If I had an RFD address (or rural address in another format) instead of using an address number and a street name, how would I give directions when I needed a fire-department, police, or ambulance response? Or how would I give directions to an out-of-town visitor, in a non-emergency situation, to get to my place? Obviously a post-office box address would be of no value…
Most rural areas are converting to 911 addressing for exactly this reason. In many cases, your rural route number would be replaced with a street address type number and road name. The street address numbers are typically assigned as a mileage measurement from some landmark so, for example, everyone on Dry Gulch Road would get a number based on the mileage from where Dry Gulch Road started, and a number like 5678 would be 5.678 miles from the intersection (with even numbers on one side of the road and odd on the other). This allows emergency agencies and anyone else with a clue to find you easily.
This conversion is often called 911-addressing because it’s driven by state rules regulating the uniformity of emergency services access. If it’s not happening in your rural area, you should ask your county or state representatives why not.
Thanks, Micco. 
My older brother lives in a rural part of eastern Pennsylvania and we only have a box number for him.
I have lived in urbanized Los Angeles for 50 years. 
In days of old [I worked for Wells Fargo in the mid 90s] rural homes were frequently assigned a number that you had to report to the PD or FD for them to respond properly.
I rarely use the house number when giving directions to my farm to people I know, i tell them about how far it is from an intersection and to look for the light blue 71 VW beetle in the rive=)
The numbers only help if you’re on the right road though. If you live on Hilltop Road and you have to take Cemetery Road to River Road to get to 5678 Hilltop Road, it’s not as simple. It can be a lot harder to find the right road in the country.
We had fire numbers well before we had 911. When we got 911 the county sent out a questionnaire and one of the things they asked for was directions to my house. Nobody asked, but I recommend that anyone concerned about emergency services finding their house call the county and see if they have directions on file.
I spent a few years as a firefighter and ambulance attendant in a small town, and we made a lot of rural runs. Finding the place depended on the accuracy of the description and the driver’s knowledge of the roads. Sometimes the billowing cloud of smoke helped too. We often got instructions such as, “Head out Farm Road 1998 like you’re going to the lake, and then just past Chewy’s Barbecue you’ll see an old tractor parked by a blacktop road. It’s my cousin’s tractor, and it’s got a ‘for sale’ sign on it. Just take that road off to the right till you pass a couple of stock ponds, and then take the third dirt road cut-off to the left after the second pond. You’ll have to open the gate, but you wanna be sure to shut it again so my cows don’t get out. Then . . . .”
Generally, it meant the house was pretty much burned down by the time we got there. Also, the county truck we used only held 750 gallons of water, and that doesn’t go far when a frame house is fully involved. We’d empty the truck, then go to the nearest hydrant to fill up again–usually a 30-minute job, and plenty of time for the house to finish burning down.
Slightly off-topic, but I like this story. One day a woman called, all in a panic, saying “My house is on fire! My house is on fire!” The operator asked where she lived, and she just repeated what she said before. It is a stressful situation, I suppose. After a few more efforts to get the address, the operator shouted, “Ma’am! How do we get there?” She paused for a second and asked, “Don’t y’all still have them red fire trucks?”
That’s cute, Mr. O. 
In Ready for the Plaintiff!, Melvin Belli mentioned a miller in Wisconsin named Bolding, in the days when rural telephone companies all used magneto-crank phones (before the era of dial phones).
Mr. Bolding told the rural operator (like Sarah in The Andy Griffith Show) “Send the fire department! My mill is on fire!”
The operator said, “Sorry, Mr. Bolding, your bill is overdue. If you come to the office and pay your bill, we will be happy to call the fire department for you.”
Of course, everything Bolding had went up in smoke. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in Bolding’s favor: the phone company was liable for the damages–especially since his bill was not overdue. Belli added, “What happened to the operator is not recorded.” :mad:
How about a map grid reference? I believe a lot of emergency services use GPS tracking for their vehicles and as such must have the infrastructure and mapping skills required to locate properties this way.
Just an idea…
Most American rural areas would have a survey address – something like ‘section 15, northeast quarter’ – within a township that is either named or numbered. I would think most farmers would know their survey address so they could use it in emergencies. (Incidentally, a quarter of a quarter section is 40 acres, so most farmers would own land in multiples of 40 acres, hence ‘back 40’.) Before they were assigned 911 numbers, people in rural areas would probably have to use directions like ‘half a mile down X Road’ or ‘two and a half miles north of Springfield’. It wouldn’t be too hard to find a fire even with rather vague directions, on account of the smoke and all.
As MrO says, most people describe landmarks. In the mid-80s, I had to call the fire department when I lived at a rural address. I told them the nearest cross roads and that our red brick house was across the street and two houses down from the X’s place (the Xs lived in two large houses on a hilltop, rather eyecatching).
Some dumb bunny dispatcher had a hard time parsing my directions. I feel confident in calling her a dumb bunny because after the first company had arrived, one fireman radioed other departments for help, and he used basically the same description that I used, right down to using the X’s place as the primary marker!
In these small country towns, most people know their way around the backroads and can navigate by landmarks–even landmarks that aren’t there anymore.
I’m getting a splitting headache just remembering all of this.
I had to manage the process of changing over from rural routes to E-911 addresses in a rural VA county. The hardest damn part was getting people to agree to the frigging street names!
Street numbers aren’t done by mile measurements here in VA (I have no idea about other areas).
A uniform grid has been developed for the entire state (I can’t recall what it is based on…UTM coordinates maybe?). Moving west to east, the numbers increase. They also increase moving south to north. Beginning at the western county boundary, addresses are assigned, with a new block beginning every 600 feet. The same works going north or south.
You assign the address at the driveway location, NOT the house location (in rural localities it is not uncommon to have have long meandering driveways).
Again, ungodly headaches and much, much anguish. Particularly when you found you’ve made a screw up and have to change someone’s address. Then the REALLY get mad.
About thirty years ago, the farm I grew up on (in northwest Ohio) was assigned a street address (although it was about half a mile either way to the nearest house). If you send a letter to someone living there, you now address it to XXXXX County Road YY. If you call 911, you now tell the operator that you live at XXXXX County Road YY. (Excuse the use of “XXXXX” and “YY”, but I don’t see any need to mention the real address.) Before that, letters were addressed to just “Rural Route 1” (and the name of the nearest town, of course). I have no idea what you would have done with calling Emergency before they assigned the street address. There was no desperate need for a street address in sending letters, since there were few enough people that the postman had everyone’s name memorized. I presume then that the real need for street addresses was for calling 911. I presume that if you tell the operator at 911 the street address, a map pops up on their computer with directions to the farm.
Your brother should be seeing a real address soon dougie_monty as PA is working on the problem of RD# vs. physical street address. They did away with my RD several years ago-I’m in Central PA.
The question of maps and so forth varies widely. Some counties have box systems and a given box number relates to a detailed page in a map book that lives in the rig. I’ve heard some dispatches direct the responding unit to “page 26, B-22” likely directing them to an ADC map book of the county.
While we’re on the subject, would everybody be kind enough to go outside tonight and see if they can find their house number quickly from the street? Trees grow, outdoor lights may burn out, and forget that “Thirteen Forty Four” script stuff. Is the number plainly visible against a contrasting background?
Fires aren’t that tough-I can usually spot the red stuff or smoke plume. What frustrates emergency workers is trying to find a house for a heart attack or infant in respiratory distress call. Your pizza will also get to you sooner.
Until I left home in 1982, my address was of the form:
BrotherCadfael
East Cowpie, VT 05XXX
No street address, no apartment number, no nothing. Oh, and when we first moved to that house in 1966, we were on a nine-party telephone line. I kid you not!
I now live in a rural area with relatively recently assigned 911 addresses. The biggest problem was that the 911 commission displayed a stunning lack of creativity in assigning street names.
MrO, our local fire departments were famous for saving cellars.
Kymodoce, providing GPS coordinates to the emergency services may or may not be helpful in rural areas, as roads do not follow a defined grid as in the cities. The shortest distance between two points in the country is almost never a straight line…
While I wouldn’t really consider it rural these days, to call the police or fire department on Martha’s Vineyard and get them to your house quickly, it’s best to know your lot number so you don’t have to give them detailed directions. I think the reason they still don’t always use street addresses is because so many of the houses are well back from the roads, and many either have unmarked driveways or the turnoffs from the main roads are unmarked, unnamed, and/or shared with other houses.
At the moment, I live in Prince Edward County, Virginia, and we now have the 911 street names and numbers.
About a year prior to this, I had to ring for an ambulance for a possible heart attack (not me, but the person living with me), and the ambulance took over an hour instead of the 15 minutes it ought to because they got lost…my directions were excellent, I promise, but I had to get the ambulance from a town 20 miles away only using the route numbers, and in several places the road ‘jogged’ (turn right onto 639, then left onto 658, then right onto 639 again…) And the road we live down is a private, unpaved lane, so they drove right past it despite me describing it and all the landmarks…
After they gave everything street names (and yes, in my area, there were feuds over the names of the streets!), I had to call someone out here again, and was trying to remember the new names of the streets, and that service asked me to give the old route numbers, because they had a county road-grid map, and said it was still easier to follow than the new names…
In fact, if we want to get fire, police, whatever out here, I just tell them I live next door to Long Time Resident who’s Got the Second Hand Car Place in Town and Everyone Knows Him!
I’m moving soon…
Road names in areas where they’ve been converted over can be hilarious, because usually the residents are asked to name the road. You get “Ma and Pa’s Place” or “Jim’s Road”. That type of thing. I’ve seen several "No Place"s around.
I suppose, also, that many emergency agencies have access to rolls of residents’ post-office box numbers, and coordinates on a physical map.
I’ve been a data entry operator for TBN, which maintains a database on donors all over the U.S., Canada, and other countries. Many of these people have box numbers or rural-route addresses. (Interestingly enough, however, a local newspaper published for the Topanga area northwest of Santa Monica, CA, uses descriptions of sites–once “by the bent oak” to refer to an abandoned vehicle that was being cannibalized bit by bit (the reporter even found that someone had removed the engine!)