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 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.

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