Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 4, 1993 TAG: 9305040302
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ANTHONY, W.VA. LENGTH: Long
The riverside sawmill shut down years ago. The last business, the general store, closed in 1980. The post office shut in 1988 and, finally, ZIP code 24914 vanished forever in 1991.
"It was like we were losing something, another little piece of the community," says Donna Cooke, Anthony's last postmaster, who was transferred six miles across a mountain to Frankford.
Small post offices, some run by only a postmaster, are being swallowed as people move on, businesses close and suburbs creep outward.
Bits of the nation's past vanish with them.
"America's history is in the mail: our commercial history, our social, political history. It's all there," says Jim Bruns, director of the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. Postal Service said it closed 190 post offices in 1992, 91 in 1991, 129 in 1990, and 154 in 1989. Most were in small towns.
West Virginia, which lost more people in the 1980s than any other state, lost 13 post offices in 1991, also the most in the country.
Many towns are postmarks no longer: Hissop, Ala.; Friend, Kan.; Wonnie, Ky.; East Peru, Maine; Menemsha, Mass.; South Schroon, N.Y.; Bordulac, N.D., and Floe, W.Va.
Most were consolidated into rural routes or annexed by other post offices, moves the government says make the Postal Service more efficient and pennywise.
But progress can be bittersweet.
"A postal stamp that says `This is my town,' in many crossroads areas, that's all that's left," says Al Luloff, a rural communities sociologist at Penn State University.
America is becoming less rural as people move into suburbs and suburbs overrun farmland. The 1990 census showed 46.2 percent of Americans live in suburbs, up from 14 percent in 1930.
Mom-and-pop stores, once the favored location of post offices, can no longer keep pace with national discount chains built to serve a dozen small towns.
"Very rarely are you going to find a post office in a Wal-Mart," Luloff says. "Even if you did, 150,000 square feet doesn't exactly make for a lot of community feeling."
Nevertheless, many people are trading custom for convenience.
In Severance, a farming town in the northeasternmost corner of Kansas, the government closed the post office last year. A part-time clerk had run it since 1987, when Postmaster Doris Rowe retired.
But the termite-infested white-frame building used for nearly a century was deteriorating, so service was moved to nearby Troy.
"The thought I had when we closed was that this same group of people won't get together ever again," Rowe says.
Now there's no place for the town's 125 or so retirees to congregate, nowhere to collect money and flowers for townspeople who die, Rowe says.
"That's the one area difficult for a rural route to replace. We can provide all the concrete services, but we can't provide the community contact," says Janet Harness, Troy's postmaster.
Similar feelings abound in Bakerton, a one-time limestone-mining town of about 800 people in West Virginia's Eastern panhandle. Now Bakerton is a series of housing developments and virtually a bedroom of Washington, D.C.
The government wants to close the old post office, located in the general store, and merge it with neighboring Harpers Ferry's. Residents want otherwise.
"Our post office gives us a sense of belonging someplace, being somebody," says Robert Allen, leader of a petition drive to keep it.
"People meet and talk and see each other there. We've had a post office here for more than 100 years. We're losing our identity."
In 1901, the government operated 76,945 post offices, the most ever. The number has declined steadily to fewer than 27,000, says Lou Eberhardt, a Postal Service spokesman.
Guidelines from 1976 require the government to consider how closing a post office will affect a community. Those rules allow towns to appeal to the Postal Rate Commission.
"It's not some kind of master plan. It's evolution," Eberhardt says. "We're the last vestige of commerce in some of these communities. The corner grocery store is gone, the filling station is gone."
Mail delivery in America began in 1639 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony gave Richard Fairbanks permission to deliver shipboard mail from Boston. By the mid-1700s, New England was filled with "post roads," along which couriers carried the mail.
In 1775, the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin the first postmaster general. By 1789, the nation had 75 post offices and nearly 2,000 miles of post roads.
Early mapmakers used post offices as landmarks. Thus "no community could claim to be on the map until it could first claim a post office," says Richard Margolis, author of "At The Crossroads," a 1980 Postal Service publication.
"It was chiefly the post office that held rural Americans within the national framework . . . connecting the ever-receding West to the established, populous East," Margolis wrote.
Postmasters became town confidants and bulletin boards. "They were one-person, continuous wire services," Luloff says.
Home service in the countryside, known as "rural free delivery" or "R.F.D.," meant people no longer had to come to post offices by the early 1900s.
Last year, Postmaster General Marvin Runyon announced a 30,000-employee cutback, mostly in middle management. The cuts mean retiring small-town postmasters sometimes are not replaced.
"Everybody always thought there would be a Sears catalog, and look what happened to that. The economy is always changing," says Jim Miller, president of the National Association of Postmasters.
He says postmasters operating alone are more than Postal Service employees: They are the people who know how the government works, from draft registration to collecting Social Security.
"A good postmaster cuts off problems Congress never hears about," Miller says. "They're federal representatives to their communities."
Today, the Postal Service has progressed to electronic sorting and bar-coded envelopes. Cooke, the former Anthony postmaster, says technology means customers "get the same service, if not better."
In Clifton, an Ohio River town that lost its post office in November, Richard Gilkey laments a disappearance of accurate mail delivery and the town's only social outlet.
His sister-in-law, like her mother before her, was postmaster and ran the post office from their home.
"Everybody says it's for the best, but I wonder who it's for the best for," Gilkey says.
Congress, Miller says, is "going to have to decide what kind of price they're going to pay to keep post offices in rural America."
Luloff says the rural post offices is yet another worthwhile institution that interstate highways and cellular telephones have helped make obsolete.
"The isolated, self-sufficient rural community of America is gone," Luloff says.
"But there is a community of the mind that is still very real to many people. They don't have anything that's theirs, and in some places, people ask, `What's next?'
"And there aren't too many answers."
by CNB