Miss Etta Nelson of Pittsfield was a modest and unassuming woman. When she won the title of the most efficient rural mail carrier in Maine a century ago, it took a great deal of persuasion to get her to talk about her job and let a newsman take the photograph of her and her horse and sleigh that appeared in the Bangor Daily News on March 25, 1907. Etta Nelson had braved the rain and the sleet and the snow – and even an occasional passing automobile – like no other carrier. This was back in the days when delivering the mail in rural areas could be risky business.

Etta had received the award of “first place on the rural delivery efficiency list” after an investigation by the nation’s fourth assistant postmaster general identified her perseverance and courage. This was an award that would have been notable had it gone to anyone, but the fact that the recipient was a woman particularly intrigued the editor who sent the reporter who interviewed Etta.

Rural Free Delivery was only a decade old at the beginning of 1907. This revolutionary social reform enabled farmers to get their mail without trekking miles by horse and wagon over terrible roads. Etta’s route stretched for nearly 20 miles. She served about 75 families in parts of Pittsfield, Detroit and Palmyra.

She had assumed her duties on RFD No. 3 in 1903. She would leave the post office at 9 a.m. six days a week. Her work took from four to six hours depending on conditions, which included mudholes in the spring and blizzards in the winter.

Her role model was her father, Augustus, a blacksmith, carriage smith and farmer in West Pittsfield who had moved with his family to Pittsfield proper after securing the duties of another mail route, RFD No. 1. Etta decided she could be a rural mail carrier too. She had beat out a young man for the job on RFD 3, noted the newspaper. She was already a busy person. Since the death of her mother a dozen years earlier, she had been her father’s housekeeper, and mother and sister to her two younger brothers. And she “keeps no help,” marveled the reporter.

Etta’s delivery vehicles consisted of a horse and buggy (with the top removed) outfitted with a large carriage umbrella in summer and a horse and sleigh with 3-inch runners in winter. We even know what she wore when it got really cold – a sweater, a light-weight coat, a fur coat, a fur cap and two pairs of mittens, the outside pair being boys leather mittens.

A small, slender woman at 5 foot 3 inches in height and 115 pounds, Etta Nelson was “persevering and courageous,” the reporter wrote. He kept referring to her as “young,” but Etta was 31 years old, not particularly young for the era, especially if you were unmarried.

She had undertaken her job for her health, she said, and she enjoyed it when weather conditions were not too unfavorable. But for some unstated reason, Etta did not advise other women to become rural mail carriers, even though her own health had improved and she was much stronger than when she had first gone to work.

Perseverance and courage were what it was all about. In 31/2 years, Etta had failed to deliver the mail only twice, and on each of those days it was because the postmaster had told her not to go because of the conditions. Several times she had to abandon 2 or 3 miles of her route owing to “unbroken roads” after severe snowstorms. One day that past winter, someone had to come help her turn her sleigh around in deep snow after only a mile. On another day, she was the only carrier in the vicinity to finish her route during a severe snowstorm.

Perhaps the most exciting event in Etta’s career had occurred not because of snow or sleet or rain or mud, but because of one of those horseless carriages that farmers hated so much. The previous summer, an automobile had frightened her horse and she was thrown from her buggy. “With her usual stick-to-itiveness, she held to the reins and was dragged some distance before she would let them go,” recounted the Bangor Daily News reporter. “She was obliged to borrow a carriage to continue her drive. And on her return to the village where a rumor of her accident had preceded her, laughed off all who tried to question her.”

The Age of the Auto was upon the land. Efforts were even under way to motorize the RFD system. On Sept. 7, 1906, a few months before Etta won her award, the Bangor Daily Commercial ran a story announcing rural mail carriers probably would be riding in autos soon. After tests were conducted in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., that included “rocky and corduroy roadbeds, steep grades and mudholes,” the government picked a prototype vehicle, a buckboard with a four-horsepower, single-cylinder gasoline engine.

This vehicle weighed about 620 pounds and cost $380, said the newspaper. Two of Bangor’s rural carriers were thinking about purchasing them, it was reported. The expense would be less than keeping two horses (for alternate days), and it would cut delivery time in half, allowing the carriers to assume other employment.

The times were changing for RFD carriers, but Etta did not have to concern herself about it. That June she married Aaron Libby in Detroit. They had four children. Perhaps Etta had delivered Aaron’s mail and he had recognized her perseverance and courage. Or perhaps he just read about her feats in the Bangor Daily News.

Brenda Seekins, author of “Sebasticook Valley,” part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, provided information for this column. Etta was her husband’s grandmother. Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net