A Treaty of 1794, and the Canadian Post Office Accessible without a Passport

Along the far northern border of New York with Canada (Québec) lies a bit of an oddity: a Canadian post office that you, the everyday American citizen, can drive to from the U.S., mail your letters from in Canada, and re-enter the States without having a passport or passing trough Customs. This anomaly is due to a jut of land passing barely through the 45th parallel—the line that defines the border (+/- some surveying error) between U.S. and Canada in Vermont and eastern New York—causing a wee bit of Canada to be attached to the United States. Driving from this little bit of Canada to another point in Canada? Gotta pass through the U.S. first. Check out this map; you can zoom out to get a greater sense of the landscape as well:



The land, known as Saint Régis or Akwesasne, is part of the Mohawk Nation; it is a (reservation) territory that straddles both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. Our particular point of interest is located 20 minutes northeast of Massena, New York and about 75 miles southwest of Montréal. For this little spit of Canadian land, the only way in or out is through the U.S. This, combined with the 1794 Jay Treaty, which affirms that Mohawk members may pass freely across the United States-Canadian border, means that the border is not built up with Customs and Inspection infrastructure. What are you going to do, build a wall, or stop and inspect people whose houses lie on the border, who have only one means of exiting and entering a 0.2-square mile piece land in a close-knit Native community? Not a chance. The crossing is "free"; you can cross back and forth between the U.S. and Canada at this little point, and you have a choice of U.S. Post Office or Canada post office when it comes to mailing.

On the U.S. side is the Hogansburg post office, ZIP code 13655. Located just off the Akwesasne reservation and just off New York Route 37, is of a standard late-century design and is staffed by friendly personnel. It is located 2.0 miles from the Canadian border.

Hogansburg, NY post office:


Heading north you'll be hard-pressed to identify the actual border between the U.S. and Canada. The best visual identification stems from the speed limit sign seen here:



Located a few hundred feet beyond the border (and actually visible in the photo above) is the Akwesasne, QC Canadian post office (postal code: H0M 1A0). It is found in the Angus Mitchell Memorial Community Centre with an -r-e. Oh yes, you're really north of the border now!

Akwesasne, QC post office:



Here's a look back into the U.S., actually at an Akwesasne school bus stop, from just inside the Canadian border.



So there you have it. Hope you enjoyed this little slice of Canada and of trivia! (Notes: Al Jazeera provides insights into the lay of the Akwesasne land, borders, and governance here. An official, detailed map of the reservation, which also extends into Ontario, can be found here.)

Going Galápagos—The Post Office Without Stamps

My lovely friends Brian and Katie took a long-awaited trip to the Galápagos Islands a few months back, and they were thrilled to pass on information about the, shall we say, informal 'Post Office' on Floreana Island.

The Galápagos Islands (and the biota living thereupon) are among the most distinctive in the world, straddling the Equator across a span of a couple hundred miles. The archipelago constitutes a province of Ecuador and currently houses 25,000 residents. More significantly, the islands house native species not found anywhere else in the world, and the rich diversity of animal and plant life inspired Charles Darwin's development of the theories of natural selection and evolution. These islands changed our understanding of life as we know it. But I digress.

As always, let's introduce some mappy goodness. Below, the islands are in the left-center of the initial map:



Floreana Island is at the southern end of the archipelago:



And here's a closer view of Floreana Island [bottom of map]—note Post Office Bay!


The Bahía Post Office on Floreana Island has been around since 1793. Back in the day the Galápagos were a stopping point for large whaling vessels. Now imagine: your home country is somewhere in Europe, and here you are in the middle of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, half a world away (and the Panama Canal not to be built for another century). Your voyage is not just months but probably multiple years long. The people who invented the telegraph haven't been born yet. So how do you communicate with loved ones?

Well, many whalers pondered this (let's just say they were all in the same boat—hah, get it?). Many of them ended up relying on each other. Galapagos.org writes:

This is one of the few visitor sites in Galapagos where human history is the main focus. A group of whalers placed a wooden barrel here in 1793 and called it a post office. Traveling seamen would leave addressed letters in the barrel and hope that the next seamen to come along might be headed in the direction of their letters’ destinations. Today, visitors leave their own postcards and sift through the current pile of cards—if they find one that they can hand-deliver, they take it with them.

My friend Katie writes that the principle behind the site hasn't changed much...
1. To send a letter: you write a post card, do not put a stamp on it and put it in the mailbox.
2. To deliver a post card: You look through all the post cards in the mailbox and find one that goes somewhere near where you live. You take that post card home and drop it off at their house when you have time.

(I have no idea how long the average item remains in the mailbox or what percentage do actually get delivered. Or if some people just bring it back to their home country and mail it from there.)

Here are some photos by my friend, April 2015; the post office, some signage, and mail barrel:





I have no idea what is going on by the barrel. (Does that head-thing on the right remind anybody else of Donnie Darko??) Unfortunately it appears there has been some graffiti as well. That said, this is definitely unique and utterly cool!

You can read more about the Floreana Island post office here:
The Washington Post: Galapagos island relies on travelers to deliver the mail
Land Loper: The Post Office at the End of the World
Galapagos.org

Bonus: Ecuador's postal service is called Correos del Ecuador and there are other, more traditional, post offices on the Galápagos Islands. Here are some descriptions.

Puerto Ayora, Isla Santa Cruz:
EcuadorExplorer.com: "The main drag, Charles Darwin, runs east-west along the bay. At the westernmost end of town you will find the Academy Bay port, the main grocery store, hardware store and post office." GoVisitGalapagos.com: There is only one bank in town with an ATM machine and the post office is right hear the harbor.

Puerto Villamil, Isla Isabela:
Miami.edu: "Buildings are concrete block, often colorfully painted or sporting murals as on the post office below. As the postmistress is the mother of one of the town’s laundress, when the laundress is out of town, you can pick up your laundry at the post office."

There's are photos of the post office here (fourth photo on the page) and here!

Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, Isla de San Cristóbal:
Great photo here! "There aren't many places where you can send or receive mail in the Galápagos islands, but on San Cristóbal the town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno has a post office."

North of the Border: Thunder Bay, Ontario

We haven't headed outside the States in a while. So when a friend showed me photos of the various iterations of the post office in Thunder Bay, Ontario, I couldn't resist a quick detour. There are many changes in the Canadian postal service (Canada Post / Poste Canada) these days; the price of a stamp has skyrocketed, a greater proportion of postal retail counters are being operated by private stores, and Canada Post is eliminating all home delivery—snowed-in "Community Mailboxes," anyone? (In the U.S. the term is "cluster box," though I could think of another apt word to follow "cluster" if USPS tries to put those everywhere in big cities as Canada is doing right now.)

Anyway. Here's Thunder Bay!


As you can see on the map, the closest metropolitan area to the population-100,000 Thunder Bay is Duluth, Minnesota. The closest cities in Canada (Winnipeg, Manitoba and Sault Saint Marie) are each an eight-hour drive. It's a 15-hour drive from Thunder Bay to Toronto. This means that Thunder Bay must have a federal building or two as well as a mail processing facility.

In the United States mail processing facilities go by a few names: "Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC)," "Processing and Distribution Facility (P&DF)," to name a couple. Canada's facilities go by the term "Mail Processing Plant" — MPP for short. Like some mail processing facilities in the U.S., there is retail service at the Thunder Bay MPP, which also serves as the community's main post office. This is located in the north side of the city along Harbour Expressway. Here's a photo from 2014.

Thunder Bay, Ontario: Mail Processing Plant / Main Post Office


The rest of the post offices in Thunder Bay are essentially what we'd call Contract Postal Units (CPUs) in the U.S.; they're retail counters located in stores, in this case branches of Shoppers Drug Mart, a large Canadian chain that you could think of as Canada's CVS. Here's a map from the Canada Post site showing its locations in Thunder Bay.



The Thunder Bay MPP didn't always house retail operations. For a long time after it was built in the 1970s, the facility was processing-only. Retail has only been added in very recent years. And this brings us to what makes Thunder Bay's postal history interesting: Thunder Bay was only established on Jan. 1, 1970, a merger between two other fledgling communities: Port Arthur and Fort William. The name Thunder Bay was chosen by a vote of its citizens; its name could just as easily have been Lakehead. (The Lakehead was also an option.)

Which brings us to the post offices. Both Port Arthur (north side of now-Thunder Bay) and Fort William (south side) had their own grand federal building / post offices. Postal retail operations were phased out as the counters in drug stores opened.

Old Port Arthur post office (32-3 Court Street S.):


Old Fort William post office (address unknown to GP):


Of further interest is Thunder Bay's Federal Building, at 130 Syndicate Avenue South (Port William side), which you can view on Google Street View here:



The Beaux-Arts building was designed and constructed under "the 1934 Public Works Construction Act (PWCA), which was designed to stimulate the economy during the Depression and to relieve unemployment." In other words, it could be considered a cousin of the hundreds of historic post offices constructed in the United States at that time under FDR's New Deal.

Stay warm, everyone! Thanks to Skip A., who contributed the photos in this entry.

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):