80th Anniversary
Early Sidney post office was a lean-to shed off store ~

by Valorie Lennox
The Review

From a comer of a grocery store
to a lean-to, then moving to its
current brick building at Beacon
Avenue and Fourth Street, the
Sidney Post Office has served the
area for 100 years.

Dudley Harvey, who was born in
Sidney in 1911, recalls hearing the
post office was first established in
a local grocery store.

The post office was officially
opened on June 1, 1892. The first
postmaster was L. Dickenson,
appointed on May 1, 1992.

Dickenson was followed by J.J.
White, who started in June, 1903
and J. Critchley, who took the post
in January, 1913.

The post office Harvey recalls
was a lean-to attached to the side
of Critchley’s store. That structure
was built in the 1920s, he said.

The current post office was built
in 1936 on two vacant lots border-
ing Beacon Avenue and Fourth
Street.

The foundation was scooped out
with a shovel and a team of horses,
Harvey said.

“The only cats you had then
were the mice-catchers,” he joked.

In June, 1935, W. Whiting took
over as postmaster. However it was
HE. Kennedy who was postmas-
ter in 1936, when the new building
was constructed.

Built by the federal government,
the post office was unusual in that
the building was constructed of
brick.

Then, as now, most of the build-
ings in the area were wood-frame
construction, Harvey said.

The post office formed the
boundary between the rest of the
town and Chinatown.

The four-lot Chinatown section

were men and were single. Harvey
only recalls one Chinese man who
lived with his wife in Sidney.

Many of the town’s residents
would pass Chinatown almost
daily as they went to the post
office to pick up their mail.

Harvey recalls the post office
being open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
with mail delivery daily from
Monday to Friday.

Town folk picked up their mail
but those living out of town had
mail delivered to their mailboxes,

Harvey said.

“The only place they delivered
was in the rural district.”

There were living quarters for
the post office caretaker upstairs.

Although all of the mail was
conveyed by rail and ship, Harvey
says delivery times were similar to
delivery times today.

A letter from Sidney to England
took about three weeks to reach its
destination, Harvey said.

“J just happened to live here

that’s what I remember of it,” he
Al

TheReview Wednesday, July 29,1992 — 18

concluded.

In 1959, EC. Waters took over as
postmaster, followed by Ben Evans
in 1976.

Since Evans, Sidney's postmas-

ters have been Hal Jackson, Ray
Vetter, Bob Stevens, Jim Sharpe,
Ray Metzler and Andy Merrick.

The current postmaster is Don
Hoffman.

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