Webster’s post office disappears. A town loses its center.
Residents say Webster’s post office was central to its identity. They’re concerned a replacement will never come.
Jack Snyder illustration
It was always more than just a place to pick up the mail. Long before asphalt and electronic highways reduced time and space to mere trivialities, a quieter system stitched scattered settlements together. The tiny Jackson County municipality of Webster grew up around that system, bringing residents together, creating a sense of identity and promising them that even remote mountain towns belonged to a wider republic.
Now that the Webster post office is gone — the boxes hauled away, the building under renovation — residents are ultimately optimistic it may return but remain frustrated by the loss of a longtime civic center with roots in a colonial-era institution and disappointed with the temporary relocation.
“It’s such a strain on older people who can’t really make that trip and who rely on it for medications and bills,” said Louise Runyon, a Webster resident. “Just looking at the broader community and the loss of the regional library system, that’s part of the fabric of the community. A post office is part of the fabric of the community. It seems that these things are being regularly threatened and disappearing.”
Scotts Creek was founded on Cherokee land in the mid-1790s, atop a subtle hill cradled by a sharp bend in the Tuckaseegee River in what was then Buncombe County but would become Haywood County in 1808.
On May 24, 1832, William Thomas was appointed postmaster of Scotts Creek, serving until 1843. Scholars today call him William Holland Thomas.
Thomas, sometimes referred to as “the White chief of the Cherokee,” was a heavily mythologized Southern Appalachian frontiersman and cultural intermediary who advocated for the Cherokee people around the time of the Trail of Tears while also operating within, and benefiting from, the power structures of antebellum Southern society.
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By the 1830s, Thomas was operating a trading post at Scotts Creek, where he conducted his Cherokee-related affairs — sending letters to and receiving letters from Washington, D.C., that would ultimately lead to the preservation of Cherokee culture in their ancestral homeland.
After Jackson County was created from parts of Haywood and Macon counties in 1851, Scotts Creek was formally incorporated as the Town of Webster in 1859, renamed for a New Hampshire native who was probably the most prominent attorney of the 19th century and served as Secretary of State under three presidents. Daniel Webster died in 1852.
The Town of Webster was originally purpose-built as the 18-acre county seat of Jackson County, but railroad barons bypassed it in favor of a growing neighbor and a fire in 1913 decimated local businesses. Voters chose Sylva as the new county seat that same year by a 2-to-1 margin.
By 1920, Webster had lost 67% of its population, dwindling to just 74 people. Important buildings that hadn’t burned down fell into disuse or disrepair and were demolished — but not all of them.
A 120-year-old Victorian-style church welcomes many visitors to town from the south. Another has stood beside Webster Road, the 1,800-foot main drag, since 1887. Farther on up the road, a half-dozen structures from the same era are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the old Webster Rock School, a Works Progress Administration project that was completed in 1938 in the utilitarian, localized WPA style known widely across Southern Appalachia.
Along the rest of Webster Road were handsome mid-20th Century homes with neatly kept lawns cornered by split-rail fences on spacious, airy lots, some more than an acre. Residents have repeatedly expressed great satisfaction with the town’s walkability and residential character. Its zoning ordinances reflect that. There’s almost no multifamily housing within town limits and almost no zoning for businesses. There’s no bar, no barber shop, no bookstore, no coffee shop, no diner, no retail at all.
Now home to 372 residents and comprising a total area of one square mile, Webster is part of a rapidly vanishing small-town America where neighbors all know each other, where children still run through forests and pastures and parks, where the real information superhighway is the sidewalk that embraces both sides of Webster Road and the only watchdog is a collared brown and white pittie mix strolling around the United Methodist Church grounds, delicately sniffing flowers like she owns the place.
At its heart, the place that tied it all together, was the old post office at 1345 Webster Road.
“There’s the larger issue of community identity, and this was a central space in our town for folks to get news and exchange information with each other,” said Leigh Anne Young, Webster’s mayor since late 2025. “It really is a central community space that we lost.”
Young, who has lived in Webster for 20 years, also has an interesting link to the long history of postal service in Webster.
Eugenia M. Allison, born in 1878 and widowed in 1906 when her husband Thomas Bragg Allison passed away, was appointed postmaster of Webster on June 27, 1914. Their son, Dan, became a prominent legislator and public servant. Allison served as postmaster until 1948, running operations from her home. Young and her family now live in that home.
“I have plenty of stories from Webster old-timers about retrieving their mail from Miss Allison’s front porch,” Young said.
Webster’s most recent post office also had a beloved longtime postmaster, Mark Jamison, a blues guitarist with roots in Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina who in 1984 joined the United States Postal Service in Waukegan, Illinois, after he decided to trade chasing late-night gigs across the Chicagoland blues circuit for a steady paycheck, federal benefits and the more austere rhythm of sorting letters. Making stops in Augusta, Georgia and then in Sylva, Jamison went on to various supervisory positions in Otto and Franklin until taking the postmaster job in Webster in 1998, where he quickly became an important part of daily life.
He knew everyone’s name. He knew who would be expecting packages. He even knew which families would be out of town on vacation, because they’d leave their checkbooks with him so he could pay their bills.
“A couple of the older women would come when they got home from the grocery store, and I’d go out there and open all their jars for them,” Jamison told The Smoky Mountain News. “I mean, rural postmasters do this stuff. That’s why rural post offices were so important.”
In 2008, Jamison bought the post office building — a concrete block structure of 1,008 square feet built on a 0.14-acre parcel in 1962 — and the cozy, century-old house on the half-acre lot next door, which he quickly made his home.
The post office building had originally been Reinhart’s General Store, and then later the headquarters of Doyle Conville’s potato chip vending operation. Jamison thinks the building was first leased to the USPS in the 1970s.
Built in 1962, Webster’s post office was one of very few non-residential buildings on Webster Road. Wikipedia photo
Once he purchased the building, Jamison erected an old bulletin board outside the post office where people would post community notices or information about lost pets. Beside it, he built a little free library in honor of his friend and nextdoor neighbor George Penland, a normally tight-lipped World War II veteran who loved to read and was prone to spouting Shakespearian sonnets while gardening.
Nearby, newspaper racks for the Macon County News, Mountain Xpress, Sylva Herald and The Smoky Mountain News connected the community to the rest of the region, the state and the world.
“Towards the end of my term there, I had a three-legged dog that everybody loved. Otis the Three-legged Monster Dog. He would sit in the yard and people would come by,” Jamison said. “It was the gathering center.”
A tireless advocate for rural post offices, Jamison has appeared in publications like The Guardian and The Washington Post, as well as on television’s Meet the Press after he began contributing to meetings of the Postal Regulatory Commission around the time of his retirement in 2012.
During one of those meetings, Jamison responded to a proposal to close thousands of rural post offices across the country.
“Within the context of the USPS, we often return to the words ‘binding the nation together.’ We do so because they speak to the fundamental wisdom of the Founding Fathers. They understood that a healthy and robust post was an integral part in the physical, commercial and intellectual infrastructure of the nation,” he said. “From that first principle, from that grand idea, we are able to articulate the essential truth embodied in the concept of the universal service obligation. There is a profound truth in the concept of universal service. There is an understanding that a successful democracy relies on our ability to provide equal access to all our citizens.”
Indeed, colonial America’s first postmaster general, Benjamin Franklin, said that “the business of the post office is of the greatest importance to the public” not only because it promotes commercial activity but also because “it facilitates correspondence between distant friends.”
As the USPS grew out of the Royal Mail system over the next two centuries — Franklin had been the joint deputy postmaster general for the Crown since 1753 — the number of U.S. post offices peaked around 77,000 in 1901, shortly before Rural Free Delivery was instituted. RFD led to the closure of thousands of rural post offices in the early part of the 20th century by providing universal service to farms and isolated cabins, thus eliminating the need for rural residents to travel to far-flung, ersatz post offices squeezed into inns, taverns, trading posts or private homes like Miss Allison’s.
Before RFD, Jackson County alone had more than 80 post offices, most from unique rural communities now consigned to the cobwebbed, yellowed pages of memory, their distinct identities mostly lost to the inevitable encroachment of development.
There was Addie and Alice and Argura. There was Barker and Bessie and Bluefield. There was Big Laurel and Big Ridge and Big Spring. Cashers Valley became Cashiers, Compton came and went, and others — tiny communities with strong names, like Grimshawes — flickered briefly on the postal map before simply ceasing to exist.
Up through the 1960s, around 1,100 post offices had closed each decade. With the advent and expansion of consumer electronic communications systems and privatized package delivery in the 1970s and 1980s, the total now stands around 33,000 nationwide.
Unlike most federal agencies, the USPS operates largely without direct taxpayer support. The USPS funds its operations primarily through the sale of postage, shipping services and related products, meaning the price of a stamp and other mailing fees provide the bulk of the agency’s revenue. Although Congress occasionally authorizes limited financial relief or policy changes affecting postal finances, routine operations are expected to be self-sustaining. In practice, that structure leaves the postal system responsible for covering its own expenses — from employee salaries to vehicles to the maintenance of far more retail locations than either Subway,
Starbucks, McDonalds or Dollar General — without the kind of regular appropriations that sustain most other federal entities.
There were four post offices in North Carolina in 1789, according to a 1996 publication by the North Carolina Postal History Society. By 1971, that number had grown to 6,681. Far below the historical trends, the state has about 850 today. Most recently, Jackson County had 10.
Less than a year ago, that number decreased by one.
After Jamison purchased the Webster post office building, he continued to lease it to the USPS, most recently in 2020, for five years at below-market rates.
“I had to fight with them to get $545 a month,” Jamison said. “That’s all they would do.”
The property changed hands after Jamison, but things remained largely the same until only recently.
In June 2024, a buyer purchased the old post office on Webster Road and the cozy century-old house on the half-acre lot next door — where Mark Jamison wrote out money orders for people who were illiterate, where Otis the Three-legged Monster Dog received well-wishers in the front yard, where Leigh Anne Young took her young children as a special treat, where Louise Runyon checked her mail.
When the property changed hands, there were still several months left on the lease Jamison had negotiated with the USPS back in 2020. The new owner and the USPS could not come to terms on a lease renewal, according to the USPS. Through a third party, the new owner declined to speak with SMN.
Extra space at the Webster Rock School, completed in 1938 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was unsuccessfully floated as an option for a new post office. Cory Vaillancourt photo
With just under two weeks’ notice to customers, the post office closed at the end of May 2025.
Runyon, a postal box customer, said the boxes were picked up with a forklift and moved to Jackson Plaza, about 4.5 miles away, off Grindstaff Cove Road.
“It’s really significant for seniors, who can just take a quick trip to the post office and not have to brave downtown Sylva and not have to brave [busy five-lane N.C. Highway] 107,” she said. “It just makes a really big difference to have somewhere you can go regularly.”
Mail delivery was not affected by the closure. The town’s sense of identity was.
“When my family and I relocated here,” said Brandon Core, Webster’s vice mayor, “we knew that we had the opportunity to opt for a Webster post office box or a Sylva street box, although our street box would need to be off site from our home, kind of in a cluster. We purposely opted for a Webster one. There was a sense of nostalgia of having a post office in our small town that our family could not only walk to, but a place where our kids could get suckers or lollipops from the postal clerk every time we went.”
Around the time of the post office’s closing, meetings of the town’s governing board became a popular place for residents to advocate for a new one. During municipal election campaigns last fall, the topic even became an election issue, although not an issue in the traditional sense of proponents vs. opponents — more in a sense of, are we doing enough?
“Since I’ve been on the town board, it’s been neat to see the effort that everybody on the town board is putting towards getting attention,” said Brad Reisinger, a Webster commissioner first elected in November 2025. “We’ve had some community members really encourage us in this direction, and it’s neat to see representation actually happening that people want — that the town board is taking up the concerns of the community.”
Core, Reisinger, Young and others have been searching for a new location for the post office, although the confluence of Webster’s layout with USPS requirements have made that a turbulent endeavor.
Town of Webster Vice Mayor Brandon Core (left) and Commissioner Brad Reisinger speak at a joint meeting of all five local governments in Jackson County on March 10. Cory Vaillancourt photo
The town’s annual budget is just $168,500, based on a 15-cent property tax rate per $100 in assessed value. According to a postcard mailed by the USPS to postal customers, the USPS is seeking a new location of approximately 1,000 square feet of existing space, or 15,000 square feet of land — about one-third of an acre — within a two-mile radius of the former location. Like many other small Western North Carolina municipalities, the town spends most of its annual budget revenue on residential services like public safety, streetlights, cemetery upkeep and sidewalk maintenance; Webster’s residents have been primarily concerned with other issues like broadband access, road and sewer improvements and environmental sustainability — not on using limited funds to purchase suitable real estate that doesn’t really exist under USPS criteria.
Members of the community have offered up several options to the USPS, all of which involved the Webster Rock School. The Southwestern Child Development Commission now owns and operates the 3.3-acre property as a 20,000 square-foot childcare facility with ample parking and multiple access points to Webster Road.
Core, who also serves as chair of the Jackson County Historic Preservation Commission and president of the Webster Historical Society, said that SWCDC offered the USPS more than 1,300 square feet and a separate, ADA-compliant entrance to its building.
SWCDC Director of Employee Relations and Compensation Stephanie Lovedahl said the offer was declined because the USPS wanted to alter the historic river rock structure so the windows would reach all the way down to the floor — even though the historic post office in Boone, constructed in a similar style, does not feature floor-length windows.
SWCDC alternately offered the use of a detached outbuilding of more than 1,000 square feet behind the main structure, near the softball field and playground. The USPS declined that offer as well, Lovedahl said, because of concerns that high school softball games, held three months a year and usually after 5 p.m., would obstruct parking for postal service customers. The former post office had only three parking spaces.
SWCDC even offered the use of another back corner of its parking lot, where a modular structure could be placed on a temporary or permanent basis. Lovedahl said the USPS told her she didn’t want that.
“I kinda got the impression they don’t want to do small, rural post offices,” she said.
Jamison said he doubts Webster will regain its post office, despite the USPS’ stated effort to locate a new site. From his perspective, the situation follows a pattern he’s seen play out repeatedly across rural America, where small facilities disappear not through formal closure orders but through lease disputes, delays and bureaucratic inertia that gradually shift operations elsewhere.
“They got smart at some point and said, ‘We don’t have to close them; we can just let them fail by themselves because what happened to this one will happen. Buildings will deteriorate, and the owners, whatever … stuff happens,” he said.
Given the existence of nearby post offices in Sylva and Cullowhee and the availability of universal street delivery across the area, Jamison said the Postal Service has little operational incentive to restore a retail facility in Webster.
Even if the Postal Service ultimately agrees to establish a new facility, Jamison said its location could determine whether it truly functions as a Webster post office in the traditional sense. The former site occupied the only place many residents would identify as the town’s center — physically, culturally, emotionally.
Jamison believes the agency will likely continue to assume the posture of a kindly federal partner pursuing a new location, but he remains skeptical that those assurances will translate into action.
“They’ll say all the right things, but they’re never going to actually do anything,” he said.
On Feb. 5, a real estate specialist with the USPS’ Greensboro office sent a letter to Mayor Young reiterating the desire to procure a new site and assuring postal customers that retail operations, including the availability of post office boxes, would continue at the Jackson Plaza post office “until the new post office is up and running.”
Outside town hall, a sign reminds residents to respond to USPS postcards notifying them of the opportunity to share their views on the post office. Cory Vaillancourt photo
The next day, a release on the USPS website noted that “the Postal Service is sensitive to the impact this decision has on our customers and the community [and] customer input will be sought and considered as we continue the relocation process.”
Webster’s town government has posted a notice on its website encouraging residents to avail themselves of the customer input process before the deadline of March 27 by sending written comments to the USPS, which did not provide an option to submit comments by telephone or email.
On March 10, Jackson County Commissioners called an unusual joint meeting with every incorporated municipality in the county. More than 20 elected officials attended. The purpose of the meeting was to recap previous accomplishments and share challenges faced by each of the five governing boards representing some 44,000 residents — Jackson County, Dillsboro, Forest Hills, Sylva and Webster.
“In some ways, I felt a little intimidated because both Sylva and Dillsboro were able to share all of these capital projects and these land acquisitions that they’re doing, and I really felt like the report that I was giving looked vastly different,” said Core, who with Reisinger brought Webster’s concerns to the collective body. “We are not doing a lot of capital projects or acquiring buildings or land or anything like that, but our community is important to us, and I believe that community and that sense of community is important to the people of Webster.”
Webster’s plight seemed to draw sympathy from other municipalities at the meeting. Jackson County Commissioner Todd Bryson suggested the county could send a letter in support of a new post office to the USPS as part of the customer input process.
“That’s a big part of that community there and it has been for years,” said Bryson, who grew up in the area and often played there as a kid. “It’s sad to see it gone now, really.”
Sylva Mayor Johnny Phillips asked if the new post office had to be within the town limits of Webster and said that through his contacts with regional grocery store chain Ingles, which operates a location just off N.C. 107 and Webster Road in unincorporated Jackson County, he believed that the grocer would be amenable to some sort of deal so long as they made out financially.
“I sort of thought that got killed because it was outside the city limits,” Phillips said.
“That’s a really good question,” Core replied, bringing up further ambiguities in the USPS’ stated requirements, including whether the new post office would need to be located in the same zip code.
When SMN asked Phillip Bogenberger, corporate communications for the USPS in Raleigh, for specifics about city limits, zip codes and size constraints stated by USPS, Bogenberger answered. Sort of.
“The Postal Service continues to make progress with the relocation of the Webster Post Office,” he wrote. “The new location should be within a two-mile radius in the same zip code that is convenient for customers while being suitable for our operational need, now and in the future. We thank customers for their patience and continued support.”
The zip code issue remains troubling — the Webster zip code coveted by some, 28788, doesn’t exist on a map. Customers with Webster post office boxes, now located at the Jackson Plaza Post office, utilize the Webster zip code and have a Webster mailing address. At their homes in Webster, those same customers utilize the Sylva zip code of 28779 and have Sylva mailing addresses.
Bogenberger did not respond to an email requesting clarification.
For the first time in the nearly two centuries since letters to and from William Holland Thomas passed through Scotts Creek, Webster does not have its own post office.
The most recent post office building now sits vacant and quiet, cordoned off by stanchions strung with chains, hemmed in by the inevitable encroachment of development and a complex mixture of zoning, topography and federal regulations. The old bulletin board is gone. The little free library is gone. Residents know how easily places like these fade.
There was East Laporte and Effie and Erastus. There was Gay and Georgetown and Granite. There was Hooper and Hoosier and Hornet. Tunnel became Dillsboro, Horse Cove came and went, and Webster just might do the same — another forgotten name in some obscure historical document sitting in a library somewhere.
“You know, almost everybody went to the post office at one time or another. People are spread out, and there aren’t businesses in the town and stuff like that,” Runyon said. “I think it was the one thing that kind of unified the community.”
Rep. Chuck Edwards, Webster’s member of Congress, did not respond to an interview request from The Smoky Mountain News.
You can help
The historic Town of Webster is advocating for a new post office after the existing facility closed in May 2025. Although the United States Postal Service has proposed relocating the post office to a new facility, logistical complications have complicated the process. The process, however, does include an opportunity for public comment — by mail only. Webster is encouraging residents and greater Jackson County to send written comments to the USPS, including support for a new facility, thoughts on potential locations or desired accessibility features. The deadline for comments is March 27.
Mail them to:
The United States Postal Service
Attn: Webster NC main office relocation
P.O. Box 27497
Greensboro, NC 27498-1103
For more information and updates,visit townofwebster.org.
