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Information Wanted On Post Office Located In Five Points, Iowa (Dubuque County)

 
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Valued Member

United States
44 Posts
Posted 01/01/2023   11:10 pm  Show Profile Bookmark this topic Add oldmanriver to your friends list Get a Link to this Message
Does anyone have any information on a Post Office that was located in Five Points, Dubuque County, Iowa? According to RootsWeb it states:

"LAPAGE POST OFFICE: Located at Five Points, the station was named for Celine LaPage, the first white settler. The office was opened on February 25, 1890, and closed on January 31, 1891. The first postmaster was Peter Weidemann."

Celine is my great, great grandmother. The post office was known as "Five Points" prior to Feb 25, 1890. It was then renamed "LaPage Post Office". It closed on 31 Jan 1891 due to lack of enough mail to justify a post office. I'm looking for any and all information you might have, Especially any covers with the postmark from this post office.
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Pillar Of The Community
4904 Posts
Posted 01/02/2023   12:07 am  Show Profile Bookmark this reply Add John Becker to your friends list  Get a Link to this Reply
The opening date (a new PO from scratch, see below) and closing date as well as postmaster Weidemann all match the information published in the daily Postal Bulletins at this site:
http://www.uspostalbulletins.com/

As for a "Five Points" connection. Jim Forte's Postal History website has an extremely good list of US post offices and does not list a Five Points office in Iowa, so it appears there was NO renaming to be done. Perhaps this was merely a local moniker for the crossroads community. And indeed that appears to be the case. I note the opening and closing Postal Bulletin announcements state that the mail to Lapage will be supplied from Rickardsville, and when the office closed the mail went back to be handled through Rickardsville.

Additionally, Guy Reed Ramsey's book "Postmarked Iowa" does not list a Five Points among the Dubuque county offices. Ramsey lists the exact location of Lapage as "unknown". Fortunately, using the idea of being near Rickardsville from the Postal Bulletins and the Dubuque county map (date unknown) in Ramsey's book, sure enough there is a "Five Points" 2.5 miles SSE of Rickardsville (and about 4 miles north of Graf, Iowa). To attempt to pinpoint more exactly where the Lapage PO was in (or very near) Five Points, I would recommend:

The USPOD also has "site location" records which are copies of the applications for new post offices and additional periodic returns from time to time. These are arranged by county. Each form should contain a locally-drawn map showing the office of interest and the other nearby offices so that one can often find your town of interest mapped into the reports for the other nearby towns too.
https://www.archives.gov/research/p...37-1950.html

Finding a cover for such a short-term office will be extremely challenging.
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Edited by John Becker - 01/02/2023 12:45 am
Pillar Of The Community
United States
593 Posts
Posted 01/02/2023   12:39 am  Show Profile Bookmark this reply Add Linus to your friends list  Get a Link to this Reply
The first building down the hill west of the Iowa State Capital in Des Moines is the State Historical Museum of Iowa. They have a free, research library in there that contains all the history of the State of Iowa. Just a fascinating library, I once researched my great great great grandfather's Civil War history there. That is where I would go to research your ancestor. Here is a link:

https://iowaculture.gov/history/research

Linus



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Valued Member
United States
44 Posts
Posted 01/02/2023   8:34 pm  Show Profile Bookmark this reply Add oldmanriver to your friends list  Get a Link to this Reply
A Huge Thank You To Everyone!!!! Awesome resources and I have them bookmarked. I figured that finding anything with a postmark would be next to impossible but never hurts to ask.
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