Last night I was watching NBC Nightly News and there was an article about a former school teacher in Mississippi who sends birthday cards to about 400 of her old students every year. It was pretty amazing. But to me the amazing part was at the end when they showed her going into her local post office to mail a batch of cards. “That’s our old post office!” Apparently *her* post office was built as part of the same public works project that built Mount Vernon’s old post office.
I never really thought about it, but I’m sure many of those Public Works Projects were simply cookie cutter plans. So all over the country there are old post office buildings with the same exact design as Mount Vernon’s, and most of them have a unique painting, just like ours. I even found an album on flickr titled “Post Offices and New Deal Art” that shows these buildings and their artwork from around the country (Mount Vernon included!). I don’t know who “jimmywayne” is, but he’s logged a lot of hours around this country photographing post offices! Very impressive if you ask me.
As we mentioned in an earlier post, our old post office is no longer the local post office, but the building still survives—a part of our town’s history and our country’s history.
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