History of the Kuhns Building and the Office Mail Chute, a Dayton Invention?

The Kuhn’s Building is one of Dayton’s most beautiful 19th century structures downtown. It predated the Dayton Arcade by about two decades, but today it is connected to the complex and considered a part of it.

The building is notable not just for its architecture (Romanesque Revival style) and materials (matching red brick and terra cotta) but also for one seemingly minor feature that turns out to have an interesting history: its mail chute.

The Kuhn’s Building’s mail chute is said to be “one of the earliest” installed in any building in the country (Owen, Dictionary of Ohio Historic Places). Other sources suggest that Dayton may have even been connected to its invention (for example, this NYTimes page).

Officially, Dayton is not the place where it was invented, as credit goes to James Goold Cutler of Rochester, New York, who patented the mail chute in 1883. One was first installed in the Elwood Building in Rochester the following year, and it turned out to be a crucial innovation as buildings began to creep ever higher in American cities.

A mail chute saved time and effort for tenants located on upper floors who previously had to walk downstairs and outside to place their mail in mailboxes on the street. They now could simply put their mail in a deposit box located on their floor which traveled down the chute to a central location on the ground floor where it was then picked up.

But according to research from Curt Dalton, a Daytonian came up with almost the exact same invention before it was patented by Cutler.

That person was Thomas J Payne, a black elevator operator in the Kuhns Building, who

… “noticed people carrying their mail downstairs each day to deposit in the lobby. Payne suggested to the building owner that a six-inch pipe be installed the height of the building, with slots cut in it for each of the four floors. (Benjamin) Kuhns agreed it was an excellent idea. After considerable difficulty, permission was obtained from the cautious post office to cut a hole in the top of the latter box for the chute, which was a galvanized rainpipe. Holes were cut in the ceiling to permit the pipe to extend through to the top floor. When completed the contraption looked like a small stove, but it proved successful.

Neither man thought much about it after that, until they learned two years later that a man in New York had obtained a patent on a chute almost identical to the one Payne had invented. Although very proud of his invention, Payne remained an elevator operator instead of the wealthy man he might have been.” (Dalton, Dayton Inventions: Fact and Fiction, p. 36)

Payne’s innovation is also not the only example of creativity flowing to an elevator operator in downtown Dayton. Famous author Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote his first volume of poetry while he worked as an elevator operator in the Callahan Building.

Some sources call the Kuhn’s example the first mail chute in an office building, or first “commercial mail chute,” which actually turns out to be a significant distinction.

Federal law at the time only allowed for mailboxes to be placed in public buildings, such as government offices, hotels, and train stations, and the earliest examples were limited to such buildings.

Thus the Kuhn’s Building chute was ahead of its time, as evident in Dalton’s description of how “permission was obtained from the cautious post office” to install it.

Across the country, many examples of the earliest mail chutes still survive today, and most often they are ignored. But an Atlas Obscura article inspires us to look closer and appreciate these relics of an earlier era of communication:

“If you have ever worked in an old building, the chances are you will have at some point walked past a small mysterious brass box. Located about halfway up the wall, it is notable for a flat length of glass leading both into and out it, disappearing into the ceiling and the floor below. Often painted over, ignored and unused, they are a relic of the golden age of early skyscrapers called the Cutler mail chute.”