Paint Bank mail now goes through West Virginia
PAINT BANK – Mail for Paint Bank residents now has to go to West Virginia and back.
The Paint Bank Post Office closed on Oct. 27, a postal official in New Castle confirmed. “It was a problem with the lease,” according to Officer-in-Charge Allison Sabo.
The Paint Bank Post Office closed when the lease ran out the end of October. Photo by Ann Harrell
So now when Paint Bank-area residents want to go to the post office for services, they have to drive to New Castle, which is 17 miles one way.
“We only had a couple of days’ notice,” said Paint Bank resident Sherry Humphreys. “People over here don’t like it, but what can we do?” The Paint Bank Post Office was run by Geneva Atwell.
Humphreys and other residents on rural routes out of Paint Bank still get their mail from carrier Jim Thomas, the same person who delivered it before the post office. He’s in West Virginia.
A carrier from the New Castle Post Office who used to take the mail to now drives the mail to the post office in Gap Mills, W. Va., where Thomas gets it and delivers it to his customers the same as always.
Meanwhile, there is a blue collection box in front of the Paint Bank General Store, the community’s gathering place. And there is a group of individual postal boxes grouped on a pedestal postal box, for people who still wanted to pick up their mail in Paint Bank.
“It was nice of the postal service to put up pedestal postal boxes box here, and a collection box” for people to mail their letters and packages,” said Tonya Calfee, who is accounting manager for the store and other businesses the Mulheren family has in the community.
“The store has stamps for sale,” added Calfee, who explained the store is exploring the option of a village post office that would offer Paint Bank-area residents more options than what they have now.
“Our preference would be for the post office to stay open and for somebody to keep their job, but since that can’t happen, it was nice of them to let us put up the boxes,” she added. “We wanted to do whatever we could in the time we have to make it convenient.” Geneva Atwell ran the Paint Bank Post Office.
The building where the post office was located in Paint Bank is owned by Larry Linton of Roanoke. Linton, whose mother is in the hospital this week, was not available for comment.
The Paint Bank Post Office was one of a number of rural
Virginia post offices on the list for possible closure, in a postal service cost-cutting study. Another was Oriskany, located just across the Craig line in Botetourt County.
No postal service decision has been announced yet on which post offices will be closed.
Changes are going on in the New Castle Post Office, too. Sabo was in charge of that office while the regular postmaster, Jeff Cherifi, was the officer in charge in Blacksburg, said Sabo, who explained Cherifi is due back in New Castle next week.
Sabo was in charge through last week in New Castle. Cherifi has been postmaster in New Castle for about five months before his temporary duty in Blacksburg.
