| New Site | Old Home | Search | Communities | Counties | Southeast | Southwest | |
 |
| |
| ||||||||||||
New Mexico’s Rural Post Offices
Last updated on Saturday, January 11, 2003
Would you like to go to a place where people know your name, where you can visit with friends and neighbors while keeping in touch with what’s happening around the world and down the street?
Picacho Post Office
Photo by Frederick MoraFolks living in rural New Mexico do that every day, just by going to the post office.
In a place like Weed, or Claunch, or Ponderosa, the post office is more than a place to buy a stamp.
“How’s your dad’s hay crop coming along?” Diana Clark, Ponderosa’s postmaster, asked a customer, a young woman with a spout of curly blond hair on the top of her head.
“He’s not doing that this year, not since his last heart trouble,” she said. “He’s a lot more relaxed now.”
“Good for him.”
The customer gathered up her mail and money orders. “I’ll be by later to pay the water bill.”
“After I close the post office, I go to the water company office,” Clark explained. “In a small community, you wear a lot of hats.”
Not only do the people in rural areas perform several functions, often the buildings do, too. A typical rural post office started in a general store - sometimes just a wooden box on the counter to hold the mail until the recipient came in to town. In a way, the tradition continues in the Maljamar Grocery, where the post office is tucked into a corner of the only store in town. It’s a modern version of the old general store with laundry detergent, work gloves and breakfast cereals sharing shelf space with quick lunch items for the oilfield workers. The store also sells T-shirts with the words “Beautiful Downtown Maljamar, Conveniently Located in the Middle of Nowhere” printed on the front.
Ponderosa’s post office is a tiny wooden cabin that once served as workers’ housing for New Mexico Timber, a company that logged in the surrounding Jemez Mountains. Clark’s grandfather, who owned a local sawmill, used it for storage. When Clark and her husband took over the property, they remodelled it for their teenaged son.
“But he never moved into it, because it didn’t have a refrigerator or a TV,” Clark said. She then divided the tiny room in two, installing 70 postal boxes in the front and making an office space just big enough for her and her three dogs in the back.
If postal customers in Weed need a little sustenance after reading their mail, they can step across the hall to the Weed Café.
Shirley Stone, a lifelong resident, says she’s been postmaster “about 30 years.”
“Most of the people here have been here for generations,” she said. “My forebears have been here since the beginning.”
Weed’s beginning was in 1885, when Mr. W.H. Weed built the first store in the ranching community known as “Garden Spot.” When he applied to have an official post office in the store, it was granted to the name that was on the application - “Weed.” The local joke is that it took the federal government to change a “Garden Spot” to a “Weed.”
In 1981, Stone built the wooden structure that houses the post office and the Weed Café. She recently doubled the size of the café to accommodate C.W. jam sessions led by her sons Steve and Gary. And according to one customer, Stone plays a pretty good fiddle herself.
Larry Wilde, another longtime resident, carries the mail between Weed, Mayhill, Pinon, and Sacramento.
Sacramento Post Office Photo by Frederick Mora “The job’s been in the family about 50 years,” Wilde said. “First my grandfather did it, then my mom and dad and now me. I travel about 100 miles each day.”
“He’s bringing the bills,” a customer said. “Maybe I’ll go out and flatten his tires.”
But of course he doesn’t, and Wilde continues his route, making the three-mile trip to Sacramento and one of the prettiest post offices in New Mexico. Old leather horse collars and deer antlers hang on the walls of the weathered wooden building. The flowers, which fill an old wheelbarrow and spill out of huge hanging baskets, are the work of postmaster Frances Visser.
“Everybody loves this building,” Visser said. “There’s always someone taking a photograph.” A wooden sign by the door announces the town’s population - “38 + one old crab.”
Who’s the old crab?
“Me,” Visser said. “But it could be anybody on a given day.” Visser must not be too crabby; a big bowl of candy sits on the wooden counter whose surface is decoupaged with old stamps. An old black metal grille holds a slot for depositing mail. Behind the counter, long windows look out to a cattail-filled marsh and down the Aqua Chiquita Valley.
“It’s peaceful here,” Visser said. “I’d never be able to live in a big city.”
In many small towns, the post office is the only public building left standing. A 1912 photo of Lakewood hanging on the post office wall shows a thriving small town - hardware store, bank, feed store. The town had stockyards, a tomato cannery and a two-story brick schoolhouse.
Today the post office is just about the only building left.
“The rest of them burned down, fell down or were carried off,” postmaster Eleanor Thornton-Johnson said. The school building, reduced to one story, is now a church. Even the lake is gone.
“They moved the dam, and now there’s just a channel where our lake used to be.”
Claunch was a major producer of pinto beans until after World War II when just about everyone left. An adobe and frame building that once served as a general store now houses the post office. It has deep display windows, an original wooden floor and a large potbellied stove with a crooked pipe going through the ceiling.
Cherie Hobbs, Postmaster in the Lincoln Post Office Photo by Frederick Mora “That’s our only heat,” postmaster Benolin McKibben said. “We had a gas heater but it cost a lot to run and it didn’t really heat this old building. This is a lot better.”
A lot cozier, too. The room, with its collection of sofas and easy chairs, serves as a social center of the town and as its library. The shelves lining the long, narrow room are full of books.
“People bring some in, take some out,” McKibben said. “I’m no librarian, so I don’t really keep track of them. When the library in Willard closed a while back, they brought us two pickup loads of books.”
A photo of the original Mr. John Claunch and a genealogy of six generations of his family hang on the wall. But present-day Claunch, with its scattered collection of abandoned stone buildings and the wind that sweeps over the treeless grassland, feels almost like a ghost town.
If the ghost of Billy the Kid returned to Lincoln, he wouldn’t have any trouble mailing a letter. He easily could find the post office in a corner of the old Tunstall store, the mercantile operation that his friend and employer John Tunstall built in 1877. The Englishman’s economic challenge to the rival Murphy-Dolan faction led to his murder the following year, an event that precipitated the Lincoln County War.
In fact, postmaster Samuel Corbett reportedly helped the Kid hide in a hole in the floor just after the murder of Sheriff Brady. The Kid was later arrested and tried for the murder - the only person in the entire bloody conflict who was charged with a crime.
As the time-travelling outlaw steps across the wide wooden planks of the threshold, he might notice the smooth depression worn in the center - the record of thousands of footsteps that have crossed it. Kid Antrim, as he was also known, could visit with postmaster Cherie Hobbs, a descendant of his friend George Coe, who was a fellow member of the Regulators, the faction that avenged Tunstall’s death.
After mailing his letter (postmarked with his own famous picture), the Kid could pay his respects to Tunstall; the Englishman’s grave, marked with a simple wooden cross, is just behind the post office.
Some small post offices almost become museums as old equipment is handed down or simply never replaced. Many of the postal boxes have been recycled from other modernized post offices. Claunch has a dozen gray metal boxes with an unusual two-dial system of letters rather than numbers. As far as anyone can remember, they’ve been there since the 1930s. McKibben used an old freezer for a safe until a postal inspector decided that it wouldn’t do and sent a real safe.
“But we used that old freezer for 20 years or more,” she said.
Clark uses brass postal and letter scales from the 1940s. “They’re checked periodically, just like the electronic scales,” she said. “They’re extremely accurate.”
The postal service planned to put a standard mailbox in front of the Ponderosa post office. But since the property line is only about a foot from the front wall of the building, that would have put a federal installation (the mailbox) on state land (the gravel road). To solve the bureaucratic dilemma, Clark got a blue metal letterbox to hang on the front wall.
“Ever year or two I give it a fresh coat of paint - Federal Blue,” Clark said.
But it is the service in the small post offices that the customers appreciate most.
In San Patricio, postmaster Amelia Candelaria helps a customer with a package for her son who is stationed at a naval base in Sicily.
“She’s the best postmaster there is,” Helen Herrera says. “I’m always sending something - cookies, sneakers, pinon.”
Candelaria hunts around and finds a suitable box. Herrera borrows the scissors.
“Does it need a little more tape?” Candelaria asks.
The mail arrives in Claunch. McKibben bundles it up and brings it to Joe Petross and Carolyn Wells who are sitting on the sofa, visiting.
“We get our mail hand-delivered here in Claunch,” Wells says. “Now that’s service.”
“We’re a small post office, but it’s 40 miles to the nearest town.” McKibben said. “I’ve really got good customers, so there’s enough business to keep our post office open.”
“The customer contact is really important,” Clark said. “The rural carrier and I get to know people’s daily routines, and if something changes, we’ll check into it. We look out for people who are alone, or who live in isolated places.”
Ponderosa’s post office has a small sign tacked to the door: “If you are grouchy, irritable or just plain mean, there will be a $10 charge for putting up with you.”
“But you know,” Clark said, “I’ve never had to collect.”
|
||||||||||||
