The Marblehead Mile [#1 The Post Office] - Lorrie Halblaub

Marblehead became a village in 1891. A village is a municipal corporation with a population of less than 5,000 people. Today, Marblehead has a population of over 800 people. The village limits start on Main Street near the post office on the north side of the peninsula and extend “Around the Horn” as the locals call it, to Bayshore Road, and the south side of the peninsula to include Wilson’s Beach and Johnson’s Island. The rest of the peninsula is Danbury Township, which confusingly enough includes the Village of Marblehead.  

There is one part of the Main Street area on the north side that I like to call the Marblehead Mile.  It is actually a little farther than a mile, but it is a walkable area where there are shops, eateries, parks, and just about everything you would find in any small town. This area started to form long before Marblehead officially became a village and has a rich history. This series of The Ottawa County Time Traveler will be about the Marblehead Mile and will cover many months of facts and stories. So let’s take a walk down Main Street going from west to east.

Danbury, Ohio Post Office 1935 (photo from author’s private collection)

The Lakeside-Marblehead Post Office at 1306 W. Main Street was designed and built in 1965 by contractor A. LeRoy Higley (1926-2018). Prior to this post office, there were many separate post offices on the peninsula. Here are just a few: Marblehead had one at the Clemons home, and later in a building that is now part of the library parking lot. Lakeside had post offices in 6 different locations over the years. Before they were part of Marblehead, the house across from the Gaydos Drive on Bayshore road was once a post office. And there was one on Johnson’s Island. At one time, a place they called Danbury O. near the Bay Bridge had its own post office. This was before Danbury Township formed in 1840. For a while before the opening of the Lakeside-Marblehead Post Office in 1965, homes in Danbury township used the Port Clinton Post Office. I remember my address in Danbury Township was R.R. #2 Box 179A Port Clinton, O. 

Our post office was built about the same time the United States Postal Service introduced the 5-digit zip code in 1963 and made them mandatory by 1967. The numbers at the end of every address helped speed up the sorting process so mail would arrive quicker. The same year, 1963, was also the start of when abbreviations for state names gradually changed to a standard set of two capital letters still used today, instead of whatever kind of abbreviation for the name of the state the addressee of the letter felt like using. Then stamps changed. Remember having to lick a stamp? The first self-adhesive stamp was printed in 1974 and grew quickly in popularity. By 2007 the Forever stamp first appeared. No more using several denominations of different stamps to send a letter. When our post office opened in 1965 a stamp cost 5 cents. Today it costs 69 cents!