Photo: Courtesy Ozark County Times
With the scheduled lease on space in the old Hardenville general store building expiring later this month, it appears the community’s postal service from that location will cease.
The Ozark County Times is reporting the closure was hinted at in 2011, and service from the general store building is set to be suspended Feb. 22.
Gainesville postmaster Jeff Elliott tells the Times he has received no information from the United States Postal Service (USPS) about the Hardenville situation since September 2019. At that time, former building owner Mike Dines notified the federal agency he would not be renewing the post office’s lease when it expires later this month.
Elliott says he serves as official postmaster for the Hardenville facility, categorized as a “remotely managed post office” with Cindy Anderson serving there as a “non-career USPS employee” working as “postmaster relief.”
Elliott says Hardenville’s 32 “route” patrons will continue to have their mail delivered to their roadside mailboxes, adding its eight general delivery patrons will be the most directly impacted.
The Hardenville building’s new owners asked their names and plans not be published at this time. However, they said in a fax sent to the Times they had tried to negotiate with USPS’s Denver-based real estate personnel about keeping the post office in the building but “a contract could not be agreed upon,” in part due to “9/11 requirements and square footage” the new owners will need.
The Hardenville post office was one of three Ozark County post offices USPS said it was studying for possible closure in late July 2011, along with approximately 3,700 other post offices nationwide. The other two Ozark County post offices studied, Rockbridge and Zanoni, have since closed.
Rockbridge, the county’s first and oldest post office, dating from 1842, closed Jan. 9, 2015. Zanoni, dating from 1898, closed Feb. 29, 2016. Like Hardenville, both of those post office closed after USPS introduced costly facility requirements that made renewing leases impractical, if not impossible, for building owners.
Two years after the Zanoni post office closed in 2016, USPS announced in February 2018 it was looking for a site where it could construct a $270,000 modular building that would serve as a new Zanoni post office. The announcement sparked a flurry of criticism over what many considered an outrageous cost for a post office that would serve 40 residents with Zanoni mailing addresses, most of whom by then received their mail in roadside mailboxes delivered out of the Gainesville post office. After the negative attention, USPS backed off the idea, and spokesperson Stacy St. John told the Times during multiple phone calls in the following months that the issue is still being studied, and no decision has been made.
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