Box 28, Arenas Valley, NM — A tiny country post office played a big role in my youth (Part 1)

In 1949, when I was six years old, my parents made the life-altering decision to transplant themselves, my sister and me from the tiny, incorporated, civilized village of Savona in New York State’s Southern Tier region to the tiny, unincorporated, less-civilized village of Arenas Valley in Southwestern New Mexico, six miles of the largest town in the region, Silver City.

Dad would become the editor of the venerable, weekly Silver City Enterprise, which bad begun publishing news about gunfights, fabulous gold and silver mines, and Apache attacks in 1882. Shangri-LaMom would continue to be a housewife coping with more dust, less water, and

In the 1950s, Arenas Valley’s population was approximately 200 residents. The Arenas Valley Road had once linked Silver City with nearby Fort Bayard and other towns in the mining district — Central (now Santa Clara), Bayard, Santa Rita, North Hurley, and Hurley — and a scattering of smaller communities — Vanadium, Hanover, and Fierro. By 1949, a new highway, U.S. 180, bypassed Arenas Valley. However, tiny as the village was — little more than a hamlet, it had a post office!

My dad at work “terraforming” in Arenas Valley, soon after our move from New York State. At that time, the Arenas Valley Post Office was located in the home of Postmaster Olga Harper and her family (the white structure in the distance, beyond the end of the white picket fence). ~ Ingraham Family Photo

Whiskey Creek becomes Arenas Valley, or…not?

Despite its official name, Arenas Valley’s residents routinely — perhaps stubbornly — called their community Whiskey Creek, a name which results from local legend: At some point in the community’s history, heavy rain in the Piños Altos Range to the north, within the boundaries of the Gila National Forest, flooded an illegal still and whiskey barrels floated down the area’s largest arroyo (or draw in regional parlance), a normally dry gully which enjoyed an official name, Whiskey Creek.

The word “Creek” in Whiskey Creek was wide of the mark: the only time Whiskey Creek ran with water was during relatively rare flash floods that transported tonnes of New Mexico soil toward and probably into Mexico, some 113 km (70 miles) to the south. At all other times, especially before and after the annual spring and summer Southwest Monsoon, it was a winding, broad avenue of soft, dry sand which was difficult to walk on and in places was flanked by vertical walls of soil as high as three metres (10 feet). The arroyo was a textbook example of erosion, probably stemming in part from deforestation in the Piños Altos Range to the north and overgrazing by cattle in the Gila and in the broad valley between Arenas Valley and the Piños Altos Range.

The Rio de Arenas (or Sand River)

It isn’t clear why Arenas Valley wasn’t named Whiskey Creek, which was only 60 metres (200 feet) behind our house and crossed Arenas Valley Road about 340 metres (1,100 feet) southwest of our house. What is clear is that [em]another[/em] arroyo, the Rio de Arenas (translated from Spanish as Sand River), passes through a culvert beneath Arenas Valley Road about 1.6 km (a mile) southwest of my family’s house. Although my family lived in Arenas Valley from 1949 until 1957, and I had ridden over the Rio de Arenas thousands of times in my school bus and in my family’s car, I don’t recall ever noticing the Rio de Arenas, which was then, as it is today, little more than a north-south depression in the basically flat landscape. I discovered it only in 2025 when I was “exploring” Arenas Valley by way of Google’s useful Street View service.

Above left, the Rio de Arenas to the north; above right, the Rio de Arenas to the south. It’s hard to imagine that the “Rio” looked much different in the 1950s. Its name in translation, Sand River, is less than accurate; it’s neither a river nor is it a good source of sand. Weeds it has aplenty, though. ~Image courtesy of Google Maps Street View

The Rio de Arenas is, almost without question, the source of Arenas Valley’s name, a name which suits the village well: Arenas Valley is an arid, sandy place, although any number of other, appropriate names could have been chosen: Jackrabbit Valley, Yuccatown, or simply Tumbleweed (or their Spanish equivalents) would have been appropriate.

This map shows the relative locations of Rio de Arenas and Whiskey Creek, the Arenas Valley Road and Highway 180. The yellow oval encloses the “built-up” area that we called Arenas Valley/Whiskey Creek in the 1950s. Few of the buildings and roads shown elsewhere on the map existed then, particularly north of Arenas Valley Road. ~ Map courtesy of Bing Maps

So why not Whiskey Creek Post Office?

All of which begs the question, Why wasn’t the post office named the Whiskey Creek Post Office? I’ve always assumed that the U.S. Post Office Department simply objected to the inclusion of “Whiskey” in the name of one of its post offices, but that may not be the case.

Kelvin Kendahl, a member of the Post Mark Collectors Club, replied to an email I sent him about the Whiskey Creek / Arenas Valley puzzle:

I don't know if the Post Office Department would have objected to "Whiskey" as part of the post office name. There were Whiskey Creek and Whiskeytown both in California already. On the other hand, those appear to be the only Whiskey post offices in the country, so maybe they did. Or maybe the residents of Whiskey Creek expected the POD to not like the name.

Arenas Valley might never have had a post office but for one resident, Mrs. Olga Harper. I don’t know exactly what inspired her, but it was she who applied for the opening of a post office in Arenas Valley, with herself to serve as postmaster. Her application clearly assumes that the post office would be the Arenas Valley Post Office:

In January, 1946, Mrs. Harper sent in this request for the estabishment of a U.S. Post Office in Arenas Valley. The request was approved 10 months later, on October 31. Note that the document provides a space to indicate if the post office’s location has a name other than that of Arenas Valley: “If the town, village or site of the post office be known by another name than that of the post office, state that other name here:” Although Mrs. Harper could not have been unaware of the routine use of “Whiskey Creek” in people’s conversations, she left the space blank.

Here’s a possible explanation for Postmaster Harper’s choice of Arenas Valley as the name for the post office rather than Whiskey Creek: I spent many hours in the Harper home; Ernest, had become my best friend, and I often hung out with him, his older brother, James, and his younger brother, Ira. Not once did I notice evidence of alcohol. And Mrs. Harper was a Christian. Although she didn’t attend church, as far as I know, she did raise her as Christians. Sometimes made them listen, unwillingly, to Sunday morning radio broadcasts of sermons from local fundamentalist churches. Assuming that Mrs. Harper was a teetotaler, perhaps even a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. It’s entirely possible that the last thing she wanted was to have the name of “her” post office to be tainted by drink.

My father, unsure of the correct name of our village, humorously addressed the problem in his Silver City Enterprise column. ~ Image courtesy of the Silver City Public Library

Whatever the reason for choosing Arenas Valley for its post office, even residents of the village weren’t clear about its “real” name. My father became editor of the weekly Silver City Enterprise soon after our arrival in New Mexico. He was so confused about which name was “correct” that the puzzle became a subject in one of his early columns, titled This World Of Mine, published in August, 1950 and reproduced at the right:

So, in the absence of other information, the reason Whiskey Creek became known officially as Arenas Valley, at least by the Post Office Department, remains a mystery. But there’s another mystery as well. Kelvin Kendahl explains:

I was surprised that a new office was opened as late as 1946. The total number of post offices in this country has been going down since about 1901, when there were about three times as many as there are now. As rural free delivery started to become widespread, it replaced a LOT of post offices. Of course, I also see things from a New England perspective, where things were a lot different. Very few post offices opened after 1901 in this part of the country.

Even if most Arenas Valley folks could easily travel to Silver City, I think in 1946, it was still seen as important to provide services to the residents there, as opposed to today, when it's assumed that everybody goes to Silver City often enough that services aren't necessary in Arenas Valley. That may have contributed to it, but doesn't explain why the post office didn't open 20 or 40 years earlier than it did.

On December 13, 1946 Arenas Valley, Mrs. Olga Harper was named postmaster.¹

The certificate recording Mrs. Harper’s appointment as Arenas Valley Postmaster.

The post office, located in the Harper’s ramshackle home, opened for business on January 1, 1947, adjacent to the former living room, which had been turned into a small “corner store”. I recall the store, but not the post office as it was then.

Mrs. Harper’s job required more than selling postage stamps, postal savings stamps, ad money orders, as well as distributing mail to the mailboxes, weighing parcels, etc. She had to submit regular reports to the Post Office Department. This cover² illustrates her submission of one such report to the Post Office Department:

Postmaster Olga M. Harper mailed this envelope, containing a quarterly report for July-August, 1947 and postmarked October 1. Envelopes postmarked in Arenas Valley, which was never larger than a small village, are very difficult to find. (At the U.S. Postal Department office in Albuquerque, an overzealous clerk — perhaps a bored clerk — unnecessarily applied the three October 3 date stamps. I suppose he or she might have been blotting excess ink from his rubber stamp date machine.)