A gigantic cedar stump near Port Angeles, Washington, that served as a post office until 1905. Below, a card mailed from Port Angeles in 1908, presumably after they had moved from the tree stump. What a fine looking crew, and you’ve got to love the window treatment.
The post office in Casablanca. Which character in the film, do you suppose, picked up the mail for Rick’s Café Americain?
Card published by George Mumford, the postmaster, circa 1908.
Between 5:20 and 5:21 a.m. of Monday, December 28, 1908, almost half of the residents of Messina, Sicily, died in an earthquake, most buried in their beds as the city’s buildings collapsed on top of them. Two thousand more, fleeing the collapsing buildings and gathering at the waterfront, died 10 minutes later when a succession of three tsunami waves crashed over the shore. In the days that followed, the post office set up this temporary station for survivors.
In 1857, the Czarist government of Russia established a penal colony on Sakhalin, a large island in the Pacific Ocean off its east coast, just north of Japan. Inmates there endured a brutal climate, long treks in leg irons, floggings, wardens embezzling the food of helpless prisoners, women prisoners forced into prostitution, and daily murders. The administrators drank vodka all day long.
In 1890, Anton Chekhov, a 30-year-old writer, set out across Siberia on an journey of two and a half months by horseback, horse-drawn carriage, river steamer, and on foot, traveling through frigid cold, crossing flooded rivers, walking for hours in mud, choking on the ash from forest fires.
Upon arrival, he told the wardens he was conducting a census. He later wrote, “Sakhalin is a place of the most unbearable suffering that can befall a man, free or shackled… I have seen Ceylon, which is paradise, and Sakhalin, which is hell.”
Needless to say, in such a setting, mail was welcomed. These photos of the Sakhalin post office date from between 1894 and 1905, when a Japanese invasion of the island led to the penal colony’s abolition. They are from the digital collection of the New York Public Library.
Bending the rules just a bit to include post offices and postmen from cigarette cards, held in the digital collections of the New York Public Library.
Built in 1910, the Grand Post Office, designed by J. Voinot and M. Tondoire in the Moorish style, stands in the center of Algiers, capital of Algeria.
The postcard and photo below show details from the interior.
A postcard of the Amerika, mailed from the post office on board the Amerika, circa 1909. Art by Hans Bohrdt.
Post Office Postcards 