The Post Office
After leaving the Skating Rink, let’s go
down to the Post Office at the end of the big room. The
first thing that you notice is that almost all of the
wall at the end of the entrance room is filled with
small metal mailboxes. There seems to be hundreds of
them. Each little box has a number, a tiny window and a
lock to open it.
All Pacolet Mills residents pick up their mail at
these mailboxes at the Post Office. There is no mail
delivery to the individual houses in the Mill Village.
Mr. Alfred Parker was the Postmaster that I remember in
the 1950’s. He had several more employees that helped
him sort and box the mail and help at the service
counter.
The service counter was in the middle of all the
boxes. At the counter you could buy stamps, money orders
or get other postal services.
Sometimes, the mail service was amazingly fast by
today’s standards. As an example, just recently, there
was a letter to a Pacolet Mills resident in 1931 for
sale on eBay. The person was Mr.
Jesse Glass who ran a small store just outside
the mill village. Mr. Glass carried on a large
correspondence through the postal service. Letters to
and from him and their related stamps and envelopes
appear frequently on eBay.
In this particular case, a letter to Mr. Glass was
sent from a Building and Loan Association in Charlotte.
What caught my eye was that it was time stamped on the
Postmark in Charlotte. It was cancelled in Charlotte at
6pm in the afternoon of Oct. 8. Back then, they must
have also stamped the envelope when it was received. The
back of the envelope is stamped that the envelope was
received in Pacolet Mills at 8 am the next morning, Oct.
9. It is amazing to me that the envelope was sorted in
Charlotte, taken and transported on the train to
Spartanburg, transferred to Pacolet Mills and sorted and
stamped in Pacolet all in 14 hours.
The cost for this fast service
was 2 cents in 1931. I don't think that you can get that
kind of service from the Post Office for any amount of
money today, much less for 2 cents.
This web site has
been started as a public service to share the story of
Pacolet.