Redding's Four Post Offices Avoid Chopping Block

Redding Ridge, Redding Center, West Redding, Georgetown.

These are the names of the four (4) post offices in Redding, population 9,158, .

Redding may be unique in the state for being a community with four post offices (and four zip codes). Next-door Weston has only one and Easton has only one.

The U.S. Postal Service announced plans last week and elsewhere but, for now, it looks as though all four of Redding’s post offices will be spared.

“But just because Redding’s not on the list today doesn’t mean it won’t be on the list tomorrow,” said Christine Dugas darkly.

Dugas is Connecticut and Rhode Island spokesperson for the USPS, which announced it would likely close 3,700 of its 30,000 post offices, 15 of them in Connecticut, following a public comment period.

“From time to time you’ll hear ugly rumors that Redding Center is closing,” said Brent Colley, who created the “History of Redding” website, www.historyofredding.com.

Colley, Redding native and grandson of beloved Georgetown historian  and onetime Redding Center postmaster Harry Colley who died in February, is a treasure trove of interesting facts about Redding’s postal past.

“Back in 1984, the U.S. Postal Service planned to shut down the Georgetown Post Office,” he recalled. “But there was such an uproar they changed their minds.”

As Colley explained it, Redding's four post offices are creatures of historical happenstance.

“In the beginning, from the 1700s to the early 1800s, were the post riders,” he said. They traveled from shoreline outposts delivering mail to the scantily populated rural interior.

“Then came the stagecoach, which stopped at Darling’s Tavern [now a private home, located at the corner of Redding Road and Goodsell Hill Road],” he said.

In 1810, Billy Comstock established the first “post office” in Redding at his home across the street from the tavern.

Four years later, William Sanford opened Redding’s second post office under the name “Redding Town House” in Redding Center. The Old Town House survives as a meeting place for town land-use commissions while the post office relocated across the street from the town hall.

When the railroad came through in 1852, Georgetown and West Redding became business hubs. A new post office was established in the general store in Simpaug Turnpike in West Redding (later relocated across the street) and eventually Georgetown, with its “company-town” , had its own as well.

Meanwhile, over on the Ridge, commerce was centered at the old general store. When the historic complex was demolished, new owners built today's and a new home for the Redding Ridge Post Office.

Of the four post offices in Redding, all have post office boxes but only West Redding does the home deliveries once carried out by rural carriers.

When the USPS decided to shut post offices in Bridgeport, Hartford, Waterbury, Stamford and New Haven, as it announced this week, it cited relatively low volume of mail and little “foot traffic” at those locations.

So what volume of mail is handled at each of Redding’s post offices and how many patrons come through the doors and how much revenue does each one generate? In other words, how close do Redding's post offices come to the magic formula for shutdown?

These are questions the answers to which are not readily arrived at.

“Proprietary information” is the USPS watchword, Dugas said.

For the past 26 years, at least, she said, that kind of information has been withheld from public disclosure to avoid giving private companies — think FedEx and UPS — a competitive advantage.

No one wants to see their local post office close and communities are mounting campaigns to protest closures at public meetings. The postal workers’ union is having a say as well.

The USPS says the closings could save $200 million annually. In 2010, the postal service suffered a record $8.5 billion net loss, up from a loss of $3.8 billion the previous year.

Where the USPS is closing post offices, Dugas was quick to emphasize, it was also planning to fill the gap with “village post offices” located in grocery and convenience stores.

Should the USPS fix its focus on Redding, post office counters at existing shops are a possibility.

Then again, some doomsayers might predict a return to the post riders of the distant past, once the oil economy collapses.