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Your Community Post Office by Anne Hunter | photos By Jimmy Farr When your dog tugs its leash into the Rosemary Beach Post Office, you might be inclined to follow. Inside, you’ll find Postmistress Joni Kelly, who has your mail—and a treat for your favorite pooch. Each morning that she unlocks the tiny office storage cove inside the iconic Rosemary Beach Post Office, Postmistress Kelly rolls up her sleeves to dig into another day of sorting the mountain of envelopes and packages addressed to the more than 624 mailboxes she manages. “The mail is usually here when I arrive,” she explained. “Some days, it is a little intimidating to unlock that door.” Depending on how many packages have been delivered, especially during Spring Break and Christmas, the volume can be overwhelming. “As the town grows, so does the mail volume,” Kelly said. “The locals are
troopers when I call to ask them to pick up the larger packages they receive, earlier than later.” But it is the Postmistress who is the real trooper. First, Kelly sorts the mail and hopes that the packages will be retrieved by their owners as soon as possible. “Although we do not have a “box- up” time, I try to have the majority of the mail up when the window opens at 10 am” Kelly explained. The rest of her day is spent collecting and stamping letters and packages from her patrons and maintaining the post office boxes rented to her clientele.
She fulfills the endless duties required of the town’s sole postal manager - all the while popping her head through the window to smile and greet those who enter. “By the time you leave, you’re wanting to be her friend,” a local box holder said. “She just has that effect.” The Rosemary Beach Post Office is a Contract Postal Unit (CPU), a postal branch of the United States Postal Service (USPS) located in a non-postal building and operated by a private company that follows federal postal guidelines. CPU’s are also referred to as a Community Post Office (CPO). They are equipped to sell most postal products and services at prices identical to those of a regular post office but without some of the bells and whistles and in subordination to the guidelines that don’t always support the needs of the location. “While the postal service provides my shipping supplies and stamps, it is not uncommon for me to make a trip on my way to work to pick them up in order to have them in a timely manner for my customers,” Kelly said. An advocate for her post office, Kelly has to jump through hoops on occasion because CPUs are not always on the USPS radar. The Rosemary Beach Postmistress understands the inner workings between a CPU and a regular post office. She was a postal agent with the USPS for 15 years before becoming a postal contractor for the Rosemary Beach Post Office, which is a CPU that is subsidized by the Rosemary Beach Property Owners Association (POA) as an amenity for homeowners and fortunate box holders. Community post offices existed by the 1880s in various parts of the country, but they expanded rapidly during the Postmastership General of John Wanamaker. A prominent and innovative businessman of the Gilded Age, Wanamaker worked to make postal services more convenient for the person on the street and to reduce the number of postal clerks needed at established postal facilities. As a result of Wanamaker's century-old advocacy, the founders of Rosemary Beach were able to sanction a post office for their town, not only for the way of mail but also for the way of uniting the community. While streets of Rosemary Beach were not plotted for residential postal delivery service, a fact that has complicated deliveries with the advent of Amazon, it is not unusual for New Urbanist communities like Seaside, Rosemary Beach and Alys Beach to place a post office as a center point of the community as a sort of historical landmark.
