Athal, Cedar and Gaylord, all in Smith County, and Brownell in Ness County have been added to the list of 32 Kansas post offices under review for possible closure.
Closing a post office is a very-last-ditch thing. All of these on the dead and dying list have workloads of under two hours a day and don’t have postmasters. The communities involved don’t have other businesses either. The people left first. Then the businesses. Now, finally, the post office will close and become a dwelling place or a barn or bulldozed.
Without a post office are you still a town? A post office is, after all, a key part of a community’s identity. That’s why post offices last as long as the Cheshire Cat’s smile, hanging on after the town itself lives only in the memories of the old timers determined to live on in their two-story white frame houses until they are led away — or carried away.
Having another batch of towns turn to dust and knowing that another place name will be dropped from the Kansas map before too many more years pass — look for Geneva on yours — is either sad or of-course. Mostly, of-course, or even so-what.
It doesn’t really hurt because the process takes generations and with each generation Athal, Cedar, Gaylord, et al, grew smaller and provided less. The schools shrank until the kids had to be bussed to a bigger place to high school. The next generation was bussed to seventh grade and the next had no school at all.
The jobs left and the last store closed and by the time the town was nothing more than a name the final losses were too expected to cause grief. When people went away for a while they realized there was nothing left to come back to. And so when the post office closes and even the name has its days numbered, the last man can walk away, turn and salute and think no more about it.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
