What Happened To Christopher, Wash. ?

Hello,
I have this cancel on a letter which was in water and is practically impossible to read. There is no stamp left.
But I searched out of curiosity and cannot find the locality.
Did it just disappear or was it incorporated?
Thank you!
Heinrich in Munich / Germany

Hi, it appears Christopher, Washington was a small farming community from the mid-late 1800's that was ultimately merged into the city of Auburn in the 1960's. It is still considered a neighborhood in North Auburn. Many of Christopher's farms were absorbed by new industry, including Boeing, which built a massive fabrication plant there in 1962.

Hello;

I researched this and
see; Kristonov Kristanov Kristonovic check Wikipedia by"oldGerman towns"

It was most likely in German occupied Czechoslovakia

Whoops Wash oh well good luck

From Jim Forte's website, Christopher, King County, Washington operated 1887-1917.

More specifically, Postal Bulletin 2169 dated April 16, 1887, announced the establishment of Christopher, (then, still) Washington Territory on March 22, 1887, and the appointment of Thomas Christopher as postmaster.
Postal Bulletin 11461 dated Sept 28, 1917, indicated the discontinuance of Christopher effective October 15, 1917, with mail going to Auburn and records/supplies going to Seattle.

From C. S. Hammond's "1920 New World Atlas", here is King County, in West-central Washington State and a close-up from the lower left area showing Christopher just north of Auburn.

Fote's = Forte's

Hello,
Thank you all - I did not follow up what Louise411 proposed, but I may still ....
Have a good day! Heinrich

Ahh, my neck of the woods. Besides the urbanization of King County swallowing smaller neighborhood P.O.s like this one, go a little further west into the Olympic Peninsula and there're easily a hundred little logging towns that had post offices in the late 1800s/early 1900s that do not operate today. Similarly, there are mining settlements in or east of the Cascade mountains that suffered the same fate, as they're mostly ghost towns now.

A complete set of town cancels from any Western US state is quite a challenge, the number of extinct post offices from towns that went up and came down (sometimes in just a few years) will be in the hundreds at least, and many of those places will have had fewer than 1,000 people even in the "boom" times. It's worth keeping a eye out for these uncommon places on otherwise common US stamps.

I've lived in Kent for about 25 years now - one of the dots on the blown-up map. When I first moved here, there were about 50k people in town. Population grew to 80k in 2000, 92k in 2010, and ~128k today, at least according to Wikipedia. In the time that I've lived here, the city has gobbled up various pieces of adjacent land. The existing towns around here have a long history of annexing adjacent lands. What WERE separate towns (Thomas, Christopher, etc) are now neighborhoods in the various towns. Back in the day, post offices had names. I don't know about Christopher, but the PO of Thomas is no more. As far as Thomas is concerned, there is not even a post office there anymore, whether it is a Kent branch or anything else. At some point, the PO closed, and at another point, Thomas was annexed by Kent - I don't know whether one had anything to do with the other, or the order in which these things occurred. I ASSUME similar histories for so many of the other tiny towns around that are no more, like Christopher. Today, there is no indication that these small towns ever existed. There USED to be a sign on the main road that said 'Thomas' (announcing the area of town, rather than announcing a separate town), but I don't even think it is there any longer. If things had gone just a little differently, I imagine Kent, today, could have ended up being called 'Thomas', or Auburn could have ended up as 'Christopher', but things didn't go that way.

Nice King County/Washington railroad map, BTW.

John Becker, Great post showing the map!