Today just four post offices serve U.S. Postal Service customers in Bulloch County, those in Statesboro, Brooklet, Portal and Register. But how many P.O.’s have existed in Bulloch? Historically, there have been 94 in the county, Virginia Anne Franklin Waters, executive director of the Bulloch County Historical Society, reported at its most recent monthly meeting.
During the March 24 lunch meeting in the Pittman Park United Methodist Church Social Hall, she showed a video, “Fascinating Names of Bulloch County Post Offices Through the Years,” which she and her husband Bill Waters produced from earlier research by fellow Historical Society members Dan Good and Del Presley. She updated one thing from the video, adding one post office to the count, the “Collegeboro” P.O. that was assigned to what is now Georgia Southern University during the time it was Georgia Teachers College (which it was from 1939 to 1959) and Statesboro had not yet grown to surround the campus.
“Since its founding in 1796, Bulloch County, Georgia, has had 93 post offices established, while only four remain as of today,” Virginia Anne Waters said in the previously recorded video. “Their establishment and locations provide clues to the settlement history within the county.”
Although Statesboro, originally “Statesborough,” was designated as the county seat in 1803, it was very sparsely populated and didn’t get a post office until 1823, the first in the county.
“Between 1823 and 1860, there were only four post offices established in Bulloch County, and all of these were on the only major roads in the county: Burkhalter Road, River Road, Mud Road and along a major river, of course the Ogeechee,” she said.
The next three post offices to open after Statesboro’s were named Millray (1847-1903), Bengal (1855-1904) and Wright’s Bridge (opened and closed in 1860, with Isaiah Hart as its postmaster).
Those and the next 50 or so post offices established in the 19th century, except for the Portal post office (first established in 1894, but at “Old Portal”, two miles north of the current town), and the Brooklet and Register post offices, which opened in 1899, have all vanished. But some of the names, such as Arcola, Ivanhoe, Sink (now the Sinkhole voting precinct), Jimps and Blitch, have been preserved as the names of communities, roads or voting places.
“Between 1860 and 1883, seventeen post offices were established in response to increased population,” Waters said.
Of the post office names, she said, “Some are simply clever, and others continue to baffle even the most imaginative.”
The Sink post office name had been submitted as “Sink Hole,” but was shortened because of a “one-name policy” of the U.S. Post Office (now the Postal Service) when that location was established in 1880. But the Sink post office became the “Enal” post office after its postmaster John M. Lane submitted that name in 1882. “Enal” is “Lane” spelled backward, Waters noted, calling it “a clever name from an apparently clever man.” The Enal P.O. closed in 1906, when Brooks Simmons was its last postmaster.
Ivanhoe to Better
The post office at Ivanhoe, as many literary minded readers will have imagined, was named for Sir Walter Scott’s popular 1820 novel. That post office operated from 1877, when its first postmaster was William A. Cone, until 1933, when the postmaster was Clisby H. Cone. The older Cone was “an avid reader and book collector,” Waters explained.
The establishment of railroads through the county the 1880s and 90s spurred another round of post office creation, according to the Historical Society members’ research. There were once five railroad lines through Statesboro, carrying mail and passengers as well as freight, but now only one freight line remains. In the early railroad years the mail ran twice a day, but rural residents had to go to a post office to get theirs, until Rural Free Delivery was established in 1906.
Jimps, five miles south of Statesboro, was also a depot on the railroad line between Metter and Statesboro and had a post office from 1881 to 1933. The name has been attributed to two different, influential local men active during the post office’s 52-year operation, Jimerson Kennedy and “Jimps” Olliff.
“Mr. Olliff operated an establishment known as Jimps’ Store and Post Office, which closed in 1933 during the height of the Depression and the period during which U.S. 301 was paved, making the five-mile drive to Statesboro easier,” said Waters.
A couple of the communities that had post offices established the same year as Brooklet’s and Register’s, 1899, Stilson and Nevils, still have active schools but no longer post offices.
But post offices with names such as “Snap” (1898-1905), “Better” (1899 only), “Star” (1897-1905), “Gnat” (1898-1904) and “Fly” (1891-1904) have left no trace on the landscape.
