In 1916, a Utah bank director named William Coltharp looked at the freight bill for his new building and decided the United States Postal Service would build it cheaper. He was right, and by the end of the year his shipment had helped push the Post Office to finally define the loophole he was using.

A Town at the End of the Road

Vernal, Utah, sat far from any railroad. Everything that arrived there had to survive the last leg by wagon.

Coltharp wanted a proper pressed-brick facade for the Bank of Vernal, not the plainer local brick used on most of the building. The nearest supplier was the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company, whose delivery route to Vernal ran more than 400 miles by rail and wagon.

A commercial freight wagon would have cost roughly twice as much as sending the same weight through the mail. Under the parcel post system launched just a few years earlier, packages up to 50 pounds could travel at a flat, cheap rate.

Coltharp did the math and picked the mail.

Fifteen Thousand Bricks, One Package at a Time

The brick company wrapped each pressed brick individually and packed them ten to a crate, keeping every package right at the 50-pound parcel post limit.

Starting in the summer of 1916, crate after crate of bricks left Salt Lake City by rail. They changed trains at Mack, Colorado, rode a narrow-gauge line to Watson, Utah, then finished the last stretch by truck into Vernal.

The U.S. Postal Service's own historians put the final count at about 15,000 bricks, roughly 37.5 tons, shipped in thousands of individual parcels over several months.

Only the facade got the expensive treatment. The rest of the two-story building used cheaper, locally fired brick, a detail that often gets left out when the story is retold.

The Rule That Finally Got Written

Vernal's postmaster and his assistant were already putting in 15-hour days keeping up with the town's parcel post boom before the brick shipments even started.

More than 100 miles away in Salt Lake City, that city's postmaster had spent over a year asking Washington to spell out exactly what counted as a "large or unusual" shipment, a rule the Post Office had used since 1914 without ever defining it.

Historic interior of the Bank of Vernal (Parcel Post Bank) in Vernal, Utah, showing the old bank vault or safe — Inside the bank the bricks eventually built.

Inspired in part by the sheer size of the brick shipment, the Second Assistant Postmaster General finally answered on November 7, 1916: anything over 200 pounds from one sender to one addressee in a single day would count as a "large or unusual shipment" and require approval before it could be accepted.

By the time the new rule took effect, the bulk of Coltharp's brick shipment had already gone through. The last crates arrived that November, and the building was finished.

What the Legend Gets Wrong

The story has circulated for decades, and it has picked up some extra weight along the way.

Many retellings claim 80,000 bricks, or that the entire bank was mailed brick by brick. Neither holds up. The Postal Service's own historian and the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum both put the figure closer to 15,000, and only the visible facade was pressed brick from Salt Lake City.

The math backs up the smaller number. Fifteen thousand bricks at parcel post weight limits comes out to about 37.5 tons, which matches the shipping records. Eighty thousand bricks would have weighed closer to 200 tons.

The Bank That's Still There

The building opened as the Bank of Vernal in early 1917 and later became a branch of Zions Bank. Locals and historians simply call it the Parcel Post Bank.

It still stands on Main Street in Vernal today, its mailed facade intact.

The National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. holds one of the actual bricks in its collection, a small piece of a building the U.S. mail was never supposed to be able to deliver.

Related Tags