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.

“The town post office is another feature that is now often included in New Urbanist communities,” David Bailey, Rosemary Beach Town Manager, explained . “It provides for many things - not only a place for locals and visitors alike to send and pick up mail, but also a place to have an impromptu meeting with a neighbor, a backdrop for a family photo, an iconic landmark to aid newcomers with navigation. Of course, most important, is the human touch of the postmaster, who is also an ambassador for the town. By having all incoming mail routed to a post office box, it adds flexibility for owners who may spend part of the year elsewhere and for those who rent their homes.”

It was 2001 when the first pieces of mail were delivered to Rosemary Beach by the hands of Carolyn Flippo, the town’s first postmistress.

“My husband worked on the grounds and I worked at the post office,” Carolyn said. “There were mostly full-time residents then. You talked to people and met people. It was a small town. Everybody knew everybody. If they didn’t get mail here, they would stop by anyway, just to connect and visit.”

Her mother was close with so many of the people who live and frequented the post office that Carolyn’s daughter, Candace Price

Former Postmistress Carolyn Flippo and current Postmistress Joni Kelly

speaks of them like family members. “Jennifer and Chris would bring Audrey into the post office every day. I remember when Atticus was born. Not too long after that, my mom would babysit them often. She just connected with everyone and everyone connected with her. It was a very special part of our family’s life and is a testament to the grass roots beginnings of our community,” she said.

Her “human touch” has spanned two decades, weaving her into the fabric of the community. “I love children,” Postmistress Flippo remembers the early post office days. “I gave out little lollipops to the children. It was a family thing. They would come to see me. I really enjoyed it when the Montessori children would come by.”

The 250-square foot space was designed by architect Scott Merrill and is situated on a two-block green that comprises Rosemary Beach’s main civic space. “People would come in amazed because it's so small and architecturally beautiful,” recalled Flippo. The green is bisected by Main Street by the principal road through town that descends to the Gulf of Mexico, a block away. The scene is reminiscent of a movie set, making it one of the most picturesque post offices in the world and one of the most popular social media backdrops on Scenic Highway 30A. Merril explained the history, “DPZ (DuanyPlater Zyberk, the Rosemary Beach town planner) had long dedicated sites to post offices, even after they had become anachronisms, because going to a central post office was seen as an opportunity for chance encounters. When my wife and I first got married, we lived in Seaside and if the encounters were not at the post office, they were on the way there or back. It was always nice, and welcome, to run into people. But then the entire town was laid out, like Rosemary Beach, to increase the likelihood you will run into friends doing almost anything.”

Behind the curtain of the beautiful backdrop is the exhaustive list of tasks, set in motion by Flippo, directed by present-day Postmistress Kelly and produced by the Rosemary Beach leadership. The performance is a daily feat - one that is not for the faint of heart, but for the heroes, like Flippo and Kelly, who have mastered living and deliver life to us daily, effortlessly - with a smile.