I went on a trip to southern Iowa Tuesday in an attempt to clear my head from all of the conference talk and in search of something about as random and uncertain: Iowa post offices targeted for closure.
One of my early stops was Weldon, on the Clarke/Decatur county line, formerly on IA 266. The community center was open for the school board election. I inquired about the location of the post office.
“The old one, or the new one?” The question took me by surprise.
And sure enough, here’s Weldon’s new post office. (The old one, a lonesome building in a lonesome downtown, still had the ZIP code painted on the window.)
The Weldon post office looks remarkably like the one in Davis City, 21 miles away and five miles from the Missouri state line:
Which looks remarkably like the one in Scarville, two miles from the Minnesota state line:
It looks pretty obvious that for some period the USPS had a utilitarian “cookie-cutter” design that was used in small towns. And that period was…the 1990s.
All three of these were built between mid-1994 and mid-2002, as shown in aerial photos of those times. There are other post offices built specifically as post offices on The List, too, like Mystic.
So, completely randomly, I have found three buildings on opposite sides of the state that are less than 20 years old – probably less than 15 – that the USPS built and now wants to get rid of. How many others are in an identical situation?
(By the way, just after I took that photo in Davis City, a UPS truck and another customer pulled up.)