With the help of an extremely 21st century company, the Postal Service is going back—in a small way—to its 17th-century roots. When the U.S. Postal Service teams up with Amazon to offer Sunday mail delivery, the move will mark the first Sunday mail delivery the U.S. has seen, with a few exceptions, for a century.

The USPS … has long been an early adopter. The system that laid, literally, the groundwork for a growing nation wasn’t just about mail; it was also about connection. It was “the sole communication lifeline of the newly formed nation.” The Founders and their followers recognized this. Until the USPS was reorganized in the 1970s, the final position in the presidential line of succession was, yep, the Postmaster. And in 1810, Congress passed a law requiring that local post offices be open for at least an hour on Sundays; most were open for much longer.  ‘Men would rush there as soon as the mail had arrived, staying on to drink and play cards.’

Despite and because of all that, the Postal Service was also … a party. As the historian Claude Fischer puts it, “post offices themselves were important community centers, where townsfolk met, heard the latest news read aloud, and just lounged about.” (The offices played that role, in part, because the Postal Service didn’t offer home delivery, even in large cities, until after 1860.) On Sundays, that town-center role was magnified. When everything else was closed but the local church, post offices were places you could go not just to pick up your mail, but also to hang out. They were taverns for the week’s tavern-less day. “Men would rush there as soon as the mail had arrived,” Fischer writes, “staying on to drink and play cards.”

Post offices, as a result, were also sources of controversy. In the 1820s, leaders from a variety of Protestant denominations campaigned to end Sunday delivery on religious grounds. Similar movements would arise over the course of the 19th century. And the objection wasn’t just to the Sunday-ness of Sunday delivery, to the fact that mail delivery on Sunday was a violation of the Sabbath. It was also to the social-ness of Sunday delivery. The six-day-delivery campaigns, Fischer writes, were “part of the churches’ wider efforts to enforce a ‘Puritan Sabbath’ against the demands of Mammon and against worldly temptations like those card games.” Exacerbating the problem, from the Puritanical perspective, was the rise in immigration among Catholics, “many of whom,” Fischer notes, “celebrated ‘Continental’ Sundays which included all sorts of secular pleasures—picnics, even beer halls—after (or instead of) church.”