In fact, according the John Thompson, an early Ann Arbor settler, John
Allen was the area's first postmaster. Thompson himself "carried the first United States mail from Ann Arbor to Jackson. The mail
was small then, consisting of about six letters, which I carried in my hat" (McLaughlin, 15). Thompson
made the trip once a week "for three months, always on foot, and followin the Indian trail. The journey took four
days" (McLaughlin, 15). Packages
could not be transported until early in the 1900s.
The rough postal system was an expensive service and it often took
a very long time. An amazing invention arose in May of 1844 when Samuel
F. B. Morse introduced the telegraph.
The first message in Michigan went from Detroit to Ypsilanti
in November of 1847. The telegraph wires were strung along the tracks of
the Michigan Central Railroad. |
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This new technology allowed the settlers to communicate with
other communities across the continent. Business owners could get information
from distant colleagues and citizens could hear about news that happened
only the day before in another part of the country. The wire network in
this era connected a majority of the larger cities.
The telegraph technology was greatly expanded after the Civil War
with the help of a conglomeration named the Western Union Telegraph Company.
Out of this communication technology boom came the seedlings of many Michigan
newspapers. Often used as political battle grounds, the Democrats spared
with the Whigs, later to be known as the Republicans. Ann Arbor developed
its own papers, the State Journal and the True Democrat. These news releases
did not usually contain much of the local news. Readers often found that
most of the paper's pages were devoted to foreign affairs, poetry and national
news, because the editors wanted to emphasize their use of recent technological
innovations, such as the telegraph, in getting news from far away locations.
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