A Unique African American U.S. Postal Service Figure Celebrated at Gloucester County Historical Society

Daisy Nelson-Century at the Gloucester County Historical Society
In a performance at the Gloucester County Historical Society, historical interpreter Daisy Nelson-Century portrays Mary Fields a.k.a. Stagecoach Mary. (Photo: Hoag Levins)

As historical interpreter Daisy Nelson-Century was finishing up her Gloucester County Historical Society performance as Stagecoach Mary she wondered aloud why the U.S. Postal Service has failed to issue a commemorative stamp for Mary Fields, who was the first African American woman to carry mail on a Star Route in the 19th century.

And indeed, in the last century, the U.S. Postal Service has issued all manner of stamps honoring the work and legacy of its white, male, Pony Express, Rural Free Delivery, Special Delivery, Certified Mail, City Mail, Air Mail, and special Postal Delivery carriers. But nothing for the woman who may best represent the early era when wooden-wheeled wagon drivers and their horses operated a national mail system that was the crucial communications network stitching together the far-flung regions of a rapidly expanding nation. This was the time when intrepid mail drivers braving extraordinary hazards along a wild frontier established what became the creed that “Neither snow nor rain nor heat, nor gloom of night will stop mail carriers from completing their rounds.” In 1986, the Postal Service did issue a Star Route commemorative stamp — but it features the illustration of a 1915 Ford Model T Truck.

“If anyone deserves a commemorative stamp, it’s Mary Fields,” Nelson-Century told the Historical Society audience that applauded the concept after just watching a re-enactment of some of the key events in the life of one of the most unique African American characters to come out of the Wild West.

“Mary Fields was a force to be reckoned with and a rabble rouser, but she was also very kindhearted,” continued Nelson-Century. “When I began doing the research for this performance, I contacted Montana and found there’s no statue of her there. I don’t understand why she’s not being commemorated for the remarkable and historical person that she was.”

A retired science teacher, Nelson-Century in 2020 began creating and staging re-enactments of the life and work of some of the country’s most remarkable African American women. For her Historical Society November 28th Stagecoach Mary performance, she wheeled in a wagon of props, including a leather horse wipe, the long reins of a horse-drawn wagon, knives, two six guns, rifle, and a hand-rolled cigar of the kind the indomitable Mary Fields was known to favor.

Mary Fields with her 1876 Winchester carbine
The real Mary Fields with her 1876 Winchester carbine.

Dressed in the coarse clothes of a frontier pioneer with a battered wide-brimmed wagoneer’s hat jammed on her head, Nelson-Century climbed up into the wagon seat she had made out of two Historical Society chairs, grabbed the reins that stretching across the floor and urged her imaginary mule, Moses, forward in the journey that took the audience nearly 200 years back in time to meet Mary Fields.

Fields was born on a Tennessee plantation in 1832 and spent the next three decades doing hard labor as a slave before being freed by the Emancipation Proclamation at the end of the Civil War. Over the next 20 years, she wandered out across the frontier taking jobs as a farm laborer, construction laborer, gardener, laundress, cook, Mississippi river boat deck hand, and “freighter.” This last term described a person who drove a horse and wagon hauling goods back and forth between remote frontier towns, farms, and encampments.

In 1885, she traveled to Cascade in the Montana Territory to help a friend and ended up settling there as a housekeeper and groundskeeper at St. Peter’s Mission, a hardscrabble Rocky Mountain settlement and Jesuit religious institution. The mission convent received regular deliveries of supplies via a Star Route wagon. Fields became familiar with a carrier’s duties and the daily challenges posed by driving a wooden-wheeled wagon across the region’s rugged terrain.

The only African American resident of the Cascade area, Fields, a bear of a woman at six feet tall and some 200 pounds, became known as one of the region’s most colorful characters. She kept two six-guns and a knife concealed in her clothes, smoked cigars, often wore men’s clothing, and routinely drank in male-only saloons. She was notorious for her willingness to engage in gunfights and fisticuffs with any white male who disrespected her. Those activities resulted in her ultimate firing from the mission, after which she became engaged in odd jobs around Cascade cooking, doing laundry, babysitting, tending gardens and becoming a fan of the local baseball team.

In 1895, at 62-years-of-age, Field saw a tacked-up United States Post Office Department (USPOD) advertisement in Cascade seeking applicants for a Star Route carrier job. She applied and, in the final test, beat out male competitors as the fastest person to hitch up a team of six horses. She won the contract to become the first African American woman to carry mail on a frontier Star Route. Her route snaked 17 miles through treacherous wilderness terrain between Cascade on the shores of the Missouri River to St. Peters in the mountains.

Frontier journalists, infamous for exaggerated Wild West story details to please newspaper editors and audiences back east, dubbed Fields “Stagecoach Mary, a name that sticks with her even today. However, she never drove a stagecoach, she used an open buckboard wagon pulled by one or two horses or a mule.

The Star Route work was as arduous and demanding as Fields was tenacious and tough. The dirt-and-rock-studded roads, mud, rickety wooden bridges, fierce winter blizzards and scorching summer sun were regular hazards facing a lone wagon driver, along with bandits and wolves. In instances when the snow got too high for the wagon to get through, Fields donned snowshoes and trudged through her deliveries on foot. In one instance, when her wagon was tangled in a partially collapsed bridge, she spent the night in the back of the open wagon using her rifle to keep a pack of circling wolves at bay.

In an era before mass communications, when mail was the single most important channel for news and business information, particularly in isolated frontier settlements, Fields earned the gratitude of her community and a reputation for never losing a single item of mail.

After eight years of mail delivery, Fields, then 71, retired and opened a laundry business in Cascade. When she died of liver failure in 1914, the local newspaper reported that her body lay in repose at the new Cascade opera house “where a large number of friends and acquaintances paid their last tributes of respect… The funeral was one of the largest ever held in Cascade.”

Mary Fields grave marker