United States Post Offices

   There is no comprehensive list of all the post offices that are have ever operated in the United States. Most of the information is available some place. There are dozens of books recording the data for each state. There are some books which accumulate the data for several states. There is a fairly good list available of all the operating post offices.

My goal here is to present the best available list for the entire country. I currently have over 187,000 listings. This is still far from complete. A far better representation of both Alabama and Georgia are now online. Most of Illinois after 1930 has not been fully researched. The quality of the Virginia listings is below par. Only a small percentage of stations and branches are listed. Many offices are listed with a / meaning that the office had multiple opening and closings. These need to be expanded. And of course there are the usual errors like spelling and county attribution which cannot be avoided in a list like this.

If you know of an office that is not listed, that office most likely the office is from Illinois after 1930 or a branch or station. There is often some confusion about branches and stations. The common conception is that these are sub offices in a large city. Many of these are. However, in some cities, large suburban towns are stations and branches of the large city. This is most evident in the Boston area and St. Louis area. While most stations of Boston are listed, the stations of St. Louis are still not fully listed. Most major military bases during World War I and World War II are stations or branches. They are still not yet fully listed. Please be patient as the listings are updated.

It can be very helpful to expand the range of your search if the information your search gets what seems to be incorrect or incomplete. My listings have the official name of the post office. If the office is a station or branch and you select Word Search , you could miss the office. Some office whose name ends in s have an official name with the ending 's. The two best strategies in these are to first change the search type to String Search. The second strategy is to browse instead of search. This is especially helpful if you know the county of the office, since there are far fewer listings than an entire state.

If you would more information about a post office, please click here to find out what additional information is available and how to access the inforomation.

I work on the list often. You can expect the listings to be updated every week or two with corrections and additions. Unfortunately, at the rate I am working, I will not get the list to 98-99% accuracy for 150 or 200 years. To bring this date closer, your help is needed. Please contact me with any corrections and changes.

The listing can be used three ways.

• If you want to know if there has been an office with a name anywhere in the U.S., use the search box on the first page after clicking the link below. If you are looking for every post office in the U.S with the word 'miller' in the name, this is the place to do it. You will get the state, the county, the name of the office and the dates of operation. Thematic collectors will find this helpful. Please understand that this is a literal text search. If you type in the string 'cat', all office with the three letters c a and t in that order in the name will be returned. You will not get contextual results. Typing feline will not bring up cat.

• If you want to find about an office where you know the state, click on the name of the state on the first page after clicking the link below. Type the name of the office in the search box on the page and you will get the state, the county, the name of the office and the dates of operation. This very helpful when you have a partially struck cancel you want to identify. Type the the letters you can see and all possibilities will be returned.

• You can browse the listings for an entire state or any county from the state. This should be self evident.

Click to Here Access the Post Office Listings