Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night

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SIDNEY — One hundred years ago today, the U.S. Post Office at the corner of North Street and Ohio Avenue was dedicated.

A celebration is in the works for later this month, according to Postmaster Brian J. Schroeder.

The first post office in Shelby County opened in 1819 in Hardin, which was then the county seat. It moved to Sidney in 1821. Seventeen years later, the post office was located in the courthouse. By 1902, it was housed in Memorial Hall, now known as the Monumental Building, and in 1912, it had moved again to the Wagner Hotel, which was along Poplar Street between Ohio and West avenues.

The federal government purchased the land for the current structure in 1915. At a time when the average salary was $1,500 per year, the government paid $20,000 for the lot. Another $70,000 was spent on the building, which was complete and occupied by March 1917. It featured marble clad walls, recessed ceilings, indoor plumbing, and ornate carving over the front door.

Winifred Gallagher wrote in “How the Post Office Created America” that Congress appropriated those large sums because the fancy buildings they paid for gave politicians something to brag about.

Area residents visited the post office then as much to do their banking as to send letters and packages. In 1864, the government established postal money orders as a safe way for people to transfer funds and by 1880, it was generating $140 million in business each year. In 1910, President William Howard Taft authorized post offices to open savings depositories, and the Postal Savings System served Americans in areas where banks couldn’t.

Although the savings system eventually closed, postal money orders are still sold every day, some by clerk Monica Francis, of Versailles, who has been working for the post office for 23 years and has seen lots of changes, especially in mail volume.

“When I started, there were six clerks. Now, I’m the only (one),” she said. Automation is the cause. Mail is sorted by machines in Columbus and arrives in Sidney already in the order carriers need to case it.

“The carriers get out a lot earlier,” Francis said. “I sort what the machine can’t read.”

Another change is the big drop in letter and flat (magazine and newspaper) mail. While email, texting and the Internet can be blamed for that, the latter is also credited with keeping the U.S. Postal Service in the black.

“Right now, the parcel business is driving revenue (nationally),” Schroeder said. That’s because of the great numbers of people who are shopping online, and Amazon, among other “Etailers,” ships packages via the mail.

While some people think of FedEx and UPS as postal rivals, those firms are actually in partnership with U.S.P.S. FedEx flies the postal mail and the postal service delivers FedEx and UPS packages to places those two can’t get to. The mail gets virtually everywhere. There are even deliveries made to boats on the Great Lakes.

These days, there are 13 routes in Sidney, the longest of which, Route 2, is 11 miles. Francis began work as a carrier before she became a clerk and walked every route. In order to sort mail, she still has to be familiar with the path of each one.

But what she most enjoys is working with customers at the stamp windows, which were modernized during a renovation of the lobby in 2015.

“I like the interaction,” she said. It’s what the post office has always been about — facilitating interaction, across town and across the nation. And today, the building on the corner begins its second century of doing just that.

The employees of the Sidney Post Office stop working for a picture Wednesday, June 28 2017.
http://www.sidneydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/47/2017/06/web1_Post-office-staff-2017.jpgThe employees of the Sidney Post Office stop working for a picture Wednesday, June 28 2017.
Post Office dedicated 100 years ago today

By Patricia Ann Speelman

[email protected]

Reach the writer at 937-538-4824.

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