A Season for Friendship

Believe it or not, Friendship is not that uncommon a town name around this fair land.

Casper, of the Friendly Ghost fame, was set in Friendship, Maine, a town so named despite various battles among the British, French, and Native Americans back in the 1750s. Located at the end of a peninsula on the Atlantic, the town was well-suited for shipbuilding. The town even has the Friendship Museum! I and two postmark collecting friends visited the town back in mid-2011.

Friendship, Maine post office:


Friendship, Arkansas is a tiny town off I-30 toward the southwest part of the state. The population lies at about 200. I dropped by late one weekend afternoon this August and can't speak for the character of the residents because no one was around.

Friendship, AR post office


The town of Friendship, New York stretches along the southern edge of I-86 in the western part of New York's Southern Tier. It possesses a cut-of-the-mill office built in 2000, but the clerk and a couple of customers made for a pleasant chat one rainy afternoon this October. Again, Friendship belies its initial nickname, "Fighting Corners"; once the local settlers quit quarreling, the present town name was adopted.

Friendship, New York post office

Post Offices of the Firelands

While volunteering at the PMCC [Postmark] Museum in north central Ohio a year and a half ago, I took a day off to explore some of the region's POs. In doing so I was able to learn about a little facet of history known by a few. In visiting 26 towns' POs I noticed that many of the names looked very familiar: New Haven; New London; North Fairfield; Greenwich. Norwalk lies to the northwest. Each of those is a prominent town in Connecticut. Here's a map of the region of Ohio in question:



Now, I'd been meaning to write about this connection for a year, but I wanted to be able to present the perfect map that demonstrates why this is the case. In September I stopped in the library after visiting the post office in Rocky Hill, NJ, and walked right into a massive wall map depicting exactly what I was looking for:



(Don't you love it when that happens?)

The land in question is what was known as Connecticut's Western Reserve (see also: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland), a great history of which can be found on the Thompson, Ohio Township website. Connecticut lay claim to these areas through and west of Ohio as part of its 1662 charter, which, by the King of England, granted the colony "land claims to the colonies westward to the mythical 'South Sea.'"

During the Revolutionary War, the British burned many Connecticut settlements to the ground -- including Fairfield, as detailed in this article by the Fairfield Citizen -- in retaliation for local colonists' supporting American independence. "In 1792," the Thompson, OH website notes, "the Connecticut legislature granted 500,000 acres of the western portion of New Connecticut to those of her citizens whose property had been burned by the British during the war. These lands were called the 'Fire Lands.'" And that's why so many of its towns bear the same names as Connecticut cities.

So: Let's see some post offices!

New Haven, Ohio post office:


The most fun part of this stop was meeting the friendly Postmaster and getting his autograph -- which, when I first saw, made me do a double take. USPS's Postmaster Finder confirms that I did, indeed, meet James Bond: Postmaster!

North Fairfield, Ohio post office:

I'm actually not sure whether or not that is a town office in the back.

Greenwich, Ohio post office:

Very photogenic -- love the setting, the gorgeous stenciling on the window, and the bunting.

New London, Ohio post office:


A WPA post office with a wonderfully, fantastically unique mural inside. It was an ABSTRACT mural painted in 1940. Have you ever seen such a thing? WPAMurals.com has the details:
New London Facets by Lloyd R. Ney.
Oil on canvas, 5 3/4 x 14 feet, 1940.
"The abstract style employed by Pennsylvania artist Lloyd Ney for his New London mural was unique among Ohio post offices. This was apparently not the result of any inherent dislike of abstract art by Ohioans, but rather from aesthetic prejudice within the Treasury Department's fine arts section. Only with the help of leading New Londoners was the artist able to convince administrators to approve his original proposal."

The mural, which appears to be relatively recently restored, was presented on PMCC member jimmywayne's Flickr photostream. (Jimmy is another PMCC member who's been to a lot of post offices.)



And this is why visiting post offices is so enjoyable.

What's in a name: Mount Tabor

Yesterday was a busy day: photographed 21 post offices and obtained the postmarks at 15. (To be fair, the rest were already closed and one was a carrier annex... and the other was a processing plant.) The highlight of my day in north Jersey was the Mount Tabor post office, which I arrived at at opening, 10 A.M. Saturdays.

There I found a lovely photogenic office, which shares a building with the local volunteer fire company. Inside are classic PO boxes and dark wood paneling. The office has obviously been around a long time. Waiting in line I came across a 21-year-old stamp collector / seller, who gave me a Mount Tabor postcard that I had stamped and postmarked. I ended up buying a few early 1900s philatelic covers from him outside.

Mount Tabor, NJ:


The coolest part of the Mount Tabor office was its sign. Look at it -- it's in the form of a stamp coil! A wonderful touch, and the type of local flavor I haven't been seeing enough of these days.



I've had an experience at (a) Mount Tabor before: Mount Tabor is a hill and park in Portland, OR. I visited it on a cloudy Saturday in March 2010, when I spent a few days in Oregon on the way to Hawaii. Here's a view from the top of the peak:


And a map!

What's in a Name: Brooklyn

The author of the blog has been busy working full-time, working more hours, rectifying incorrect policies at some unnamed regional post offices, and preparing to move to Pennsylvania for graduate school later this summer. Hence why I haven't been posting much.

For this post, several post offices I've visited around the country, named Brooklyn.
Portland, OR: Brooklyn Station

Visited March 2010. One of 40 post offices I visited in five days in Oregon before flying to Hawaii. When I was there a lawyer was buying 40 panes of the Supreme Court Justices stamps.

Brooklyn, Wisconsin

The first post office photographed on my 2008 cross-country road trip! Most likely the first post office I have ever photographed, in fact. This office was closed by the time I visited it on a Saturday.

Brooklyn, Iowa

Visited, and photographed (rather poorly, I know), October 2008.

My family has long visited the Brooklyn Museum [of Art] in New York. Brooklyn, Iowa had the Brooklyn [Historical] Museum, and featured a venerable globe's worth of flags outside. Indeed, the town bills itself as a "Community of Flags."

Brooklyn, New York: General Post Office
February 2011. It's big. 'Nuff said. Capisce?

What's in a Name: Quinton

First, I'm happy to announce this blog's 1,000th hit, as well as my 1,700th postal facility visited. The rate of visitation to Going Postal has been accelerating lately. It's nice to see!

Once you've begun to visit [insert excessive number of] towns and post offices, you begin to notice some repetition to their names. As of yesterday, I've now been to three Greenwiches (CT, OH, NJ -- a story for another post), two Salems (OR, NJ), and two Quintons. The latter seemed like an odd name, but it actually derives from the Old English for "Queen's town".

Both Quintons I've visited are reasonably photogenic facilities and both possess fantastic four-bar postmarks. Presenting Quinton, Alabama and Quinton, New Jersey:

Quinton, AL: [map]
It's reasonable to say this town, about 20 miles northwest of Birmingham along I-22, is in the middle of nowhere. The town doesn't even have its own exit on the Interstate. What it does possess, however, is an adjacent church and post office. I passed by on a Sunday to leave a note for the Postmaster; the church was still in session. You can see folks parked between the two buildings in this photo:



Quinton, NJ: [map]
This town and its bridge, near the Delaware River roughly 30 miles south of Philadelphia, was the focal point of a Revolutionary War battle in early 1778. (The colonialists won the battle, though lost nearly a couple of score men.) Currently, the post office is next door to the town's general store. And yes, it's yellow.

A Tale of Two Antlers

On my 2008 cross-country road trip, I couldn't decide how best to get from Minneapolis to Yellowstone. So I took what was obviously the most straightforward route, jutting north 250 miles up to Winnipeg, crossing Manitoba and tipping into Saskatchewan (collecting some Canadian postmarks along the way -- and let me tell you, they were the FRIENDLIEST about it -- every single office), and diving south back to Bismarck, to the Black Hills of South Dakota, and eventually over to Yellowstone.

My AAA/CAA map showed me a cute little pairing -- a town in Saskatchewan and a town (60 miles south) in North Dakota called Antler. So, I stopped at both and got each postmark.

Here's a map:

View Larger
The Antler, SK office was in the back of a woman's house, and had no signage except for hours in the window. It was fantastic!

As all the roads in Saskatchewan were gravel, I headed back into Manitoba for the crossover back to the States. After all, it was the middle of nowhere, how long could it take to get back into the country?

As it turns out, A LONG TIME. Apparently it's uncommon to see solo 21-year-old males from New York City crossing back into the country in the middle of absolute nowhere (this is what it looks like from the Manitoba side -- note how Google Street View turns off near the security-sensitive border crossing), and so they took the liberty of inspecting every single item in my car over 45 minutes. To their credit, they packed my trunk more nicely than I'd had it prior!

It's a good thing they shut my car engine off, or it would've run out of gas. (It was more expensive in Canada, so I saved up to buy back in the States.) Finally, a couple of miles down the road was the town of Antler, ND -- population 55 (and gas $3.99⁹). It featured a Standard Oil gas station and, of course, the Antler post office. Shannon, the Officer-in-Charge, was getting promoted to Postmaster the next day, and to celebrate I took her photo in front of the office. Here's a photo I took from the gas station (with the PO in the background):