Tyler, Texas, was named for President John Tyler who supported the admission of Texas to the United States, and the town is best noted as the hometown of Dooley Wilson who played Sam in Casablanca. This postcard image shows the Tyler post office in 1910, with its awnings shading the postal clerks from the Texas sun; by 1947, this building had been replaced by a box.
Every post office should open with fanfare, as did this one in Pleasant Point, New Zealand, in 1912. The building survives today as a cafe.
East Sioux Falls, home to this humble post office, is today a ghost town, but once was a spot where much store was set by the way you wore your hat. The short-lived town, linked to the rapid rise and demise of a local quarry, was set in Minnehaha County, named for the heroine of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855).
Before Route 9 was completed on the west shore of Lake George, the mail traveled by boat. Shown on a Jesse Sumner Wooley postcard, the steamboat Sagamore is settled near the shore after hitting a rock in July, 1927. But we can heave a sigh of relief because on this card mailed that week from Silver Bay, N.Y., Arlene Stevens wrote, ” Dear Mother, This is the boat that my cake was on but am so glad they saved the mail.”
This Palladian post office was built in 1912, designed to fit into a corner of the main square of this South Carolina town long associated with horses in general and polo ponies in particular. The building is said to be lovely inside as well as outside, with 16-foot ceilings and woodwork of solid oak. Today, it’s home to a photographer’s studio.
While we’re in Korea, a stop at Kunsan Air Base, Republic of Korea, circa 1953. This air base on the shores of the Yellow Sea is still there; I imagine they have updated the post office.
Two views of the old central post office in Seoul, Korea.
And below, something you don’t see every day, two photos from 1904 of men shoveling for the post office foundation and hardening the earth for the foundation.
This post office in central Florida is graced by Pim and E.T. Hitchcock, both looking very summery.
From the State Library and Archives of Florida.
This post office in Florida’s Coral Gables, “the city beautiful,” knew how to make an entrance. Sadly, it was sold and torn down to make way for a larger building.
Photos by William A. Fishbaugh from the State Library and Archives of Florida.
Postmaster Ted Smallwood in the doorway of his store and post office
Just 20 feet above sea level at its highest points (and those are shell mounds left by Native Americans), Chokoloskee Island, Florida, barely rises above the Gulf of Mexico at the northern end of the state’s “Ten Thousand Islands.”
Modern settlement began in 1874; early residents farmed, fished and caught turtles. C. G. McKinney moved there in 1886, opened a store and secured a post office for the island in 1891. Ted Smallwood began his postal career carrying the mail by sailboat between Everglades City and Chokoloskee; a conch shell was blown to alert the islanders when the mail arrived.
In 1897, Smallwood married and settled on the island, hunting alligators, fishing and raising tomatoes. In 1906, he became postmaster and opened a store which housed the post office. He worked as postmaster until 1941, when his daughter took over. Smallwood died in 1951, but his daughters kept the store open until 1982. The store was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
Smallwood Store and Post Office; photo by Karl Holland, State Library and Archives of Florida
Today, Ted Smallwood’s granddaughter has reopened the store as a museum.
Post Office Postcards 