What’s so special about Milton, Kansas 67106?

February 18, 2011

Milton, Kansas, rural post office

News this week:

The U.S. Postal Service will begin the process of closing as many as 2,000 postal offices in March and will review 16,000 more — half of all existing post offices — that are losing money, The Wall Street Journal reports. The new round of closures is in addition to 491 that are already being shuttered.

What will this mean for our rural post office, a tiny white building in the near-dead town of Milton? I headed to Milton to find out. The town is about 10 miles from our farm.

Postmaster Betty is not worried. She gives me the facts (after recognizing me by the volume of mail we get). She has two mail carriers which serve 287 rural mailboxes in the nearby town of Norwich and 104 post office boxes at the Norwich hardware store. (Unfortunately, Norwich’s post office shut down a year or so ago because of a moldy building.) She also serves 138 rural mailboxes in the Milton zip code and 26 boxes in her building.

She’s proud of the vintage post office touches in her building, which used to be a one-bedroom home. The outside was painted just last year, she says. While I’m there, a customer comes in to buy stamps and she answers a phone call or two. We chat about life — everything from the weather to mobile phones to the Internet to recent farm family tragedies.

Betty and her post office are treasures — real-life Americana. I hope she’s right that Milton, Kansas 67106 will survive the cuts. Take a peek: