“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

For 18-year-old Martin Bundy, the time-honored postal creed was not yet in existence. Yet, New Castle’s first mail carrier certainly fit the mold.

The man who later became judge, a member of the Indiana General Assembly and one of New Castle’s first bankers delivered mail on horseback during a time when much of Henry County was an untamed wilderness.

According to the centennial edition of The Courier-Times, published in 1941, Bundy was employed by John Silver, who ran a store in New Castle and held the contract for the mail route through Henry County.

The year was about 1835 and New Castle, the town, was younger than Bundy, himself.

Bundy’s task was a challenging one for an 18-year-old. He rode round trip from Centerville to New Castle to Noblesville and back. In addition to the snow, rain, heat and gloom of night, Bundy had to ride through many miles of forest that separated communities at that time.

The centennial edition of The Courier-Times described Bundy’s route this way:

“Centerville (formerly Salisbury) then the seat of Wayne County and a prospering trade center, received the mail from Cincinnati. Bundy rode the route to New Castle, then to Middletown, then a mere hamlet, to Anderson, which had scarcely 100 inhabitants, and thence to Noblesville.”

Bundy’s arrival at his various stops drew small crowds of eager residents. He was, in a way, their network newscast long before television existed.

“There was a General Stevenson on Bundy’s route between Middletown and Noblesville, who was a subscriber to a Philadelphia newspaper,” the centennial edition of The Courier-Times read. “At each stop, settlers asked Bundy the news from the East. Those were the days when men like Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Webster and Hayne were prominent.

“Many times, Judge Bundy recalled in later years, he would read at length from General Stevenson’s Philadelphia newspaper to people who were gathered along his route, later delivering the paper, already well-thumbed, to Stevenson.”

Bundy would ride on to greater heights from that early postal job. He attended Oxford University in Miami of Ohio and was later admitted to the bar as a lawyer. In 1844, less than a decade after his mail-delivery rides, Bundy was elected Henry County treasurer, then to the state legislature and finally judge of the common pleas court.

In 1860, he was a delegate to the Republican convention in Chicago that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president. He soon became a friend of Lincoln’s and was later appointed by the nation’s 16th president as paymaster of the army.

But the greatest “Bundy” delivery arguably came years after his postal rides through the wilderness – and not by him, but by his wife. She gave birth to a son they named Omar, the Bundy who grew up to become the general that would refuse to retreat during the battle of Belleau Wood in World War I and help the U.S. turn the tide to ultimately prevail over Germany.