An RPO cancellation for a postcard mailed via a train at Branchville.
I hear Ridgefield used to have a slew of post offices. True?
For years, people have complained about the Ridgefield Post Office and its lack of enough convenient parking spaces. A century ago, parking was never a problem when visiting the post office — the town had a fraction of today’s population, but seven times more post offices.
From the 19th Century into the early 20th, almost every major region of Ridgefield had its own post office.
There was, of course, a center post office, located in a variety of places over the years. The first official federal post office opened in 1793 in the King and Dole Store, a building now part of the Aldrich Museum offices on Main Street (before that, privately handled mail came to the Keeler Tavern).
Ridgebury’s post office was in a store just north of the Congregational Church. Limestone’s post office was located in a house near Stonehenge Inn while Scotland’s was in a home on North Salem Road nearly opposite Pond Road.
Though only a short distance north of the main village of Ridgefield, Titicus had a post office for many years, located in the Titicus Store at the southeast corner of North Salem and Mapleshade roads (the building is now used as an office and apartment).
A post office reportedly existed along the train line between Ridgefield center and Branchville, located at Cooper Station, which was hardly more than a shack on Cooper Hill Road.
Branchville itself had a post office, too, right near the station. Trains were the main method of outside mail transportation, and bags of incoming and outgoing mail were transferred at the Branchville Post Office. Incoming mail was from there distributed to the local post offices.
The neighborhood post offices were closed down early in the 20th Century when the automobile began to make travel to the center post office and the home delivery of mail much easier.
One other post office deserves noting because it passed through Ridgefield. That’s right, through Ridgefield.
In the last half of the 19th Century and first part of the 20th, many trains on the line from Norwalk up to Pittsfield, Mass., carried mail cars that were mobile post offices. Mail was cancelled and sorted as the train was moving along the tracks.
While passengers could not access the “Railway Post Office” car, people on station platforms could. Most postal cars had a special slot through which mail could be deposited and many people used this service because it was faster than a traditional fixed post office; overnight delivery was much more likely.
Railway post offices employed special postmarks, saying “RPO” and including the names of the towns at both ends of the line. Letters mailed from Branchville generally were cancelled “Danbury and South Norwalk.”—J.S.