Tucked on a street east of Riverside Park in southwest Detroit, on the bank of the Detroit River south of the Ambassador Bridge, you’ll find the small gray building of The J.W. Westcott Company.
If you’re not familiar, the company is known for its official U.S. Postal Service mail boat, a floating post office with its own zip code: 48222.
The world’s first non-military floating postal zip code.
Since 1874, the The J.W. Westcott Company has made deliveries to ships, first by row boat and now one of two boats that typically deliver goods from mid-April to late December (when ice thaws on the Great Lakes).
According to background history on their website, delivery service to passing vessels first started when John Ward Westcott founded the company in 1874 and delivered information to passing vessels from his dock on Belle Isle:
The modern marvel of engineering – a line tied to a bucket – would be thrown over the side of the passing vessel.
Westcott would place communique inside and the bucket would quickly hoist back up. This string of events would come to be known and ‘mail in the pail’.
Twenty-four hours a day now during their season, the J.W. Westcott II or its backup boat M.S. Westcott delivers mail, packages, and food, to vessels on the Detroit River.
With email, physical letters and other correspondence has decreased over the years.
The company expanded to make DoorDash deliveries of takeout from local restaurants as well as provide Amazon delivery services to the marine community on the Detroit River.
I hoped to to capture a photo of one of the boats, but I couldn’t see them along the shoreline.
Unfortunately, a lot of construction and closed streets are around the office.
With the snow and ice storms we’ve had in southeast Michigan the past few weeks, it was challenging to get around the mud, puddles, ice and snow in the area.
Have you seen the J.W. Westcott II or M.S. Westcott along the shoreline or delivering goods on the Detroit River?
