Dover to celebrate new post office

DOVER — Dover will welcome the city's post office back home with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday.

The celebration will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m. at the post office, 306 Roosevelt Ave., Dover.

While the site is a new location, it might be familiar to some as the site previously served as home to the post office in the past, dating back to the 1930s until 2009 when it moved to Jackson Avenue. At that time, the old post office building was demolished.

With Dover's post office having been located in several different buildings during its 100-plus years of existence in the city, it is fitting that its new home is where it previously stood for decades, Dover Mayor George Eskridge said previously.

Previously, the site was the city's fire station before it was remodeled into its post office. Residents worked with postal officials to identify possible locations, ultimately deciding on the Jackson Avenue site. It also led to a community meeting to give residents a chance to share concerns and voice support for a Dover facility, according to Daily Bee news coverage at the time.

"I hope it gets settled, because I'd hate like the dickens to lose our post office," then-mayor Randy Curless said.

In response, residents formed the Dover Post Office Committee and worked to remodel the former fire station into the city's post office. At first, it looked like the efforts would be denied when the Postal Service denied the move despite it gaining the stamp of approval from the Dover City Council.

However, Mayor George Eskridge, then a state representative, and U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo contacted the Postal Service and asked them to reconsider.

A week later, the agency had changed its mind and the former fire station was approved.

Had the efforts been unsuccessful, Dover would have lost its post office boxes and residents would have only received mail from a rural letter carrier.

“It moved steadily in one direction, but slowly,” committee member Paul Nowaske said in 2009. “The post office had their own hurdles to make and we had some ourselves. We had to do conditional use permits and variances and building permits to renovate the fire house. So those projects took time.”

Now, 15 years later, the post office has moved back home.