Mullica Hill Historic Walking Tour

The Harness Maker's Post Office

c. 1840 · 26 South Main Street

Stop 5 of 13 · Core Loop · Old Town Hall Museum 5 min · Map · About 2 min read

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For thirteen years, the entire Mullica Hill post office fit inside one end of this house.

William F. Iredell made harness for a living, and had for a long time. An 1882 census of village trades already lists his shop among Mullica Hill's dozen-odd going concerns. The postmastership came to him in 1897 and stayed until 1910. He simply moved the mail in with the leather, running both operations from the north end of his own home at 26 South Main Street. A town small enough to collect its mail in a harness maker's front room is a town where the postmaster knows every name on every envelope.

The mail is the oldest thread here. The village post office dates to 1802. The earliest postmaster the old-timers of 1883 could still put a name to was Willett Smith, "Captain" Smith to the town, and by the 1880s the coach was bringing the mail pouches in a dozen times a week. The historic district survey knows this building as the Shoemaker House, built around 1840, one more name in a village where houses collect them.

William's son Edward stood on both sides of the arrangement. It was Edward behind the camera for the photograph of his father at the bench, and when William's term ended, the appointment passed to Edward. The picture is one Mullica Hill postmaster photographing another, a family trade recorded by the family itself.