By Barbara Benson

Local gardeners faced with the question of what to do with excess produce, can drop their items off at the Cuba Township office in

conjunction with the The Giving Garden program.  This program, run locally by the Daily Herald, seeks to identify local food pantries for gardeners with excess produce.  Produce can be accepted at the Township office Monday through Friday, 9 am to 3:15 pm.  Produce will be shared with the Township’s food pantry recipients.  Last season over 600 pounds of produce was received at the Township office.   This year’s total will most certainly exceed that!

In the Winter 2007 issue of the Cuba Newsletter, using previous research, I documented some of the early history of United Post Offices that were located in rural Cuba Township.   To briefly recap, Frank Hager was born in 1868 on the Gothard farm on West Cuba Road.   The Gothard, later Hager farm, was adjacent to the Bullock farm on Section 27, which Plat Maps of the 1880s identified as the location of an “Old Log P.O.”.

 

In the 1940s, when Frank Hager talked with Barrington’s historian Arnett C. Lines, he recalled his happy childhood as a countryside dweller, but at that time, Hager believed that the first Post Office was on the “Hecock” property, which, as the first article indicated, was proven by later available records to not be the case. 

  

Nonetheless, Hager’s contribution is an interesting reminiscence of our area:   “The Hecock log house sat among the plum and yellow apple trees on the north side of the road in the east edge of the woods where there is a ranch house now and that was the first post office in the community”.  Mr. Hager said that it was built of logs with some of the logs projecting inwards as support for bunks.  Window holes in the attic, like portholes in a fort, had wooden doors or shutters on them fastened with leather hinges.  He and his boy playmates would look out of the portholes and pretend that they saw Indians(sic) coming.  He said that the horse back trail had been so well beaten that for years the growth of trees was stunted there and the trail to this day could easily be seen from a distance by the depression in the tree line.  He also said that they used to find relics and bits of pottery around the place.

 

U.S.P.S. records indicate that John Bullock was succeeded as Postmaster by John Jackson in 1855, and  the Flint Creek Post Office was discontinued for the second time in 1856.  After 1856, the “main” Post Office was located in the newly founded Village of Barrington Station, rotating to whichever business was owned by the currently appointed postmaster.

 

There were to be two more Post Offices located in rural Cuba Township in the late 19th and early 20th century.  Langenheim or Cuba

Station, where Kelsey Road crosses the present Northwest Highway, was the site of a small “service center” including Krause’s

General Store on the corner where the Kelsey Road House is now, and a blacksmith shop where Cuba and Plum Tree Road join.  Charles Lederle was the Postmaster from April 1892-February 1894, and Conrad Krause from February 1894 – June 1894, when it was

 discontinued.

 

I had written in an earlier article about the Chicago Highlands, and the early promise of a settlement at Hart Road and Northwest Highway generated by the industrial development of the time.   From April 1902 – January 1906, William Hobein was the appointed

Postmaster, and a Post Office was located in his general store at that intersection, mainly to serve the workers who were building cottages near to their jobs at the American Malleable Ironworks, which later went bankrupt.

 

Rural Free Delivery began from Barrington with horse drawn coaches on June 15, 1904,with 4 routes of 25 to 28 miles each.   The first rural carriers were Charles Hutchinson, Samuel L. Landwer, Ben Freye and Herman Gieske.   When Hutchinson retired in 1946, he was the third oldest carrier in years of service in the United States.   By 1914, the rural carriers began using their own cars and the routes were increased to 40 miles!

 

During the term of Joseph Robertson as Postmaster from 1920 to 1931, the Barrington Post Office was moved from the Cook County side of Main Street to the Lake County side, and therefore Cuba Township.  In 1929 the Post Office opened in the Huszagh Building on Hough Street, by the railroad track.  Built in 1926, that building now houses the offices of Charles Schwab and Sagano’s Restaurant.   Local delivery to village homes began in 1928.   Before that, village residents called at the Post Office for their mail. Post Offices are no longer located in farmhouses along country roads around here, but since 1929, in the Village, there has been a post office in Cuba

Township.  A new building was opened on West Main Street at Garfield (now Applebee) in 1956, and when Grove Avenue was opened in 1988, an office was continued on the Cuba side in Barrington Commons.  With over 3,000 postal boxes at the two offices, the days of calling in for the mail every day (we do) are not over. We don’t go on horseback any more, and  I don’t think that, as was often said in earlier times, we look sick if we don’t get any mail!     As I said in my Post Office History:  “It was simpler then, but it’s easier now.”  However, no email can replace the “dipped in the ink” penmanship, and the courtesies, good wishes and prayers or well-being, with which those correspondents began and ended their letters.