You have walked past them on street corners your whole life. That familiar blue box, standing there waiting to swallow your letters and birthday cards. But here is something worth thinking about the next time you drop something in the slot: those boxes were not always blue. Not even close.
In fact, the color we all take for granted today was not settled on until 1971. That means if you mailed something in the 1950s or early 1960s, you were dropping it into a green box.
It Started with Green, and Then Red
The earliest official U.S. mailboxes were green. The New York Times referenced that color as far back as 1860. By the 1880s and into the early 1890s, the boxes were repainted red.
Red did not last long, though. The problem was simple and a little embarrassing: people kept confusing the red mailboxes with police call boxes, which were painted the same color. So out went the red.
By 1897, mailboxes were painted silver-white. Then, in 1905, they went back to green and stayed that way for the next several decades.
A Patriotic Makeover in 1955
In 1955, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield decided it was time for a change. He announced that mailboxes would be painted red, white, and blue, the colors of the American flag. The idea was to make them easy to spot and impossible to mix up with anything else.
The design split the colors across the box: the upper half red, the lower half blue, and the notice on the front painted white. It was patriotic, eye-catching, and very much of its era.
By 1964, though, the three-color scheme was starting to feel like more trouble than it was worth. Painting each box in three separate colors took time and effort. Postal officials began looking for a simpler solution.
How Blue Finally Won
The design firm Loewy/Snaith suggested going with a single color: blue. Their first idea was a sky blue shade, but that was turned down. Tests using a darker shade of blue were run in a handful of cities, and the response was positive.
In 1969, the Post Office Department made it official. Dark blue would be the standard color for all U.S. mailboxes. The gradual rollout began the following year, and by 1971, that dark blue was the standardized color from coast to coast.
It is a small piece of American history hiding in plain sight. The next time you drop a letter in that blue box, you will know it took more than a century of green, red, silver, and patriotic stripes to get there.