ELIZABETHTOWN — If you just drive by without knowing it’s there, you’ll probably miss it.
Visually speaking, the tiny 1,064 square foot Elizabethtown Post Office is eclipsed by the towering and sprawling Consolidated Grain and Barge complex next door.
Nevertheless, the 55-year-old post office at Second and Poplar streets continues to be a vital and highly-appreciated asset for the 525 residents of Elizabethtown, as well as rural residents in Sandcreek Township, according to several customers.
“Everybody calls you by name,” said customer Tina Stephens after being handed her mail just seconds after entering the building. “I couldn’t ask for better service. And I like that personal touch you get here.”
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Small, but professional
There were no other customers while Stephens was inside the post office, so Officer-in-Charge Lee Anne Pickerel felt free to chat with her about what dishes their respective families planned to prepare during the holidays.
A postal employee for 13 years, Pickerel has worked in the Daytona Beach, Florida area, as well as larger Indiana towns including Columbus, Madison and North Vernon.
But things are more laid back and personalized in Elizabethtown, she said.
“We are a gathering place for our customers,” Pickerel said. “If you go to a bigger city, you just don’t have the time to get to know everybody like you do here.”
However, small-town does not mean unprofessional. On a small shelf next to the counter, customers can see four honors awarded in different years that recognize mail tracking and record-keeping excellence with minimal mistakes. Each honor gave the Elizabethtown Post Office a Top 10 ranking in a competition that includes post offices throughout the entire Great Lakes region.
In addition, there are several certificates hanging near the awards that attest to Pickerel’s professionalism over the years.
But what’s important to customer Tom Malloy is that the Elizabethtown Post Office is in an ideal location for his frequent trips from his home in northwest Jennings County to Columbus.
“It’s pretty important to the community that this post office is here,” Malloy said. “It’s a real good place with very friendly people, so I always come here.”
In the shadows
But alas — despite all the awards, customer praise and internal recognition — history indicates the Elizabethtown Post Office has frequently been overlooked since it stopped operating out of existing stores and businesses.
When the current facility opened in 1964, there was far more local news speculating on where a new Columbus post office might be built to replace the existing one at Seventh and Washington streets. The former post office is now the Fresh Start Recovery Center.
In 1965, media speculation ended after it was announced that world-renowned architect Kevin Roche of Eero Saarinen and Associates would design the new Columbus Post Office on the block surrounded by Jackson, Fifth, Brown and Fourth streets.
The opening of new post offices in small towns in 1964 wasn’t really unique in our region. Several new post offices opened that year in places including Seymour, St. Paul, Scipio, Edinburgh and Flat Rock. This expansion of facilities was made possible by a U.S. Post Office lease construction program, which allowed private investors to build a post office, and lease it to the federal government for up to 25 years.
But instead of celebrating having their own post offices, many small-town Hoosiers were still feeling annoyed at the time by a 1963 directive that required a different set of five digits representing every city be placed on each letter or package. It took many Indiana residents quite some time to get used to ZIP codes.
By the way, the title “U.S. Post Office” was correct in the 1960s. It wouldn’t be renamed the U.S. Postal Service until 1971.
Distractions
Investor Merrill Jones of Futures Inc. in Greenwood financed construction of the 1,064-square foot post office in Elizabethtown, as well as a 40-square foot loading dock and 3,211-square foot parking lot. In exchange for his $15,000 investment, Jones received lease payments from the federal government for $1,620 a year.
When word got out that U.S. Senator Vance Hartke (1919-2003) might attended the Elizabethtown post office dedication, over 100 people showed up at the ceremony.
Once again, the facility got overlooked. Instead of Elizabethtown, Hartke attended a similar post office opening that day in Francisco, Indiana — just 32 miles away from his hometown in Evansville.
Well, at least the new post office must have been the top news story in Elizabethtown that year. Right?
Not really.
In 1964, most of the buzz in Elizabethtown concerned Indiana Bell’s investment that provided additional telephone circuits between the small community and Columbus. The upgrade significantly enhanced both local and long-distance calling for Sandcreek Township residents, and — for the first time — all phone numbers in Elizabethtown were assigned a 579-prefix.
Recent concerns
Employees in small facilities designated as Level 18 post offices have been a bit nervous in recent years. In 2015, the U.S. Postal Service began reducing hours and staffing at half of its post offices, especially the small ones.
But Pickerel says hours have not changed at the Elizabethtown Post Office since she began working there in 2013.
Later that year, the office of Inspector General of the U.S. Postal Service released the results of a national survey that confirmed what folks in Elizabethtown already knew.
“Both consumers and businesses place value on human interaction with a Postal Service employee at a post office, rather than alternative access options such as postal counters in non-postal retail stores and self-service kiosks,” the survey stated.
This year, there have been reports that the U.S. Postal Service has been floating a business plan that would include significant cuts to employees’ take-home pay and benefits. But Pickerel said she feels secure in her position — especially with the significant increase in package shipping resulting from online sales.
“It’s crazy,” Pickerel said. “We’re delivering a lot more packages from companies like Amazon, Kohl’s and Target than ever before.”
Elizabethtown has two routes handled on a full-time basis by postal employees Adrian Hardwick and Justin Williams. They also have a substitute deliverer named Zenita Leonard, who was being called in quite frequently during December, Pickerel said.
“If a package is extremely heavy, it’s like ‘all hands on deck’ until we get it delivered,” she said.
Sometimes, packages takes up so much room that all outgoing mail doesn’t fit in the truck, so Leonard has to be brought in to ensure that everything else is delivered on time, Pickerel said.
There were several more packages delivered during the 2019 holiday season than last year, so Leonard was nearly being called in on a daily basis in the weeks leading up to Christmas, she said.
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The first post office in Elizabethtown was established the same year the community was founded: 1844. That year, George W. Branham, who named the town after his wife, Elizabeth, was the first postmaster.
For the next 120 years, the community’s postal service was forced to share buildings with grocery stores and other businesses. The Elizabethtown Post Office was located in a large, two-story retail business owned by Norman Bechelli when the U.S. Post Office unveiled its lease construction program in 1963.
That program allowed private investors to build post offices and lease them back to the federal government. Officials in Bartholomew County government liked the concept because the owner was still obligated to pay local taxes on the property.
Futures, Inc. of Greenwood was chosen to build the 1,014 square foot post office near the corner of Second and Poplar streets in Elizabethtown. At that time, the cost of the one-story building was $15,000. That is equivalent to $126,000 today when adjusted for inflation.
James R. Williams was the postmaster of Elizabethtown when the current post office was formally dedicated on July 26, 1964.
Today, operations are supervised by Officer-in-Charge Lee Anne Pickerel.
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