Welcome to Going Postal's sixth annual year-end summary. During 2015 I visited 179 new active postal facilities across four states, bringing my grand total to 6,595. Actually, it's by far and away my lowest yearly count since we started ... what having a full-time job and doing work for multiple other organizations does to you. As always, for the active and curious follower, here are the summaries for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. Woot!
I visited as many as 39 post offices in one day. State by state, counting only new, distinct active postal locations (including CPUs) for the year:
Pennsylvania: 74 post offices
Focus/Foci: Rural corners of northern PA
Ohio: 46
North-central Ohio and Cleveland suburbs
Connecticut: 38
Northeast and south-central CT
New York: 21
Southern Tier
In addition to these I also visited discontinued / suspended post offices for documentation purposes as well as historic former post office buildings.
Among privately-operated Contract Postal Units was the operation at the student center at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio:
Kent, OH: Kent State University CPU:
Former sites visited this year include the grand old post office of Hornell, New York, which celebrates its centennial in 2016. Well, I suppose it would be celebrated were the structure not presently relegated to the municipal equivalent of a paperweight.
Hornell, NY: former post office:
There had been a post office in Barton, New York until it was washed away by flooding caused by Hurricane Irene in 2011 and never replaced. It was around here somewhere:
Barton, NY:
Despite some yearning for what we've lost I did find several wonderfully photogenic post offices this year, including that in Milan, Pennsylvania, made all the more stunning during the peak of an August sunset:
Milan, Pennsylvania post office:
Count-wise, I reached a modest milestone this year. My 6,500th post office was New Riegel, Ohio.
New Riegel, OH post office:
See y'all next year! Well, this year. Had a bit of a late start on this post, I suppose.