Old Post Office Building

Hello. I’m Dean Borg. Living in this area since 1965, I remember this building as the post office, adjacent to a bakery that was a Saturday morning favorite. Just a few more steps down the sidewalk, a hardware store, meat market and a café displaying a big kettle of hot soup with a help-yourself ladle just inside the front door. Ambience is part of why I’m proud to call Mount Vernon home – a very inviting, intriguing downtown, interesting shops and restaurants and business owners who live here too.

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A post office, with the name of “Franklin” was established on the farm of Robert Symthe three miles west of Mount Vernon in 1841. In those days mail arrived once a week by horseback. During the 1840s, the office was “passed around” to the homes of different postmasters until, in 1850, it was transferred to Elisha Waln, moved into the newly platted village, and renamed “Mount Vernon.”

Waln probably operated the post office from his general store. In the decades prior to the establishment of a Rural Free Delivery System in 1896, farmers from the surrounding countryside would make periodic trips into town in order to pick up whatever mail had accumulated for them and to do their shopping.

This building was built in 1888 by Rood and Young, a clothing store partnership that operated in Mount Vernon during the late 19th century. The first postmaster to use this building was T.S. Brokaw. The post office moved to Second Avenue Southwest in June of 1967. In later years, the metal siding of this building obscured much of the original decoration on the façade. When this siding was removed in recent years the enormous amount of brick detailing and pressed tin decorations were once again visible.

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105 1st Street Southwest