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To find your answer, we typed "post office" into the Yahoo! search field. The most promising result seemed to be the United States Postal Service category, so we clicked on it. Conveniently enough, Yahoo! listed a sub-category on the history of the USPS. We clicked on the first site listed, History of the United States Postal Service 1775-1993, a subpage of the official USPS web site. It included a list of significant dates in postal history, which stated that in 1639, Richard Fairbanks' tavern in Boston was named repository for overseas mail. No further explanation was provided, so we ventured on in search of a more definitive answer. We figured there was no better authority on the subject than the USPS, so we continued exploring the site. We found a comprehensive history of the postal service that corroborated our earlier finding, implying that Richard Fairbanks' tavern in Boston was the official mail depot for letters brought from or sent overseas. Depending on your definition of a post office, this tavern could qualify as the nation's first. However,
further down the page we learned that William Penn established a post office in Pennsylvania in 1683, which could ostensibly be considered the first official P.O.. Either way, you have Benjamin Franklin, the first Postmaster General, to thank for the current state of the U.S. postal service. Apparently, "America's present Postal Service descends in an unbroken line from the system he planned and placed in operation."
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