Five men from the Hamilton County seat of Webster City moved 10 miles east to plat the town of Hawley in December 1857. The town was named after the Chief Engineer of the Dubuque and Pacific Railroad with the hope he would choose to have the rail line stop in the new town. The railroad did not extend to the area for ten years, and by that time John I. Blair was the Chief Engineer. When the Hawley investors refused to work with Blair, he platted his own town a mile to the north and named it Blairsburg.
The Blairsburg Post Office was officially established in August 1867. It has been in operation since and now resides just north of the town’s Main Street, adjacent to the restored turn-of-the-century Blairsburg Opera House. It is one of over 250 post offices in the state being reviewed for closure.
Though the small Carroll County community of Willey hasn’t had a full-service Post Office since 1901, resident mailboxes have been grouped in a single location for many years. A 1969 article in the Carroll Daily Herald noted a new facility that divided the mailboxes into two rows and added the town nameplate at the top of the stand, the first upgrade in 43 years. The pictured canopy was constructed in 2004, featuring 32 mailboxes along with benches for local children to wait for school buses.
Construction began on the new post office facility for the Davis County community of Pulaski in December 1999. The non-descript modular building featured new patron mailboxes, a handicap-accessible entrance, and a 24-hour lobby. Postal service was first established in Pulaski in 1852.
Construction began on the new Algona Post Office on May 28, 1964 with an expected completion date of October 31, 1964. The construction project was postponed three times due to heavy rains in the spring and summer, heavy snow in the winter, and heavy thawing and flooding the following spring. Once work was completed, the process of moving equipment and mail from the old post office to the new one began 4:00 a.m. on Sunday, May 2, 1965. The Post Office opened to the public the following day and was formally dedicated September 11, 1965.
Mail equipment was transferred to the new post office in the Clinton County community of DeWitt on Friday, July 14, 2000, and the new facility was officially opened to customers the following Monday. The new post office offered dedicated customer parking, a 24-hour lobby, and about twice the square footage of the previous location.
The previous post office was constructed in 1936, one of several built across the state as part of the Works Project Administration. After sitting vacant for nearly a year, the City of DeWitt purchased the building and renovated the interior for use as the City Hall.
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