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 Texas : Features : Columns : "Texas Tales"

Post Offices

by Mike Cox
Mike Cox
One of my earliest memories is tagging along with my granddad back in the early 1950s when he went to the Capitol every Sunday to check his mail.

Yes, the big red granite building in downtown Austin used to have a post office known as the Capitol Station. All the state agencies got their mail there, but rental boxes also were available to the general public. And yes again, the government actually used to put mail in boxes on Sunday, though only once. On Saturday, as on every other day of the week, mail got placed in boxes or delivered twice a day.

When I was about four, I got lost on one of those Sunday visits when Granddad and I were probably the only two people in the whole building. I wandered around the wide, silent halls crying until he finally found me, that day’s mail clutched tightly in his hand.

With email and other forms of digital communication virtually (pun intended) having killed old-fashioned first class mail, it’s time to pay more attention to the history of all the hundreds if not thousands of post offices Texas has had over the years. Many have been closed and it doesn’t take much imagination to realize that as postal revenue continues to decline, more shuttered post offices will follow.
Ranger, Texas Post Office Mural "Crossroads  Town"
Ranger, Texas Post Office Mural "The Crossroads Town"
TE photo, September 2009
Each of Texas’ 254 counties has its own postal history, but commonalities exist. The prime postal history story in any county has to do with how a particular post office got its name. Often, a spelling error or a mistake by the ubiquitous Washington bureaucrat will be the story behind an unusual name. The other standard tale is how a community went through several prospective post office names before the folks in D.C. finally gave their approval.

The best example of that is Mobeetie. Back in the 1870s, folks in future Wheeler County wanted to call their town Sweetwater, but there was already a Sweetwater in Nolan County. So someone asked a friendly Indian how to say Sweetwater in whatever language he spoke. His reply was “mobeetie.” Later, the possibly made-up story goes, a cowboy was walking across the street when another Indian cautioned him not to step in a steaming pile of mobeetie.
Borger Tx New Deal Art Big City News
Borger Post Office Mural "Big City News"
Photo courtesy Barclay Gibson, August 2009
Another aspect of Texas postal history that transcends county lines is that post offices were more than a distribution point for written communication and published material such as newspapers and magazines. They amounted to the social center of a community.

Often, the post office was in the town’s general store, a place to buy groceries, clothes, barbed wire, horse tack, and candy from the barrel – anything people needed, all in one place.
Yoakum County Texas 1907 Postal Map
1907 Yoakum County Postal Map
Courtesy Texas General Land Office

On the left border of the state, just across from New Mexico, is Yoakum County. Not organized until 1907, it still has only 7,000 or so residents.

Sligo
Settled in 1903, Sligo had the county’s first post office. Pat McHugh, the first resident, named the new community for Sligo County, Ireland. He and his family lived in a half dug out, but four years later he built a small house which became a way station for travelers as well as the post office.

Bronco
Yoakum County’s second post office was in Bronco, a town founded and named by H. “Gravy” Field. As postmaster, Field used the bed of a covered wagon, with wheels removed, as a post office.

Field also operated a store. Since he was most often out riding the range looking after his cattle, he’s store was not only self-serve, it was based on the honor system. Cowboys came in, collected the supplies they needed, left a list of what they had bought and settled up later.

Most of Bronco’s residents lived in dug outs, but Field had a wooden two-room house. When a neighbor woman died, because of the scarcity of wood in the county, they removed a partition from their house to build her a coffin.

Plains
W.J. Luna filed on four sections in the middle of Yoakum County. In the spring of 1906 he set up a post office in his home. They named the post office Plains, after the wide open space that constituted Yoakum County.

Originally from Canyon, Luna had lumber shipped from there to build a general store. When the store opened, he moved the post office there.

While Sligo and Bronco have long since disappeared, Plains remains the county seat and one of only two towns in the county, the other being Denver City. (Don’t go there looking for any snow-covered peaks.)

Of course, it does snow in Yoakum County. When a particularly heavy snow hit during the winter of 1917-18, the women who then served as postmaster, Mrs. Thomas W. Hague did extra duty by officiating at a funeral because no preacher was available.

P.S. A genealogical researcher in Austin County is looking for information about two places she believes were post offices in that county back in the 1870s – Pittsville and Iron Creek. Both were near the historic town of San Felipe, which during the days of the Republic of Texas was a postal distribution center because it sat on two major postal routes, Austin to Houston and San Felipe to Velasco on the coast. If you know anything about those places, email me and I’ll pass it along.

© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales"
February 25, 2010 column

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