2025 Postal Summary

Well, look at that—a year-end post posted during the actual year the summary summarizes! First time since 2022. Progress, I suppose. Welcome to the 16th annual year-end postal tabulation post! Let's get right down to math. This year I visited 302 new post offices (and photographed 371 in all; so, many revisits). My current grand total is 12,199 post offices across the U.S.

Meaning, of course, that I visited post office #12,000! That would be the gorgeous Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania post office, constructed in 1940 and home to a New Deal mural.



Let's show a map. Here's my Pennsylvania (+ New Jersey) map of post offices visited. Old school AAA map goodness. The highlighted areas are ones where I've been to all the post offices. I've been to more than 1,400 in the state in all, though there are still hundreds left to visit!



Now is as good a time to any to note that sometimes the math in these entries doesn't always quite add up. Last year my tally was 11,890 post offices. Add 302 and that should yield 12,192. So what happened? It turns out I forgot to catalog a set of post office visits in Staten Island over a decade ago, meaning I had to adjust my counts. It happens from time to time, though usually it's a smaller correction due to my realizing that I missed logging a single post office during a trip or that I counted the same post office twice (generally years apart and having forgotten I actually visited it the first time). Oops. Anyway, if you notice discrepancies in the math, that's the reason why. Fun times, eh?

This year's philatelic bounty came as part of two trips: one week-long trip to the Dakotas—86 new post offices, 2,280 miles driven and covering all post offices in roughly 1.5% of the area of the continental U.S., and one two-week trip (216 new post offices) encompassing the Post Mark Collectors Club (PMCC)'s annual convention, which was held at the National Postmark Museum in Bellevue, Ohio.



My post office counts include standard post offices as well as Contract Postal Units (CPUs), carrier annexes and mail processing facilities. I visited my first standalone S&DC (Sorting and Distribution Center) this year but I don't think I'll count it because as far as I'm aware they have no postmarking date stamp devices ... which is also my policy regarding Village Post offices (VPOs). If you work at an S&DC and have a postmarking device / date stamp with the place name on it, please get in touch; I'd love to collect it on a postcard!

As part of my Dakota explorations I visited all five CPUs in Bismarck, North Dakota. Four of them were shuttered at the end of September.

Bismarck, ND: Family Fare #3128 CPU, discontinued Sept. 30, 2025:


A postal clerk in the Youngstown area kindly informed me that the post office in Rogers, Ohio was losing its lease, and I was able to visit that P.O. on its last day of operations before suspension.

Rogers, Ohio (suspended Oct. 24, 2025), plus USPS's notice of suspension:




It took some time to locate the Community Post Office (CPO) located in the side of a couple's home in Willard, Montana, one Sunday afternoon. While there aren't many buildings in this middle of the prairie Google Maps was way off, and I had to contact a friend who'd found and photographed it 15 years prior. Regardless, when I showed up at their door Maxine and Robbie Rost were gracious with their time as they watched their nephew compete in a Montana state esports competition! (It was Rocket League.)





Sometimes (and it's is always suuuuper fun when this happens) USPS doesn't actually update the data on its website / Locator tools. I encountered one CPU that had actually closed months before I visited the husk of the store in which it resided: Indiana, Pennsylvania: Bi Lo North Plaza CPU, closed mid-2025 (and which doesn't count toward my totals). Actually, that photo is so boring I'm not going to show it here.

This said, I also visited, as always, a fair number of grand old former post office buildings. This one in East Liverpool, Ohio, bearing a 1908 cornerstone, is now the Museum of Ceramics.

By the Numbers

I visited as many as 35 post offices in one day—twice!—in 2025, and visited 30+ post offices six times this year. State by state—and territory by territory:

Pennsylvania: 152 new post offices (+16 re-visits)
Focus/Foci: Rural west/central Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh suburbs

Homer City, Pennsylvania post office, pre-Halloween. This mailman was feeling kind of blue!



Ohio: 57 post offices (+20 re-visits)
Northeast Ohio to Steubenville; Put-in-Bay and Middle Bass Island in Lake Erie

Middle Bass Island, Ohio Community Post Office (CPO), located in the rear of a house; even with a blue box and sign under a tree the road, how in the heck are you supposed to find this place??





North Dakota: 43 post offices (+8 re-visits)
All SW N.D., from Bismarck south and west

South Dakota: 32 post offices (+15 re-visits)
All NW S.D., west of the Missouri River and north of Pierre / Black Hills

Ridgeview, South Dakota post office:

Montana: 11 post offices
Far eastern MT near Baker and Glendive

West Virginia: 7 post offices
Far northern panhandle; Weirton

New York: 9 revisits
Brooklyn and Queens

Minnesota: 1 revisit

St. Paul, Minnesota: Twin Cities Air Mail Facility, as photographed from the passenger terminal at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, during a layover.



Counting Counties: I visited 25 new counties in 2024, for a total of 1,461 (~46.5% of U.S. counties / counties-equivalent).

Thank you to those who continue to visit and read this blog, threadbare though it's become in recent years! Have a happy and healthy 2026.
Evan

2023 Postal Summary

Whoops! It's not the first time a year-end postal summary has come out a little late. Alas.

When you've been at this a long time it can become difficult to encounter low-lying postal fruit. Why, I finished visiting most if not all of the post offices [near me] in New York City, Long Island, north Jersey, and Connecticut a decade ago. Getting to new post offices requires effort; sometimes days of it! This year I was able to visit 418 new post offices spanning eight states, for a total of 11,401 post offices. I also revisited several dozen post offices for updated postmarks and photographs, notably in Hawaii and Massachusetts.

My 11,000th post office was Cape May, New Jersey.



Two trips accounted for most of the postal exploration this year: a ten-day trip based out of Kansas City (MO/KS/NE), wherein I visited 201 new post offices, and a ten-day, 1,913-mile trip based out of Dallas-Fort Worth (TX/OK), which resulted in 159 new post offices visited.

The term post office for the purposes of this post should be interpreted broadly: it includes carrier-only facilities, freestanding mail processing facilities, and Contract Postal Units (CPUs). However, it does not include some other sites that I nonetheless documented, such as: the Fairlawn Detached Lockbox Unit, former Westboro Station (in operation from 1951 to 1968), and Material Distribution Center—and that's just Topeka, Kansas!

Former Westboro Station, Topeka, Kansas:

Scenes from 2023 postal explorations:

Hawi, Hawaii: This post office relocated next door since I last visited it in 2010


Wichita Falls, Texas main post office [interior]:


Marietta, Oklahoma: "Chicksaw Indian Family Making Pah Sho Fah," a New Deal mural by Solomon McCombs


Liberty, MO: Hy-Vee #1384 CPU

2023 by the Numbers

I visited as many as 38 post offices (33 of which were new to me) in one day this year, in northeast Kansas and southeast Nebraska. State by state—and territory by territory:

Kansas: 109 post offices
Focus/Foci: Northeast Kansas: Kansas City and suburbs through Topeka

Texas: 105 post offices
Wichita Falls; Dallas and suburbs, out to Tyler

Oklahoma: 54 post offices
Southern Oklahoma: Ardmore through Lawton

Nebraska: 48 post offices
Southeast Nebraska; Lincoln

New Jersey: 31 post offices
Southern N.J., including Cape May County

Hawaii: 26 post offices
56 total visits (just 26 new): the Big Island of Hawai'i, Kauai (all), Pearl Harbor

Massachusetts: 1 post office
14 total visits (Cape Ann), one new operation: Beverly Delivery Distribution Center

Counting Counties:
I visited 47 new counties in 2023, spanning the areas above.



Thank you for your continued support! Have a wonderful 2024.
Evan

2020 Postal Summary

What to say... I was able to visit 201 [new-to-me] post offices in 2020—a frustratingly low count—for a total of 10,195 post offices. 161 of those came during January and February during a trip to southern California. So what happened that made the rest of the year so unproductive? America kind of dropped the ball. Then America kicked the ball under the couch. Then America burned the house down entirely.

So, I'm going to keep this year's summary short and sweet, with just a couple of photos this time around.

(Note: All ten of my prior annual postal summaries can be found here: 2010—2019.)

This year's travels included two trips:
1. California: Los Angeles to Santa Barbara (14 days, 160 new post offices)
2. New York: Hudson Valley and Catskills (7 days, 38 new post offices + ~ a dozen revisits)

I had the privilege of visiting my 10,000th post office: Century Station, a New Deal beauty in Culver City, California, on January 31. Here I am outside:



Here I am one fine day in August wearing a mask at the Empire State Plaza Station post office in Albany.

2020 By the Numbers

I visited as many as 27 post offices (of which 25 were new) in one day this year. State by state:

California: 160 post offices
Focus/Foci: Los Angeles area, including San Fernando Valley; Santa Barbara

New York: 39 post offices
Northern Capital Region; the Catskills

→ I also revisited a dozen post offices in southern California, and maybe 30 post offices in New York (NYC, Long Island, and Upstate) to obtain better / updated photos.

Counting Counties:
I visited one new county in 2020: Santa Barbara County, California.

As ever, thank you for your continued support—especially if you took Wheel of Fortune's advice and got yourself one of these:



(Oy, that photo is definitely in need of some color correction; but no, I did not make that up!)

-- E

30,000: the Ultimate Post Office Photo Collection Keeps Growing

Three years ago I introduced readers of this blog to the Post Mark Collectors Club (PMCC)'s Online Post Office Photo Project. The Post Mark Collectors Club operates the National Postmark Museum in Bellevue, Ohio, and among its unparalleled collections is a catalogued cabinet with 60,000 printed post office photographs. The images span all 50 states, and even all U.S. counties.

As I detailed in this thorough write-up three years ago, the PMCC's digital collection of post office photographs has been expanding at an unprecedented clip. With 30,000 catalogued photos, there is no comparable collection anywhere in the world. No other institution—neither the U.S. Postal Service, National Postal Museum, Library of Congress, National Archives, nor Smithsonian Institution, manages anything like it. As of this writing images in our collection have garnered more than 3.7 million hits.

All 50 states are represented by more than 100 post office photographs; 21 states feature at least 500 photos; and five states (NY, IL, PA, TX, CA) boast more than 1,000 images. Additionally, each of the 55 darkest green counties on this heat map is represented by at least 50 photos.



Photo #30,000 was this photo of the Community Post Office in Nanwalek, Alaska. I was fortunate to visit all the post offices on the Kenai Peninsula back in 2016, and wrote about the adventures on this blog in this four-part series.



Please refer to this post for FAR more additional information about the project, as well as contributing new images.

Viewing the Collection
The PMCC Online Post Office Photo Collection homepage is:
http://www.postmarks.org/photos/

Here is the link to our primary Flickr page, at which you can view all our uploads chronologically, starting with the most recent:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/postoffices/

Note: © All rights reserved. We are pleased to present these photos online, but most of these images are under copyright and may not be re-used without the respective photographers' consent. Commercial usage is prohibited without the purchase of an image license. Contact me (email address in left sidebar) and I can help sort things out for you if you're interested.

2018 Postal Summary

It's that time of the year again... the end of it! This blog has been around since 2010, and every year I've posted a year-end summary of all the post offices I've visited that year. So, welcome to our ninth annual summary!

(As always, my prior summaries can be found at these links: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. Let's go!)

2018 was a comparatively modest year. I visited a hearty 565 new, active postal operations this year, my lowest new count since 2015. My grand total is now 9,287 post offices.

This year's travels included two sizable voyages out west: a weeklong jaunt beginning and ending in Albuquerque, a 2,400-mile round trip that netted 114 post offices across five states. A two-week adventure began in Phoenix and culminated at LAX, and resulted in 157 new post offices. I dedicated nearly a full day of that trip to visiting just one new office: North Rim, Arizona. (Fun fact, I was its first customer of the year!)

Thank you to the dozens of people who purchased the 2019 Postlandia calendar, and/or postcards! Your support is always greatly appreciated. This has always been a passion project, and I don't get paid a dime to do any of this.

Postlandia also has a popular, growing Instagram feed. Check it out!

As always, the counts in this post include active 'standard' post offices, Contract Postal Units (CPUs), carrier annexes, and mail processing plants. They do not include former sites (e.g. historic post office buildings), places I've previously been to but revisited (say, to take a better photo), or previously discontinued operations. Here are some assorted photos from various operations I've visited this year:

Middlsex-Essex Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC), North Reading, Mass.


Liberal, Kansas former post office—a New Deal beaut!


Easton, PA: Lafayette College CPU


Yeso, NM former post office


I continued documenting the U.S. Postal Service's New Deal treasures as well, for example:

Northampton, PA: "Physical Changes of the Postman through the Ages", a cast stone relief by Maurice Glickman, 1939

2018 By the Numbers

I visited as many as 35 post offices in one day this year (in southern California), and post offices in as many as five states (specifically, KS, OK, CO, TX, and NM) in one day. State by state:

New York: 117 post offices
Focus/Foci: Western Hudson Valley, the Catskills

Pennsylvania: 83 post offices
Northeast corner

Arizona: 83 post offices
Eastern Phoenix area, I-40 from Kingman to Winslow, the Grand Canyon, and Flagstaff to Page

California: 50 post offices
I-15 from Baker to San Bernardino, San Bernardino Mountains, Route 91 around Anaheim

Massachusetts: 44 post offices
Western Worcester County; Salem/Beverly; Reading

Texas: 42 post offices
Western half of the northern panhandle, incl. Amarillo

New Mexico: 35 post offices
Northeast New Mexico: Clovis to Clayton

Utah: 25 post offices
Southern Utah: St. George area to Big Water

Kansas: 24 post offices
Southwest corner

New Hampshire: 24 post offices
Southeast New Hampshire

Maine: 16 post offices
Southwest Maine; Portsmouth Naval Shipyard

Oklahoma: 12 post offices
Western panhandle

Nevada: 11 post offices
I-15 corridor, excluding Las Vegas; new Vegas CPUs

New Jersey: 11 post offices
Northwest Bergen County

Rhode Island: 2 post offices
Naval Station Newport

Colorado: 1 post office
Campo

Here's the Campo, Colorado post office (southeastern-most in Colorado):

Milestones

9,000th post office: Wittmann, Arizona

Last year I finished visiting all publicly accessible post offices in Rhode Island...

Actually completing Rhode Island:

Last year WNPR's Colin McEnroe Show (listen to the full episode here) invited me to speak about some post offices across Connecticut and the U.S., and I mentioned for the sake of accuracy that I'd visited all *publicly accessible* post offices in Connecticut, although I had not been able to visit the operation located on the Naval Submarine Base New London, in Groton. Thanks to a very generous listener, and U.S. Navy officers and officials at base, not only was I able to complete my Connecticut postal collection, but this year I got to visit the Naval Station post office of Newport, Rhode Island (the one P.O. in the Ocean State I had not been able to visit), as well as the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard post office in Kittery, Maine! Thank you all!!!

Here I am at the Naval Station Newport post office:



Special thanks to Navalog (the base's magazine) for highlighting my visit in its April 19 issue, and for "A Time and a Place" magazine from the Catskills for featuring my travels in their December 2018 edition!

Navalog:


A Time and a Place:


Counting Counties:
I visited 43 new counties in 2018. They are shown in dark blue on this travel map:



Dear readers, thank you for your continued support! I'm hoping to share many more new post office stories and photos with you in 2019.

2017 Postal Summary

Wow, I've been at this a while now. This blog has been around since 2010, and every year I've posted a year-end summary of all the post offices I've visited that year. So, welcome to our eighth annual summary!

(As always, my prior summaries can be found at these links: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. Okay, down to business!)

2017 was my most productive year in quite some time. I visited a hearty 1,261 new, active postal operations this year, the most of any year save 2012 (wherein I took a 17,000-mile, 1,400+ P.O. road trip that spanned 3.5 months). My grand total is now 8,722 post offices.

This year's travels included a two-week venture into New Hampshire, Vermont, and far Upstate New York; a 3,200-mile trek from the Bay Area to remote communities in the high Nevada desert; and a 6,000-mile, 641-post office road trip through the Upper Midwest, featuring Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

This year I had the pleasure of teaming up with Postlandia friend John Gallagher for a weekend of trekking through the northern Nevada desert, home to many of the most remote post offices in the mainland U.S. (For one thing, it pays to split the fuel costs out there!) I nabbed a couple of relaxing ferry rides to island post offices in the Great Lakes: La Pointe, Wisconsin, and Mackinac Island, Michigan.

And here's a quick note to the dozens of people who purchased the 2018 Postlandia calendar, and/or postcards! Your support is always greatly appreciated. This has always been a passion project, and I don't get paid a dime to do any of this.

Postlandia also has a new Instagram feed!

As always, the counts in this post include active 'standard' post offices, Contract Postal Units (CPUs), carrier annexes, and mail processing plants. They do not include former sites (e.g. historic post office buildings), places I've previously been to but revisited (say, to take a better photo), or previously discontinued operations.

San Francisco Network Distribution Center [NDC] in Richmond, CA


I visited a bewildering 40 Meijer [CPU] locations, across four Upper Midwestern states, including:


Springfield, IL: former post office


Fridley, MN: Carrier Annex


Earlier this year I documented the first-day WPA Posters stamp ceremony in Hyde Park, New York, and met Megan Brennan (again, though for the first time as Postmaster General):

2017 By the Numbers

I visited as many as 34 post offices in one day this year. State by state:

New York: 212 post offices
Focus/Foci: Far northern tier; northeast New York; Seneca Falls region; I-81 southeast of Syracuse

Michigan: 177 post offices
Most of the Upper Peninsula; Traverse City to Lansing; Battle Creek

California: 134 post offices
San Francisco; Oakland and East Bay; I-80 corridor to Lake Tahoe

Indiana: 101 post offices
Indianapolis area up to Lafayette region; Fort Wayne to South Bend

Vermont: 91 post offices
Northeast Kingdom; Montpelier region; Burlington region

Pennsylvania: 72 post offices
Southwest PA (Washington region); northwest PA (south of Erie)

Ohio: 72 post offices
I-70 corridor, including Columbus and Dayton; Cleveland area

Minnesota: 62 post offices
Eastern tiers: Mississippi north to the Twin Cities, and MSP area to Duluth

Massachusetts: 60 post offices
Plymouth County; NW Boston suburbs

Wisconsin: 57 post offices
Southwest WI, La Crosse area; far northern WI

Nevada: 56 post offices
Most of the northern half of Nevada, including Reno/Sparks

Illinois: 55 post offices
Champaign-Urbana, Springfield, Decatur areas

Maine: 40 post offices
Southwest Maine, NW of Portland

New Hampshire: 24 post offices
Northern New Hampshire

Connecticut: 21 post offices
All remaining post offices, primarily NW of Hartford

Iowa: 14 post offices
Quad Cities area; Dubuque

Rhode Island: 7 post offices
All remaining [publicly accessible] post offices -- Newport area

West Virginia: 6 post offices
Wheeling

Here's the Elm Grove Station in Wheeling:

Milestones

8,000th post office: Hayward, CA: Bradford Station

This spring I finished visiting all publicly accessible post offices in the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island...

Goshen, CT:


Tiverton, RI:


Early this year I visited my 1,000th post office in New York State:

Actually completing Connecticut:

Earlier this month WNPR's Colin McEnroe Show (listen to the full episode here) invited me to speak about some post offices across Connecticut and the U.S., and I mentioned for the sake of accuracy that I'd visited all *publicly accessible* post offices in Connecticut, although I had not been able to visit the operation located on the Naval Submarine Base New London, in Groton. Thanks to a very generous listener, and U.S. Navy officers and officials at base, this week I was given a tour of the facility and allowed to complete my Connecticut postal collection. (The experience is worthy of a post unto itself.) Thank you all!!!

Here I am with the U.S. Post Office and military post office staff, in front of the post office:



Counting Counties:
I visited 95 new counties in 2017. They are shown in brown on this travel map:



Dear readers, thank you for your continued support! I'm looking forward to a great year of new post office photos and stories to share with you in 2018.

2016 Postal Summary

Welcome to Postlandia's seventh annual year-end summary. During 2016 I visited 866 new active postal facilities across 17 states, bringing my grand total to 7,461. This represents the most new visits since 2013. As always, for the active and curious follower, here are the summaries for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. Woot!

Instead of driving cross-country, as I have historically done every four years, I took a handful of flights to regions of the country I wanted to explore further. These included two weeks in the high west: Albuquerque, northern New Mexico and southern Colorado; a week in Alaska (with postal layover in Seattle); a week in the Salt Lake City area / eastern Utah and western Colorado; and a week and a half in the southeast: South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Furthermore, Postlandia friend Kelvin and I explored the northern reaches of Maine and got some great photographs and stories along the way.

This summer I finally visited several post offices accessible only by ferry: Fishers Island, NY; Prudence Island, RI; and the Sophie C Mail Boat in New Hampshire. In Alaska I visited a handful of post offices only accessible by boat or by plane! But that's another post (coming soon!).

Perhaps most significantly this blog got an overdue "re-branding". No more Going Postal; hello, Postlandia! The idea came from the title of a story published a couple of years back. We've also got a great new calendar for you as well.



As always, this year's visits included "standard" post offices, Contract Postal Units (CPUs), and carrier-only and mail processing facilities, not to mention former sites of relocated and discontinued facilities. For example:

Bangor, ME: Broadway Hardware CPU


Portsmouth, NH Processing and Distribution Facility (P&DF)


Alamosa, CO: former post office


Columbia, SC Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC)


But postal journeys weren't all the excitement for Postlandia 2016. Devin Leonard published his great book: Neither Snow Nor Rain [link: NPR story], which tells the story of the Post Office Department (now Postal Service) through the lens of many of the distinctive people and lives who made the institution what it is today. Yours truly is featured in the prologue and epilogue of the book! Devin was gracious enough to invite me to speak at a talk he gave at the New York Public Library this summer.





That's me being highly amused by someone's question.

This followed a presentation at the once-a-decade World Stamp Show at the Javits Center in New York, wherein I got to discuss some of the interesting post offices and places of the Big Apple. And postmarks!

2016 by the Numbers

I visited as many as 34 post offices in one day. State by state, counting only new, distinct active postal locations (including CPUs) for the year:

New York: 115 post offices
Focus/Foci: Modest upstate travels: Rockland, Orange, Sullivan, and Delaware County; west of Syracuse

New Mexico: 109 post offices
Northern New Mexico; Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and numerous Native reservations in NW NM

Connecticut: 91
Northern, southeastern CT; Norwich

Maine: 79
Far north, and eastern Maine; Bangor

Colorado: 71
Southern, western Colorado; Grand Junction, Durango, Pueblo

Georgia: 70
Augusta through Macon, to Thomasville

Utah: 53
Wasatch Valley: Salt Lake City, Provo; and eastern Utah: Vernal

South Carolina: 50
Columbia area; and south toward Charleston and west toward Augusta, GA

Florida: 44
Tallahassee and Orlando areas

Alaska: 43
Anchorage, Wasilla, and the Kenai Peninsula

Pennsylvania: 40
North-central, rural PA

Massachusetts: 32
East of Springfield and east of Worcester

New Jersey: 23
Northern NJ, near NY border

Rhode Island: 22
Northwest, southern RI

Washington: 12
Seattle area

New Hampshire: 11
Southeast N.H.; U.S. Sophie C., Lake Winnipesaukee

Arizona: 1
Teec Nos Pos—closest post office to the Four Corners

Milestones

I achieved post office #7,000, as well as post office #1,000 in just the state of Pennsylvania, during the same afternoon this summer (actually, just a couple of post offices apart). Actually, I've now visited at least 100 post offices in each of 22 states. This year added New Mexico, Maine, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Georgia to that roster. Connecticut now reaches the top five, with 321 different active locations visited.

Me at post office #7,000: Crosby, PA



Me at Pennsylvania post office #1,000: Hazel Hurst, PA

Counting Counties (and States)

I've now visited all 50 states, as well as more than 1,000 counties across the U.S. This map shows the most recent extent of my travels (2016 travels in light pink). There's always so much more to see!



Hope to write more for you soon!
Evan, Postlandia