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Archiver > VERMONT > 1999-05 > 0927073997


From: "Jackie M. Botala" <>
Subject: [VERMONT-L] more old papers...
Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 17:33:17 -0700


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South Starksboro Post Office

When I was trying to find out when South Starksboro first
had a post office, older residents told me that often their
people had told them how they had gone afoot, after a hard
days work, to Bristol, over five miles away, to get the mail.
Daniel Orvis built a store in 1872 or 1873 and one corner
was used for a post office. The mail was sen to Bristol when-
ever there was an opportunity, sometimes only once a week.
After several years it was sent every day.
At last the mail was carried for $500 four years, in the
"horse and buggy days".
The carrier looked so much like the pictures of "Uncle
Sam" that a New Yorker dubbed him that. He named his
horse, which he thought a great deal of, Sam. He went to
a tinsmith and had a long horn made which he blew fre-
quently as he journeyed along, and blew it all the time as
he was nearing and entering Bristol Village. This was for-
bidden after a while.
Edwin Orvis told me that one day the postmaster, Daniel
Orvis, asked the carrier to get five dollars worth of postage
stamps. He asked "Where?" Mr. Orvis replied, "Oh, at any
good hardware store." So that night Edwin Orvis went to
the store to see what the outcome was, and Uncle Sam had
been to two hardware stores and come back without any
stamps.
He was a trusting old man, and we often heard him break
forth suddenly in meeeting, singing,
"I want to go
I want to go there, too."
And one day he went.
Our next mail carrier was of a sterner type and believed
in making was for the mail. Rumor claimed that he and a
woman met in a rather narrow road, and took some time
trying to decide who had the right of way. My informant told
me a number of men were sitting onthe edge of the porch
steps in front of the store, and the wagon wheels of the mail
carrier ran across the toes of one man's shoes, in demon-
stration of the right way.
The postmaster was keenly alert in devices to deliver the
mail, one time tying an iron to some mail and throwing it
across the river, after a flood had taken the bridge away.
In March 1901 the store burned and then the mail was
moved to Daniel Orvis' home until July 1901.
By that time rural delivery had come, and now collectors
are searching for old letters with the South Starksboro post-
mark.

(Contributed by Lillian L. Jacobs, Burlington)

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