A new postal rural route out of Spring Grove, to be established in October of 1905, would discontinue the post office in Yucatan, according to the September 8, 1905, edition of the Winona Republican-Herald. An additional route from Rushford would cross the county line and service Money Creek. The post office at Money Creek (established in 1856) was discontinued in August of 1907.
According to that newspaper account, the already 17 rural routes, if expanded as expected to 20, would make a “complete county system” able to serve “practically every inhabitant in the county.”
Rural Free Delivery (RFD), as welcomed as it was by farm families, was not popular among country storekeepers, who feared the competition from mail order. A. W. Machem, the superintendent of RFD, attended the Minnesota State Fair in 1902, where he not only lauded the benefits of RFD for farmers but also argued that whatever leads to the prosperity of farm residents will eventually be a boon to trusted local merchants as well.
That 1905 rural route would be the sixth out of Spring Grove as RFD made postal hubs – first out of Caledonia (January 1, 1902) – and by 1905, also out of Spring Grove, Houston, Brownsville, Hokah and La Crescent.
Those six early 20th-century RFD offices plus Eitzen are the only surviving post offices in 2020, far fewer than the 41 post offices established in Houston County.
Photo courtesy of Houston County Historical Society
Of those 41, all but 10 had been discontinued by 1907. Some bustling burgs had lost their bustle and their post offices when bypassed by railroads in the 1870s. Many were gone before RFD arrived about 1901-02. Quite possibly due to RFD, 10 were discontinued between 1901 and 1907, including Portland, Wilmington, Owen, Sheldon, Black Hammer (twice), Winnebago Valley and Money Creek. The closing dates for Bee, Yucatan and Riceford were October 14-15 in 1905.
The last closures were Newhouse in 1933, Reno in 1935, Freeburg in 1947, and Mound Prairie in 1948.
Six of the seven survivors were among the earliest – established between 1852 and 1856. The late-comer was the Eitzen Post Office, which began in 1868 and was the only one with no rural delivery. The government, thinking the area too sparsely populated, did not want to put one there. But Christian Bunge, Jr. prevailed by paying the U.S. government $200 a year and placed the post office in his log-built store.
The new post office needed a name; Bunge and his father decided on “Eitzen,” named after their former home in Eitzen II, Germany. Bunge and later his daughter Bertha served as postmasters for 79 years.
Previously, during territorial days before Minnesota statehood (1858), settlers near Eitzen had to travel, some said on foot, 20 miles one way to Brownsville to get their mail or post a letter. According to the Bunge family history, “such mail service was only in summer and fall when the Mississippi River was open for navigation, and steamboats could stop at Lansing, Iowa, and Brownsville, Minn.”
It became a shorter walk when stagecoaches and better roads rapidly expanded mail service to newly-established post offices in the second half of the 1800s. After the first post office on the river at Brownsville in 1852, there were 24 more established between 1855 and the statehood year of 1858. An 1857 map of postal stops in Houston County identifies 22 post offices, including Watertown, Looneyville, Winfield, Athens, Springdale, Union, Sheldon, San Jacinto, Riceford and Dedham.
A post office may have been inside a small store or a private residence. Existence could be fleeting with 10 being discontinued or relocated before 1868. Before Bunge put Eitzen on the map, a series of area homes had served as a post office known as Portland and later Wilmington.
Horse-drawn wagons were the norm for early rural delivery. Between 1907 and 1915, delivery was authorized on horseback, bicycles, motorcycles and automobiles as a temporary replacement when storms or other causes made roads impassable for other vehicles. Following the end of World War I, the War Department transferred 1,087 motorcycles to the Post Office Department
Earl Wood, a 33-year rural carrier at Houston, delivered by car in the summer and by horse in the winter.