Essex County Herald

A Blind Mail Carrier.
The mail route between Claryville, a mountain hamlet in Sullivan county, N. Y., and Big Indian, Ulster county, is twenty-one miles long, and is through the roughest and wildest portion of the Catskills. The road is so rough, in fact, that the mail is carried on foot, and the carrier is Clark North, who is totally blind. He has carried the United States mail over almost impassable Catskill routes for thirty years, since he was a boy, and has never seen any of the wild region through which he has traveled. His former route was in the wilderness region between Shokan and Samsonville, at that time an almost unknown country, frequented only by hunters and fishermen, yet the sightless carrier made his trips three times a week with the regularity of clockwork. He travels his present circuit of forty-two miles three times a week, and has never missed a day either in winter or summer. Snow drifts nor floods seem to be any barrier to him. He has never met with an accident. In spite of his long life of exposure to rain, snow, cold, and heat he is wonderfully vigorous in health. He is a walking encyclopedia of the region through which he travels.
Although unable to read, he industriously gathers from others all information on the current topics of the day, and, as he never forgets anything, is probably the best informed person on general subjects in that part of the Catskill region. Kind, honest, industrious, reliable, no citizen in this region stands higher in the estimation of all classes than Clark North, the blind mail carrier of the Catskills.
—New York Sun.