Post Cards, Postage Stamps and Post Offices

Part 1

Between 1898 and 1927, from Murdo, Milltown, Mina, Carter, Clayton, Westover, White River, Gann Valley, Avon, Alexandria, and many other towns in South Dakota, my people received postcards. They saved some of those post cards and snipped the stamps from others to save. Through them a slice of history reveals itself.

Picture of the Mattas Place.

If you were really a savvy entrepreneur - like those early Milltown settlers - you would locate the post office in the general store that you owned, like in Milltown. Pick up your mail, grab a sack full of flour!

Many postcards were sent from there over the years. 

The town even sported its own postcards. 

Photo of store published in "Our Place in Rural America" by Donna Stainbrook.

The Post Office/Store in Milltown became the hub of the community. On the second floor was a dance hall. My Aunt Grace Adkins (Mattas) was invited there by her friend, Patsy in 1915.

The invitation came by post! 

In 1902, nine miles east of Milltown, another entrepreneur, George Buehner built a store in Clayton Township. He, too, established the store as a post office. In 1903, George received annual compensation of $34.84.

In addition to the building being a store and post office, it was also the family home!

Photo courtesy of Ralph Marquardt.

Postcards depicting idyllic Clayton scenes were sent to friends!

Members of the Buehner family were the only postmasters in Clayton, they ran the post office for 30 years until it closed in 1933. 

Postcards courtesy of Ralph Marquardt.

Although my families all lived just a few miles apart and went to the same rural Stainbrook school, they had different postal addresses. Mattas’ were Milltown, Adkins’ and Mize – Parkston. When Lillian Mattas wrote to her friend Grace Adkins, the postcard went from Milltown to Parkston and then back again.

Luckily by the early 1890s Rural Free Delivery came to the area! And who but my grandfather, John D. Mize and his brother Harley became mail carriers for a while. Dispatched from Parkston, and first by buggy, they traveled the challenging roads delivering mail to their friends and family. They bid for the contracts and had to provide their own buggies and horses.

Milltown was always Milltown, Clayton-Clayton, but to get a postcard to the Parkston area was a challenge in the beginning. The first Post Office was called Amburn, changed to Dakota City, moved a mile to Kirk, which then became the town of Parkston!

The man behind the Post Office was A.G. Grimm, postmaster, who ran it in Dakota City from, of course, his general store. In 1886, when the railroad missed Dakota City, he moved the Post Office/Store to the new town called Kirk. 

The townspeople were not fond of the name Kirk, so they called it Parkston. The Postal Address remained Kirk for over a year, much to the dismay of its citizens, including my Great aunt, Martha Adkins! 

From the Parkston Advance, July 1887: “A town with one name and a post office with another is what we have had to contend with and has caused a great deal of trouble with the many who have been receiving their mail here!"

A.G. Grimm - always the excellent postmaster - with the help of his bondsman, finally made the change that year.

Mail delivery in Parkston operated smoothly after that. Postcards were received by my family from all over South Dakota, the United States, and beyond! 

By the late 1920s some were even arriving via air mail!

Treasured letters and postcards came to my family, even from as close as Scotland. 

My Aunt Martha Adkins was a prolific letter writer. She kept in contact with our many relatives, including her Williams relatives. This postcard in 1898 is from her sister Rachel Williams Craig.

Each town, like Scotland, through its post offices have more stories to tell.

The Milltown Post Office closed in 1953. The store has been demolished. The store in Clayton was sold to the Marquardt Family in the 1950s and they used it as their home for many years. It now sits abandoned. Dakota City disappeared.

The John and Leta Marquardt family inside the Clayton store. Photo courtesy of my cousin, LaVae Marquardt. Circa, 1959

My cousin, Debbie Rauscher Triebwasser, like her grandfather John D. Mize, was a mail carrier in Hutchinson County. She retired this year after nearly 20 years of full-time service, tackling the Dakota winters too. Her last route included the area around Milltown.

L-r: Debra Triebwasser, her grandfather, John Mize, and Debra's aunt and my mother, Margaret Adkins. Circa, 1950s