SEPTEMBER 2020 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 65
REAR VIEW
SUZIE BRUNNER
A COURAGEOUS CARRIER
BY ANNIE WILKINSON
Nothing could stop her — not snow, not
rain, not wild animals nor robbers nor
deserted dirt roads in the dead of night.
She defended herself with a gun and
thrashed thieves with her buggy whip.
As one of only two women in the country
who carried the U.S. mail, Susanna
(“Suzie”) A. Brunner was the first
woman on Long Island’s North Shore
in New York to be entrusted with the
Port Washington-Great Neck route
in the 1880s. Guiding the reins of the
horse she named “William J. Tilden,”
the tough daughter of immigrant
German parents known as “a devil of
a mail carrier” got the job done.
One has to wonder: Were she alive
today, would she let politics, or prejudice,
or the actions of any human decimate
her postal power and sabotage
her appointed rounds? Or would she
just load up the buggy with precious
cargo and keep on riding?
NO SHRINKING VIOLET
The gun-toting young woman chose
a career that followed in the carriage
tracks of women who, since before
the Revolutionary War, had delivered
the mail. They were popularly called
“postmistresses” but the proper term
is “postmasters,” according to the
Smithsonian National Postal Museum,
because, as one female postmaster put
it, they were “not to be known as ‘any
man’s mistress!’”
Brunner was born on Dodge's Island
(renamed O'Gorman's Island then
Manhasset Isle) in 1858. Her family
moved when she was 1 year old to the
Samuel Dodge House at One Sandy
Hollow Road on the Cow Neck Peninsula,
as Port Washington was then
called, to a house she would live in
until her death in 1933; the house still
stands today.
As a young woman in her early 20s,
she set out to be a letter carrier with a
horse she had broken to harness herself.
She knew that the mail must go
through, rain or shine — a dictate that
sometimes meant digging Mr. Tilden
out of snowdrifts.
Suzie Brunner was the first woman to deliver mail on what would become the Gold Coast.
The job was physically draining and
fraught with danger, but she faithfully
worked at her routes from 1881 to 1885.
Keeping regular schedules throughout
Queens County — before there was
a Nassau County — carriers were often
targeted by thieves and other attackers,
like one drunken, out-of-control
photographer who crossed her path.
After disappearing for a day, he was
found with blackened eyes and body
bruises, and died several days later.
Legend has it that Brunner told a reporter
that the previous day she had
beaten him with the butt of her whip
in his face and eyes because of his bad
conduct while intoxicated. Others
believed that the man died of alcohol
withdrawal.
DOING A MAN’S JOB
After retiring from her route, she
lived a well-rounded life and was respected
in the community. When not
working on her family’s farm, she and
Mr. Tilden plowed others’ fields. She
worked as a public school janitor and
opened a store that catered to children
walking to or from school, according
to an account by Ross Lumpkin, a
trustee at the Cow Neck Peninsula
Historical Society. “Aunt Suzie,” as
the locals called her, always wore an
apron, even when she went to church.
After her father died, she became what
one observer called “the man of the
family.” Sensing the town’s rising prosperity,
she purchased three properties
around Sandy Hollow Road as well as
the old schoolhouse, which she moved
across the street.
Cow Neck was moving into the modern
world: In 1898, it was renamed
Port Washington, which became
part of the newly established Nassau
County. The same year, the Long
Island Rail Road extended its Great
Neck line to Manhasset and Port
Washington by building a train
trestle viaduct over the marshes
at the southern end of Manhasset
Bay. The first electric trolley line
opened in 1908, carrying passengers
from the Manhasset Bay Yacht
Club to Roslyn.
THE MAIL MUST GO THROUGH
Despite the nation’s growth, there
were still many not-so-modern beliefs,
including the conviction many
people had that a woman should
not be doing a man’s job. In 1908 the
Washington Post reported that when
the civil service proposed allowing
women to take the clerk-carrier exam
in Alexandria, Virginia, the entire
masculine population stood in the
streets and denounced the proposal.
One Col. Yancey shouted, “Lives there
a man with a soul so dead that he
would permit his mail to be carried
by a female mail carrier?”
Still, although women were popularly
regarded as delicate and fragile, the
ones who carried mail were seen as
larger-than-life legends, as prejudice
began to give way to acceptance: By
1902, about 25 women worked as rural
mail carriers throughout the country,
and in 2019, nearly 37 percent of the
country’s postal service mail carriers
were women.
“A devil of a mail carrier,” they said of Suzie Brunner.
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
