Postmaster Vernon Copenhaven moved his staff into the new Glidden Post Office building on September 1961. The single-story brick building is in use today, a tenure much longer than any of the previous locations. The community’s first post office was established in March 1867 and located inside a wood-frame general store. The location changed frequently during its first 100 years, housed in a variety of downtown storefronts, a portion of a hardware store, a former bank building and an old furniture store. Glidden is a town of 1,253 residents located along Highway 30 east of Carroll in Carroll County.
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.
The 21,000-square-feet Carroll Post Office opened its doors with little fanfare on Monday, July 13, 1970. Built at an estimated cost of $239,000, the air-conditioned facility offered four times the space as the previous building including rooms for record storage, mechanical equipment, mail bags and postal equipment. Customers benefited from the location move with a larger lobby, more post office boxes, and standalone mailboxes in the parking lot to allow letters to be deposited without leaving the car. The previous post office served the Carroll community for 46 years.
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