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 transplanted my sister and me from the tiny incorporated village of Savona in New York State’s Southern Tier region to the tiny, unincorporated village of Arenas Valley in southwestern New Mexico, six miles east of Silver City on the old highway¹ between Silver City and Fort Bayard.

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 towns in the mining district — Central (now Santa Clara), Bayard, Santa Rita, and Hurley and a scattering of smaller communities like Vanadium and Fierro. By 1949, a new highway, U.S. 180, bypassed the village. But, tiny as Arenas Valley was, it had a post office!

My dad at home 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 the name of the post office, Arenas Valley’s residents routinely called their community Whiskey Creek. According to local legend, a heavy rain in the Piños Altos Range to the north flooded an illegal still and whiskey barrels floated down the area’s largest arroyo, a steep-sided, normally dry gully which we called “the arroyo” and which appropriately had an official name, Whiskey Creek. The word “Creek” in this case was wide of the mark: the only time Whiskey Creek had running water in it was during a flash flood. At all other times, it was a winding, broad avenue of soft, dry sand which was difficult to walk on and was flanked by vertical walls of soil as high as three metres (10 feet).

The Rio de Arenas (or Sand River)

Whiskey Creek was was only 60 metres (200 feet) behind our house. When it was in flood, we could hear its roaring tumult from our house. It wasn’t hard to believe that a flood like that could easily carry away large whiskey barrels. It might have been able to carry away an Abrams tank! But Whiskey Creek obviously had nothing to do with the choice of the name Arenas Valley. So what is the origin of the Arenas Valley’s name? It turns out that there’s another arroyo, one I’d never heard of or even noticed until a google search revealed its presence. And it’s even got an intriguing name: Rio de Arenas.

Rio de Arenas crosses beneath the the Arenas Valley Road, through a culvert, about 1.6 km (a mile) southwest of my family’s house in Arenas Valley. I must have crossed over that culvert a thousand times with my family, in our school bus, or in our family’s car after I got my driver’s license. I don’t recall ever noticing Rio de Arenas or the culvert’s concrete curb, the culvert itself, or the Rio de Arenas, which today is little more than a north-south depression in the flat landscape. Its name in translation, Sand River, seems perfectly accurate; it’s a good source of sand and weeds, but not water!

Above at the left, a view of the Rio de Arenas to the south; at the right, the Rio de Arenas to the north. ~ 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, and, within the yellow oval, 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 aa 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.

Whatever the reason for the choice of 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.²

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 cover³ 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.)