Site of Reeves Post Office

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker says about the site of the Reeves Post Office in Briscoe County. Now, half a mile east of where you're sitting right now, there's a piece of ground that used to mean everything to the people who lived out here. Picture this prairie, sparse as it gets, and the nearest railroad sitting sixty miles away.

Sixty miles. Out here, that might as well have been the moon. So when the Reeves post office opened on July 13, 1899, it wasn't just a post office.

It was a lifeline. A communication link for early pioneers who otherwise had nothing connecting them to the wider world. And where did this vital operation set up shop?

In the front room of postmaster Joseph H. Reeves' own two-story frame home. That man opened his house, and one hundred and ten settlers came knocking, letter by letter, season by season.

Then on August 24, 1905, a fellow named James U. Strickland bought the house and stepped into the postmaster role himself. He kept that link alive, kept the mail moving across that windswept prairie.

Until March 30, 1907, when the facility closed, and mail got rerouted eight miles north to Silverton. Just like that, the need that had built this little operation had shifted, and the post office was done. Strickland eventually sold the home to Forrest Leonard Weast in 1909.

And that two-story frame house, the one that had held the front room where it all began, was destroyed by fire. Not a trace left to show what once stood there. Just the open prairie, and now this marker, half a mile back, remembering it for you.

What the marker says

(.5 mi. east) Since the railroad was 60 miles from this sparsely populated prairie, the establishment of Reeves post office opened a communication link for the early pioneers. Begun July 13, 1899, in the front room of postmaster Joseph H. Reeves' two-story frame home, the post office served 110 settlers. James U. Strickland bought the house and took over as postmaster August 24, 1905. He served until the facility closed on March 30, 1907, and mail was delivered to Silverton (8 mi. N). After Strickland sold the home to Forrest Leonard Weast in 1909, it was destroyed by fire. (1979)