A Mighty Postwoman

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" has long been associated with the American postman.

"FEMININE MAIL CARRIER CIRCLES GLOBE 6 TIMES ON DEFIANCE MUDROADS"

When Miss Pearl Nihart unloads empty mail sacks at the Edgerton post office on Jan. 15, 1926, she will have circled the globe six times and gone 15,000 miles on the seventh lap around the planet without once getting off the mud roads of Milford township. 

Pearl is not pictured here.

She is the Mohammed who has moved a mountain of letters, papers, and mail order catalogues to 100 families in the past 22 years.

With the assistance of several horses and five automobiles, the bones of four of which have rusted in some junk yard, Miss Nihart has covered the 25 and 18 miles on her route 6,000 times.  Only three-quarters of a mile of her daily journey is over improved roads.

"I have the worst road and the best people served by the Edgerton post office," Miss Nihart said recently in recounting her experiences as a rural carrier."

"Folks shook their heads when I drove one of my father's horses over a new route for the first time on Jan. 15, 1903.  The next Monday a blizzard swept over northwestern Ohio. I would have given everything I had if I could have resigned on the spot.  But I knew it would be spring before I could be relieved.  I've been carrying mail ever since." 

Horse and sleigh carried the mail.

 "My first automobile had but one cylinder and it coughed its way over the route for several years.  Since then I have worn out three cars.  In the winter I still have to use horses and sometimes I walk over part of my route."

I like to work in summer.  The winters, I dread.  It seems as though one can't get thawed out from Saturday night to Monday morning when the round of bucking snowdrifts or bouncing over frozen ruts begins again."

"Folks often dash out to their boxes to ask if I think they can get through the drifts to town, not stopping to think that I've just come over the road.  I couldn't do it if my people did not make an extra effort to keep the mail road open.  Perhaps, that's because I'm a woman."

Edgerton post office has the reputation in northwestern Ohio of delivering mail on the rural routes when the weather gets so bad that neighboring towns abandon attempts to reach the country folks.  Perhaps, that is because there is a woman and three men carrying mail out of Edgerton, and the woman has failed but twice in 22 years to cover her route.






Once, in March 1913, when a large part of Ohio was under water and the rest of the state expected to be at any minute.  Miss Nihart did not leave the post office.

During the blizzard of 1917, she and the other rural carriers at Edgerton drove out over the first part of their routes till the cold forced them back.  They came to the post office, thawed out, and tackled the other end of the routes, going as far as their numbed fingers would guide their cars or horses.

The Defiance Crescent-News, Defiance, Ohio, December 14, 1925, page 1