her previous job at Sam’s Club.

Fifty-seven percent of United States post offices are located in rural areas, and 88 percent of the land served by the USPS is rural. Recent reporting has shown that privatization of the USPS would disproportionately impact rural communities, as rural delivery, which operates under a Universal Service Obligation (USO) mandating service to all Americans, would not be profitable for private corporations and service and staffing decisions would be determined by market pressures. Without that mandate, private mail service would become unaffordable for many rural residents who live in remote areas and experience higher rates of poverty than their urban counterparts. But privatization could also mean that all the other benefits of rural delivery would be lost for both communities and the people who deliver those routes. These additional services are not necessarily compensated by the USPS. They are externalities not factored into the “profitability” of a federal institution that was always intended to be a public good rather than a for-profit business. In interview after interview, rural mail carriers stressed that they put the “service” in the US Postal Service.

Rural delivery is one of the few ways that rural people feel the positive impact of federal public services in a daily, tangible way. As Park City, Kentucky, rural carrier Karen Button told me, “We touch everybody every day, in some way or another.” This does not go unnoticed by their customers. According to a 2022 report by the USPS, 81 percent of rural customers view the Postal Service as valuable. I saw this reflected in what rural carriers told me — that when they took care of their customers, their customers took care of them, showing appreciation with small gifts like farm-fresh eggs or homemade canned goods, stopping to help fix a carriers’ flat tire, or leaving a cold bottle of water in the mailbox on a hot day.

By framing federal positions as wasteful office jobs held by professional bureaucrats in Washington, the Trump administration obscures the reality that federal jobs, like those of rural mail carriers, exist in many iterations across the country, providing essential services as well as stable employment opportunities. In a time when there are numerous economic and political forces pulling rural communities apart, federally funded jobs like rural mail delivery keep them stitched together.

When I first started the interviews for my project on rural postal workers, I thought that these additional services that rural mail carriers provide, though beneficial, existed outside of the scope of their jobs. But what I came to see was that the human elements of caregiving are in fact part of what makes their work essential to the remote communities they serve. The USPS, too, touts its mail carriers’ intimate knowledge of their communities and personal relationships with customers as vital aspects of the agency’s function and value. A 2020 white paper published by the Office of the Inspector General argues that it is the Postal Service’s “roots in every community, unmatched address information, and carriers’ extensive knowledge of neighborhoods from coast to coast” that makes it an essential player in federal response efforts.

As Kay Foltz said:

People out here, [by mail] is how they still pay their bills. Everything important to them comes in the mail. I deliver a lot of medication. So it is important. It’s not just for the mail. There’s a lot more to it. It really is a service that if people didn’t have, I think our country would be a lot different.