At the turn of the century, the landscape changed again with the advent of the Rural Free Delivery service, which delivered rural residents’ mail directly to them so they no longer needed to travel to the nearest post office every day. As a consequence, only village post offices, like that in Kenyon, survived and many of the rural post offices shut down. The settlements that had grown around them vanished as well, leaving the quadrangle and those around it with a surprising number of ghost towns for a relatively small area.

People did, however, still need to travel for other purposes. This is clear from interviews conducted by Lilly Setterdahl with people who grew up in rural Goodhue County in the early 1900s. One of the main reasons that people traveled to hub areas was to attend church, although it was not possible to go every day because of the poor quality of the roads and the never-ending work of maintaining a farm. Churches offered services as well as religious classes, which some people attended. Higher education, however, was not available in these rural areas. Myrtle Hilan and Helen Hyllengren recount that they both attended high school in Cannon Falls, but they both had to find places to live while there. Cannon Falls was not part of their immediate world, and they therefore could not commute the distance to and from home every day.

The immediate spatial world, while still potentially larger than before, had modified the elements that it contained. Daily travel was still at times necessary for supplies or services, but daily travel for mail was no longer a necessity. Traveling farther distances was therefore required to fulfill other daily necessities.