Post house (historical building)

This article is about the building used in the past for mail and passenger services. For the mail delivery centre, see Post office.
See also: Stage station

A post house, posthouse, or posting house was a house or inn where horses were kept and could be rented or changed out. Postriders could also be hired to take travellers[1] by carriage or coach and delivered mail and packages on a route, meeting up at various places according to a schedule. Routes included post roads. A postmaster was an individual from whom horses and/or riders known as postilions or "post-boys" who might help a coachman drive coaches could be hired. A postilion might also travel on a coach to take back his employer's horses. The postmaster would reside in the post house.[2]

Post houses functioned as the post offices of their day as national mail services came later.

  1. ^ Collins English Dictionary 12th Edition 2014, HarperCollins Publisher
  2. ^ Rogers, Fairman (1900). A Manual of Coaching. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company. pp. 279–283. OCLC 6478019.