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Question:

How long would it have taken a letter to get from Sturbridge to Boston in the 1830s (and how long does it take now)?

Answer:

Letters usually went by stagecoach. Certain coach lines were called "mail stages" and had the contract to carry the mail between post offices. At its fastest, the 1830s postal system could deliver a letter from Sturbridge to Boston in under two days. (That assumes you brought your letter into the post office in the morning and that the Sturbridge postmaster sorted it and put it in the bag for Boston in time for the stage from Hartford that would be stopping that afternoon. The letter would be carried into Worcester that night. From there it might be transferred to a night-running stage for Boston, so that it would arrive early the next morning. More likely, it would wait for a day-time stage leaving Worcester early in the morning, and arrive in Boston around mid-day. Then the letter would go to the post office, where it would wait for the addressee to come in to inquire about his or her mail -- and pay the postage on the letter. That's how the system worked before postage stamps!)

With the best of luck the letter could be in your correspondent's hands by that evening, taking a day and a half. Of course, it could also take quite a bit longer. Bad weather could delay all the stages, the local postmater might wait a day or two to sort the mail before sending it on, or the recipient might not come into the Boston post office for days. All these things together could mean that a week would elapse between posting the letter and receiving it in Boston.

Getting a message from one small community to another would be substantially more time-consuming, because there would be no direct mail stage connections and your letter would have to go through several different post offices and stage lines; this would take several days in most circumstances.

As for comparisons with the present day? We've all had both good and bad experiences with the mail, but today a huge volume of mail moves at comparatively inexpensive rates. Back then the volume of mail per person was much smaller and postage was, relatively speaking, much more expensive. In those terms, an ordinary letter of the 1830s cost as much as such overnight services as Express Mail or Federal Express do today!